by Frank Harris
“Nothing that has ever been said from the religious point of view concerning the blissful condition of the soul in Heaven involves any exaggeration. On the contrary, the basic fact connected with existence on the plane of nature corresponding to the Heaven of theology is bliss, absolute, complete and unalloyed.”
But surely the methods of nature provide for all cases, and not merely for those of the spiritual aristocracy. What are we to think of the condition in Heaven of, let us say, a drunken coal heaver, whose earthly life has been anything but meritorious. Mr. Sinnett might reply that even in such a man's life there may have been some little gleam of spiritual feeling, something resembling love for a woman or a child.
Mr. Sinnett concludes by declaring that this theory of his “is not theory at all, but a living fact of consciousness" still to most of us as yet it is only a theory and hardly even plausible.
Plainly the whole hypothesis depends on the antenatal biographers and they are conspicuous by their absence.
The second person to preach Eternal Life was a Frederic Myers who was much more scientific than Sinnett, if I may be forgiven for using such a word to describe either of these dreamers. His book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, is, he tells us, the result of thirty years' close study and serious thought.
Myers declares that “messages of the departing and departed have actually proved: a) Survival pure and simple; the persistence of the spirit's life as a structural law of the universe; the inalienable heritage of each several soul. b) In the second place, these messages prove that between the spiritual and the material worlds an avenue of communication does in fact exist, that which we call the dispatch and the receipt of telepathic messages, or the utterance and the answer of prayer and supplication. c) In the third place, they prove that the surviving spirit retains, at least in some measure, the memories and the loves of earth. Without this persistence of love and memory should we be in truth the same?” Finally he declares that “every element of individual wisdom, virtue, love, develops in infinite evolution toward an ever-highering hope, toward Him who is at once thine innermost Self and thine ever unattainable Desire.”
But all this is founded on the slightest basisis indeed mere assertion. The whole theory is as fantastic and absurd as that of Sinnett. It only shows the intense human desire to live again after this life, but after thousand of years of study we have not the slightest proof of any such existence.
A little later there was much stronger testimony: Sir Oliver Lodge who succeeded Frederic Myers as President of the Society for Psychical Research and a few years later as Head of the British Association, made some startling statements which his position rendered extremely important. He stated boldly that “personality persists beyond bodily death.” Bergson made as positive an assertion to the same effect only a short time before in an address to the Society for Psychical Research. But Lodge went further and his words carried weight. He said: “The evidence to my mind goes to prove that discarnate intelligence, under certain conditions, may interact with us on the material side, thus indirectly coming within our scientific ken, and that gradually we may hope to attain some understanding of the nature of a larger, perhaps ethereal, existence and of the conditions regulating intercourse across the chasm. A body of responsible investigators has even now landed on the treacherous but promising shores of a new continent. Yes, there is more to say than that. The methods of science are not the only way, though they are our way, of being piloted to truth.”
He was asked if he could tell of his investigations. “Not yet,” he answered, “one must wait a little longer; but I am convinced that those on the other side are trying to speak to us, and that they are doing all in their power to help us.”
And he went on: “When the time comes in which men not only think or hope that they survive death, but when they know it, know it is a fact of life, then many of our problems will solve themselves. For it is inconceivable that men thus convinced of Immortality should lack the spirit of fellowship; inconceivable, surely, that they should depress each other, struggling for material enjoyments which entail suffering on their fellow creatures. One believes, as Christ believed, that Brotherhood among men absolutely depends upon faith in a divine Fatherhood; the whole labor of Christ's teaching was to persuade men to believe in the existence of a God in order that they might live on the earth as the sons of one Father. Because we have grown to be incurious about life after death, life here and now has assumed the dangerous characteristics which are at present troubling the politicians. Social existence is organized almost entirely on an animal basis; struggle for existence is still one of our main conditions; the dignity of life tends to disappear more and more with the stability of the social order; men are not now so concerned about character, about real values, as about money and enjoyment. This is why I regard the labor of psychical research as so well worthwhile; it is a labor which ought to result in restoring to mankind a sense of Infinitythat sense of greatness, the grandeur, and the dignity of existence without which poetry must perish, the imagination wither, and the human species sink into a miserable condition of animal degradation.”
These are weighty words: No such dignified pronouncement has been made in our time. And though I should like to believe that “personality persists after death,” and though I believe that all manner of good would come from the faith, I cannot believe. I often wish I could.
I find myself in closer agreement with Maeterlinck who wrote a series of articles on “Life after Death” in The Fortnightly Review during 1913. He begins by declaring that he has “no reluctance to admit the survival and the intervention of the dead, but it is for the spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that the dead really exist.”
He sums up: “The spiritualist follow the tracks of our dead for a few seconds, in a world where seconds no longer count, and then they abandon them in the darkness.
“The fact remains that this inability to go even a few years beyond the life after death detracts greatly from the interest of their experiments and revelations; at best, it is but a short space gained, and it is not by this juggling on the threshold that our fate is decided. I am ready to go through what may befall me in the short interval filled by those revelations, as I am even now going through what befalls me in my life. My destiny does not lie there, nor my home. The facts reported may be genuine and proved; but what is even much more certain is that the dead, if they survive, have not a great deal to teach us, whether because, at the moment when they can speak to us, they have nothing to tell us, or because, at the moment when they might have something to reveal to us, they are no longer able to do so, but withdraw forever and lose sight of us in the immensity which they are exploring.”
Even Maeterlinck here seems to believe more than I can credit.
It is true that Alfred Russel Wallace believed devoutly in a life after death and believed too, as I have told, that there was continual communication between the dead and the living. But I strained ears in vain and remained at long last a confirmed skeptic. Meredith, too, another wise man, believed in a Divine Providence and the gradual disappearance from this life of all that was maimed or wrong. I could hardly rise to that height of faith. Wise men, I saw, were instruments of good in life and might yet lift this earthly life to a high plane of enjoyment and spiritual growth; but even this appeared to me doubtful and I could find no trace of a God in nature, no hope of a life after death for man. Skepticism was rooted in my nature.
Small wonder that Professor Metchnikoff, one of the greatest modern scientists, declares that “since the awakening of the scientific spirit in Europe, it has been recognized that the promise of a future life has no basis of fact to support it. The modern study of the functions of the mind has shown beyond all question that these are dependent on the functions of the body, in particular of those of the central nervous system.”
I cannot understand why we hesitate to explain life according to our present knowledge. There is
no trace of an omnipotent or all-good God to be found anywhere in life; but there is everywhere in animals, as in insects, abounding evidence of a creative impulse, and impulse that is the chief source of our bodily pleasures and is at the same time the soul, so to speak, of all our highest spiritual joys. To deny this universal creative impulse would be as ridiculous, it seems to me, as to talk of goodness in creation.
There are two other facts that appear to consort better with our wishes; we seem to be able to trace hierarchy in living creatures and it is fairly plain that the tenure of life corresponds roughly to this hierarchy. That is, the highest or most complicated creatures live the longest. Furthermore the highest in the hierarchy, men and women, are also the kindliest, the most unselfish, in short the most moral, or rather the only ones in whom morality can be said to exist.
We have then in life a universal creative impulse and this impulse satisfies itself in producing higher and higher creatures; or, if you will, more and more complex creatures, and these creatures in proportion to their complexity live longer than the others and finally develop a morality of kindness and unselfishness which the other creatures know little or nothing about.
There is a certain order in the universe, a rude imperfect order, if you will, but order neverthelessorder and law.
And strange to say, in this cosmos ruled by law, there are continued revelations of pure beauty; now a sunset or sunrise; again a coastline framing a dark blue ocean transfigured by silvery moonlight; or a mountain gorge with pine-clad heights and shadowy depths holding a little rivulet; or simply a superb man's figure or the soul-glow in a girl's eyes. Beauty everywhere, without order of any kind or law that we can detect.
Now is the creative impulse to stop and be satisfied with men and women? That is a question we cannot answer from experience. Some say the creative impulse is committed by its very nature to an endless succession of cycles. I see no reason to believe this; rather I believe that the best men will sooner or later get together and transform this world of ours into an Earthly Paradise by making men and women better and wiser than we can easily imagine them today. It seems so simple to begin by abolishing war and doing away with armies and navies while spending the money thus saved on the education and development of the many. We could thus put an end to poverty and know nothing more of the millionaire or the starving child, and every foot of progress upward would make the next step easier, the good result more certain. The heaven dreamed of can be realized here on this earth and in man's lifetime if we set ourselves to the work.
One cannot resist the question: Are we tending to this goal or are we merely taking our wishes for the spirit and purpose of the Universe? Even so, it may be that our unselfish desires are themselves prophetic of the future.
It looks as if the creative impulse we have found everywhere in life is working out its own fulfillment. How else can we explain the fact that the best men, centuries after their death, are selected out and adored as Gods, their teaching even becoming our example and inspiration?
In truth, we men are called and chosen to a purpose higher than our consciousness. The creative impulse, if not God, is at least a conscious striving to reach the highest. We must cooperate with this impulse and do our best to make this life worth living for all and so turn men and women into ideals and this earthly pilgrimage of ours into a sacred achievement.
CHAPTER V
It was in Shanghai that I first learned that various poisons and aliments are supposed to increase desire or intensify sensation, but I found them no more efficacious than the spiritual theories of Mr. Sinnett. Indeed, in time I came to explain the wide use of drugs throughout China with reference to the curious insensitiveness of Chinese women.
I was taken by a Chinese I met shortly after my arrival from Burma to one of the famous “opium dens” for which China is famous. Frankly, I was very disappointed. I achieved neither the desired physical effect nor that intense state of clear vision attained by Coleridge on the eve on which he wrote “Kubla Khan.” I smoked the prescribed twenty pipes again and again without ever achieving either object.
This was especially true in regards to sex. My friend had obtained a young Chinese woman for me. When I was “high” I was to make love to her. We were taken to the place of our assignation in a rickshaw and once in the room, the Chinese girl immediately put herself at my disposal. A few words of description would not be out of place since, in spite of the fact that I was disappointed with the effect the drug had on me, the girl herself was the picture of loveliness.
She lay cool and naked as yellow marble on the gaudy red-covered divan, her little hands crossed on her full breast and her legs together. Her nipples were large and dark, though they were not engorged, even when I removed my clothes and I stood naked before her, my cock standing straight out in anticipation of the pleasure to come. Her hair was thick and lay in crushed tresses under her back. Between her thighs, under a glossy chevron of hair, her pussy lips were obvious, larger than I personally would have expected, but pretty and warmly moist to the touch. But she made no response as I laid my hand on her mount She remained as cool as a cucumber through the entire operation.
Only the slightest tremor passed through her limbs as I applied my lips to hers, and even when I hovered on the verge of fucking her, it was merely a matter of opening her legs. She had gathered her knees up and they fell open like the pages of a heavy book. I shrugged and moved up closer to her slit, placing the head of my cock against that warmly throbbing entrance. Usually, it has been my experience that a woman will respond to this with either some gesture or word, or even a moan signaling her rising passion. But with this one there was nothing. I entered her slowly, studying her eyes, which remained expressionless through the entire affair. I pumped her slowly, then hard, almost brutally, in an effort to elicit some sort of response. When I reached forward and took her breasts in my hands and squeezed the nipples, not harshly, I thought I saw a flicker of emotion, perhaps discomfort, but she soon reverted to type. I sighed inwardly and simply continued to saw between her legs.
For myself, I soon arrived at the point at which I wished for the frantically passionate limbs of Winnie, or of some other almost perfect mistress, but was met in my flood instead by the same soft impassivity which I came to think of as being characteristic of Chinese women. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but that does not detract from the validity of the broad generalization. This girl, like many other girls I met in China, seemed to be entirely without passion, and the drug, in spite of the fact that I had followed all instructions given to me with the utmost care, had no effect whatsoever on the intensity of my orgasm.
I was indeed slightly disgusted by the whole affair afterwards. Its passivity, its obvious one-sidedness, struck me as coming very close to the kind of thing I have always been at pains to avoid. For me, love must froth into intensity from “twin rills;” that is why I have always considered prostitution to be sordid.
Those who delivered their speeches on the virtue of drugs were not satisfied. My friend in particular felt that I ought to give it another trial. I did so, but with similar results. In the end, I could see no point in my trying again. Then someone told me that I should have tried cocaine. Once again, giving my advisor the benefit of the doubt, I submitted to the test. The effect was slightly different but, if anything, made me feel even less passionate than I was under opium; it was just as inoperative. Finally, an English doctor who had lived for years in Peking, vaunted the benefits of ether, and in this case I am bound to say I could trace a distinct stimulation of desire. But this good result was offset by the evil effect of the intoxicant itself. For a couple of days afterwards I felt sick and out of sorts. I was unable to work and had no mind at all for love. In conclusion, no drug or poison seems to be worth recommending.
Exciting foods and drinks were to me just as disappointing. There is one thing, however, I do find worth mentioning.
In Peking one day, I was shown an apparatus which deser
ves description as it was intended to give pleasure to Chinese women. It consisted of an oval-shaped ball, or rather a kind of egg in silver or ivory, the size of a small fowl's egg. The Chinese screw off the top of the egg and fill it half-full of mercury, then screw it up again and grease it carefully.
The woman puts it into her pussy and stretches herself on a rocking chair, giving it a swinging movement to and fro. This rocking provokes the alternative moving of mercury to one end and the other of the egg, making it slide about in the soft canal and producing a special sort of sexual excitement. The oval end helps the slipping out of the apparatus when the woman gets up.
I had such an egg for a long time in my possession. In fact, I had several of them, but I have given them all away. I must admit that their action is marvelous. This history of my last egg is worth recording.
I had perhaps six or seven in my possession when I returned to England, five of which I left there in the hands of a woman I knew in London who afterwards, and very dishonestly, sold them for the astounding price of fifty pounds each. Believing myself to have five kept safely in England, I took two to America with me, one of which I couldn't resist parting with to a sweet Brazilian woman whom I met on the boat. We had great fun with it. The other I smuggled safely past Customs and carried with me to New York. Naturally, as it was the last I had with mealas! it was the last I was ever to seeI deliberated for a long time before parting with it. There were three ladies who competed for the favorGloria S., a model, Joan B., a chorus girl, and Elsa M., a married woman whose husband appeared to be completely asexual. Frankly, I had decided in favor of the last from the beginning. She, poor soul, had most need of it. The other two had plenty of male admirers only too willing to be of service to them. But somehow or other, I had made up my mind that Elsa would have to earn it. For all I knew, it was the only such egg in existence in America!
