by Talbot Mundy
THE HEART-SATISFYING LOGIC OF REINCARNATION
He shows us, wittily and with a skill that compels admiration, how we mortals might react to an environment too good for our present mental and spiritual development. The humor of the situation is immense when the ‘earthlings’ — quarantined in a castle because they have brought disease with them to which the Utopians have long since ceased to be immune, the disease having vanished from their economy — proceed to try to conquer Utopia, relying partly on the disease they brought with them to weaken the ranks of their opponents. The speciousness with which the would-be conquerors justify themselves; the attitude of Hunker the American, who refuses to enter into an entangling alliance but is willing to help do the fighting and more than willing to share in the prospective profits; the insistence by Dupont, the Frenchman, that there must be “some guarantee, some effective guarantee, that the immense sacrifices France has made and still makes in the cause of civilized life, will receive their proper recognition and their due reward in this adventure,” are all to the point; they emphasize the selfishness of the minds that must be changed before Utopia could be anything more than an excuse for new cruelty and conquest. They remind us of Pizarro and his conquistadores; of Blücher surveying London from the dome of St. Paul’s saying “Was für Plunder!”; of Clive and Hastings and their swarm of followers “shaking the pagoda-tree”; of the Forty-niners tearing down the forests, wresting out the gold, and squandering the proceeds; of all the argonauts who ever saw a good thing and devoured it. Mr. Barnstaple’s refusal to take part in the proposed conquest constitutes him, in the eyes of the others (the women included), a traitor to mankind. And that is all very marvelously drawn; probably no other pen than that of Wells could do it. But, except that he makes the reader sympathize, makes out no case against the proposed iniquity. The ‘earthlings’ are defeated by Utopian methods as drastic in their own way as those that the ‘earthlings’ had in mind to use. The result is merely the defeat of a lower materialism by one that is more intelligent and therefor possessed of more resources.
Mr. Barnstaple, responding to a truly spiritual impulse, offers himself at last for experiment. The Utopians are to try to return him to earth; and they succeed. Mr. Barnstaple rejoins his family in the London suburb, possessed by a vision of Utopia and a hope for the redemption of the world. But on what is his hope based? The reader is left wondering how Mr. Barnstaple shall persuade the world to mend its ways, without any prospect to offer them that he who shall truly labor for the advancement of mankind shall inevitably see the consequences of his labor. It is easy enough to enjoy Mr. Wells’ vision of Utopia, and to realize how Mr. Barnstaple must have been thrilled by it. But Mr. Barnstaple is a more than middle-aged man, who must die before long. The author leaves him helpless without the heart-satisfying logic of reincarnation on which to base his program of reform.
If we accept the fact of reincarnation, Mr. Wells’ vision of Utopia becomes a reasonable prospect, within reach, worth striving for, to be amended and improved as our imagination grows and we learn by experience. But if, when we die, we are dead and don’t come back again, why all this plowing? Why not eat and drink, cease hoping and be done with it? There is, there must be, a tremendous faith, a knowledge, that makes Mr. Wells plow (and whistle) so sturdily. He would have done well had he intimated why evolution should be interesting to us all, how we are all a part of it, and how we are all inevitable gainers if we strive for posterity’s benefit, because posterity is we ourselves.
“LEGENDS OF SMOKEOVER”
L.P. Jacks is Principal of Manchester College, Oxford, and Editor of “The Hibbert Journal”. One may safely look to him, as to Wells, for a book that compels thinking. In The Legends of Smokeover, the most recent of eleven books, he has striven mightily to lift the world a little on an upward course and, unlike Wells, he more than hints at ways and means. He has written a delightful story, in which he seems to overrate the power of money to accomplish spiritual purposes — even as Wells appears to overrate the power of material comfort to produce a zeal for spiritual living — but he has brought out from the half-respect, to which the creeds have all conspired to relegate it, one of the splendid elements of human character; and his story contains two women who are really spiritual beings, blessing everyone and everything they touch. Withal, they are human, credible, likeable. And in the mouth of one of them he puts a question whose correct answer solves the whole riddle of the world’s course out of its present tragic condition.
The quality that L.P. Jacks has stressed and seeks to build upon is sportsmanship. By frequent instance he shows what sturdy stuff that is, how it persists in all layers of society, and how the practice of it comforts even those who are dying in agony. To all intents and purposes the author invites the world to ‘take a chance,’ perhaps a very long chance, for the benefit of all mankind; and he has come extremely close to true prophecy or, to coin a word, true seersmanship.
The story is divided into five legends, the first of which concerns the rise to fortune of Rumbelow, the betting man. His birth is obscure, but in early youth he is the reputed son of a drunken rascal of that name, who goes the round of the country fairs with a Coco-nut Shy. At the age of ten the youth began his studies of the Doctrine of Probability, as the result of which he finally evolved a formula. The disreputable Rumbelow senior is conveniently killed, the boy takes over the Coco-nut Shy, sticks to his formula and makes a fortune, and for a while disappears from view. He is known to be traveling abroad, and it is hinted that he is acquiring an education.
Here at once is the Achilles’ heel of Mr. Jacks’ whole argument. His story is an appeal to the world to wake up and be educated; he shows wittily and well how that splendid quality of sportsmanship inherent in most human beings is the educators’ opportunity; but he does not point out who shall teach the educators, or where they shall derive the knowledge which shall redeem mankind. He shows us Rumebelow, the man of zeal, who is afraid of nothing, not even the Pharisees; Mr Lady, Rumbelows’s wife, with whom he returns from his mysterious journey in quest of an education and who thereafter is his wise confederate, adviser, guide, and friend. We are introduced to the “Mad Millionaire,” Mr. Hooker, who has Quaker principles but who is foisted into a war-fortune in spite of himself and howled at as a profiteer. Mr. Hooker with his millions becomes one of the syndicate of five who conspire to teach the world; and a charming old conspirator he is, possessing tact and modesty. We have Miss Margaret Walfstone, a born educator, almost too wise and delightful to be true, whose successful school for girls is wrecked through the spite of the reactionary element in Smokeover. And that part of the story is amazingly well told. The fourth legend concerns Professor Ripplemark, “Regius Professor of Virtue in the University of Oxford,” a V.C. man, possessed of humor, who ultimately resigns his “Chair of Virtue” to become the fifth member of the board of conspirators.
It is all very cleverly done, with such good humor and such earnestness that it is difficult to lay the book down once the first page is turned. The author has assembled five characters who convince themselves, and thus the reader, that the world must be educated out of its materialism. There is not a dull page in the book, nor a hint of pessimism. All that is lacking is the key. The reader is left wondering what this new education shall be all about, and whether the deadweight of Rumbelow’s and Hooker’s millions will not in any event prove to be more than the magnificent ideal can carry. From owning Coco-nut Shies Rumbelow proceeds until he is the proprietor of a titanic betting establishment which will work out mathematically and declare the odds on anything from a horse’s chance to win a selling-plate to a clergyman’s prospect of promotion to a bishopric. The firm even takes up insurance on a downright betting basis, naming the scientifically calculated odds and accepting wagers as to whether or not a house will burn down, whether or not a man will die before he shall have saved enough for his dependents. One suspects Mr. L.P. Jacks of deliberately poking fun at pious humbug, rather than of
pretending that Rumbelow’s fortune is acquired by desirable means.
At any rate, Rumbelow, a most appealing character, grows fabulously rich, and he worships that mysterious wife of his, whom he insists on everyone addressing as “My lady.” It is she who directs his titanic energy along the altruistic course, and she who voices the question whose proper answer shall solve the riddle of the world’s unrest.
“WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?”
Rumbelow’s experience as a gambler convinces him that the universe is not governed at all. The relation of Spirit to the world, according to him, is that of a lover to his beloved — anything but the relation of a power-loving potentate to his subjects. Professor Ripplemark, confirming that opinion, adds that “teaching” is primary, “ruling” is secondary. Rumbelow adds to that again: “Government should be a department of education instead of education a department of government.” It is on that platform that the five conspirators agree, Rumbelow adding that sportsmanship is a “bridge between time and eternity.” Says he: “the sporting instinct is the easiest transformed into its spiritual equivalents.” But it is “My Lady” who transforms that platform from a mere experiment in phrasing into a spiritual possibility with her quiet question, “Who is my neighbor?” When the men and women of the world wake up and realize that all of us are neighbors there will be no more need to strive to pin down spiritual thinking into formulas; then there will be no more poverty and no more war between the nations — incidentally no need for Mr. Rumbelow and his gigantic betting firm.
But the fact that two such books as these by H.G. Wells and L.P. Jacks can command an audience is proof enough that the tide has turned. The world is waking up. Neither Wells nor Jacks has given us a satisfying reason why we should take seriously in hand the task of leaving behind us a world more fit for posterity to live in. Both speak of evolution as a fact. Neither of them shows how evolution is the intimate concern of all of us. But both have succeeded in showing by contrast and illustration how hugely better the world might be, and Jacks has hinted — hardly more than hinted — at the process by which transformation is to be accomplished.
Who is my neighbor? The word is hardly intimate enough. We all are brothers. Change Wells’ word “confederacy” into “Brotherhood,” add Jacks’ “spiritual equivalent of the sporting instinct,” and we are not far from the Path blazed by Theosophy. For sportsmanship is a will to meet the other fellow more than half-way and a determination never to accept unfair advantage.
But the underlying reason for the hope that rises eternal in the human breast, despite all the piled up horrors of materialism and the failure of all dogmas to provide more than a temporary anaesthetic, is the fair, heart-satisfying fact of Reincarnation, and of all-compensating Karma — fact that men know intuitively, and that springs forth as the clods of material delusion are broken up. The plowing is being well done. The seed is sown in secret. Let Theosophists not neglect its cultivation; for the weeds turned under by the plow persist interminably, and the one hope for the seed is to keep it growing.
UNIVERSAL
THE WORD “international” has come on evil days, inevitably, since it was adopted as a panacea. In its very origin it presupposes the existence of a barrier between the nations. Every international theory hitherto invented has stirred more rancor than it healed, sometimes by denying the obvious, more often by asserting the absurdly untrue, always by raising material standards, which by their very nature invite conflict of opinions. Quot homines tot sententiae.
The so-called international control, set up by jealous governments to check the scramble for political advantage, resembles as much as anything a bandage wrapped around all the fingers of a hand, to prevent any one finger from acting independently; and the result is what might be expected — numbness and exasperation. Even international sports, conceived in the spirit of friendliness, develop into international rivalry, as instanced when an English crowd applauds the bad strokes of an American golfer, or an American crowd hisses an alien contestant — extreme instances, but neither rare nor on the wane.
Material standards, of whatever kind, inevitably lead to quarreling and chaos, because the standards in themselves are false. And nothing can be gained by calling black white, or by taking the result of false premises and trying to force it into more convenient shape. Dame Partington trying to sweep back the Atlantic with a broom, was acting no more illogically than the nations, the classes, the mobs and the dogmatists who seem disposed to strive forever to offstand Karma. In fact, she was wiser than they; for she made her experiment on a scale on which her finite human mind might grasp the absurdity of the attempt.
Truth is universal. Consequently all its proofs, if apparent at all, are universally apparent — as apparent in a bowl of water as in one drop of the same fluid or in an ocean. And it is easier for us to take the middle way, that our senses can grasp with least effort. There is no need to study drops under a microscope, or to sweep the vast expanse of the Pacific, in order to learn the elementary lessons of the Law. Its proofs, its demonstrations, its examples are all about us, in every move we make, in every sight we see, in every sound we hear. They always were; they always are; they always will be. There is no stage in our development as individuals, at which sufficient illustration of the Law as it applies to each one of us is not immediately at hand and comprehensible. It is impossible to invent a condition or a state of mind, out of which observance of the working of Universal Law can not, and will not, show a spirally progressive way.
A simple illustration is that one of the bandaged fingers. Loose them and the brain, which has no apparent connection with them, controls them separately; but each finger serves the hand, the hand the arm, the arm the man, the man his fellows, his fellows the world — and so on, up to heights beyond our present comprehension. The absurdity appears at once of any jealousy between the fingers or between the left hand and the right; yet it is no more absurd than international rivalry. The same law applies in either instance.
The United States’ Declaration of Independence declares that all men are born free and equal; and that is a sturdy and honest effort to express a profound interpretation of the Universal Law. But to misinterpret that into the assumption that all men have the same grade of intelligence, that the same food, the same work, or even the same creed must suit all of them, that they all have the same ability, must speak the same language; that their immediate interests are all identical — would be, and is, as absurd as to say that they all experience the same weather and that the sun shines on all of them at once.
The fact is that, whatever their degree of present attainment, the same Universal Law applies to each, and that the possibilities for each and every one are absolutely limitless — beginning at the point at which he is, and progressing infinitely. The goal of us all is ineffable harmony. But to try to attain that harmony by preaching materialist theories of internationalism resembles the advice of the man on one side of a deep chasm to a stranger on the other side:
“Jump. I think you will make it in two jumps!”
We are confronted by conditions. We are governed by unalterable Law. Knowledge is the proof of Law; wisdom its application. Theories of internationalism, being based on local points of view, can accomplish no more than to reduce all nations to one dead-level of suppression, leading ultimately to explosion more terrific than the outbursts of Vesuvius — matter seeking to imprison force.
It is Universal Law that makes possible the playing of Beethoven’s magic compositions by orchestra of a hundred pieces. To compel the first and second violins to use their bows simultaneously, would accomplish a result as futile in degree, and in its way, as any effort to bind the nations in one man- governed league. It is enough, and difficult enough, that nations should govern themselves; and they will never attain harmony by all striving to be first violins. Order is attained by listening, self-government, and work; and not by listening to the next piece in the orchestra but to the universal symphony.
An il
lustration comes to mind from memory. On a night in the Ituri Forest in the Congo Free State, many years before the recent world-war, there met more than a dozen men of different nations in one of those great clearings made by the Forest Administration, into which paths led from every direction, and in which travelers might pitch their tents. It was a bright oasis in a gloomy wilderness of trees so dense as to be impenetrable except along the paths, two meters wide, that threaded the forest like the filaments of a gigantic spider’s web.
The men met quite by accident. There was a German grand-duke with a Prussian friend and a Bavarian non-commissioned officer; a Swiss merchant; two Roman Catholic priests, one a Hollander, the other a Portuguese; two Belgians with a handcuffed Greek prisoner; an Englishman; an Italian; a man whose identity remained in doubt, but who might have been a Lithuanian or Russian; an American big-game hunter suffering badly from malaria; and one or two others, including an East-Indian trader, whose names and nationalities I have forgotten.
We met on territory then being administered by Belgium, subject to an international treaty expressly devised for the protection of the natives and to prevent rival nations from coming to blows for possession of the rich, then hardly explored area. The only discoverable points of agreement between the various nationals assembled in that oasis were, that the natives were being cruelly exploited rather than protected; that war undoubtedly would come for the possession of the so-called Free State; and that, whatever local laws there might be, any man with brains and sufficient lack of scruple might break them with impunity.
