Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  H.P.B.’s testiness did not fade as her confidence grew: some of her disciples had to remind themselves that Madame was in constant pain and on these grounds should be forgiven her outbursts. In the countess’s opinion, Helena’s abuse was calculated as a trial through which she deliberately put people to test their devotion to the Cause. Madame herself may have flogged her naturally mercurial nature in order to set herself outside the realm of civility and courtesy: after Alice Cleather had once spent weeks helping prepare the index for The Secret Doctrine, she brought her work to Madame who “flicked it contemptuously with her beautiful forefinger saying, ‘This is not in the least what I wanted, my dear; it won’t do at all,’ thereupon she tore the sheets across and flung them into the waste paper basket.” Alice burst into tears, but Helena paid no attention. To Alice, Madame’s response was perfectly justified; she had known nothing about indexing and must have completely botched the job. And Alice felt that spiritually H.P.B.’s rebuff was “extremely good for me at that early stage.”30

  Most people lacked the nerve to talk back to Helena, but Bert, after months of abuse, was growing angry. So one day when Helena viciously attacked him, “hitting just every one of my weakest and tenderest spots,” he rebelled and “suddenly felt a surge of red-hot anger rise within me.” One moment Madame had been squawking furiously, he recalled; the next she stopped dead and stared at him. Looking him up and down, she remarked coldly, “And you want to be an occultist.”

  It was then, he said, that he “saw and knew, and went off deeply ashamed, having learnt no small lesson.”31 It seems remarkable that he failed to question how Madame had managed to become an occultist if she could not restrain herself; in the end, the fact that he and the other disciples took her mistreatment says more about them than about H.P.B. The only person exempt from her “training” was Archibald, and when Bert once asked her why she never scolded Arch, she replied that it was because he had a blue liver, and would not explain what that meant.

  In 1887, the fantastics began to take over London. The century was gearing up for the “Yellow Nineties” with its fin de siecle daring, its tolerance of novelty in ideas and art, its Wildes and Beardsleys with their refined perversities. It was also working up to economic depression. Essentially, however, 1887 was the curtain-raiser to a decade of hope and action, when people believed anything might happen; for the young, anything that did happen had to be good so long as it was new. With the most cherished principles of the Victorian Age about to be dumped overboard, experiment became the watchword and people set about testing life for themselves. People of all ages convinced themselves that they were passing into a new social and moral system; still it was mainly the young men and women who especially felt they were stepping out of the caged past into a freedom full of limitless possibilities. There was so much to think about, so much to discuss, so much to see: aesthetics in art and literature; celebrity breakfast parties; anything Oriental from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado to mystics like Mohini Chatterji; Buffalo Bill; bright new restaurants and “tea shops”; and the only just invented safety bicycle that became a symbol of the new freedom.

  Soon after Helena’s arrival in London, she had rather shyly told Vera that “it appears that your sister is getting to be the fashion in Europe,”32 and even though it had been an exaggeration at the time, by early 1888 it would be a fact. Séances were still a stylish pastime for fashionable London society, and the city’s clairvoyants continued doing a brisk business, but none of them had the foresight to predict the 1890s, nor did they divine that Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophy would soon become a fashionable cult. As a matter of fact, H.P.B. herself did not foresee it.

  From the time she moved to Lansdowne Road, more and more people were drawn into her orbit, not only the Thursday attendees at the Blavatsky Lodge, but visitors who just wanted to meet the famous Madame. “We were hardly settled in the house,” recalled the countess, “when people began to call on H.P.B. The visitors grew so numerous, and she was so constantly interrupted in her work, that it was considered advisable for her to have a day for reception.”33 Accordingly, H.P.B. had a calling card printed:

  MADAME BLAVATSKY

  AT HOME

  Saturday, 4 to 10 o’clock.

  17 Lansdowne Road

  Notting Hill, W.

  The four to ten hours were totally ignored because, as Constance admitted, “from 2 p.m. till 11 or 12 at night there would be a succession of visitors and H.P.B. would frequently have a group around her asking questions, to which she would answer with unvarying patience.”34 At the same time Helena did not hesitate to ask questions of her guests, the most frequent to newcomers being, “Do you believe in a P.G.?”35 (Personal God).

  Aside from the Saturday At-Homes, she welcomed a stream of guests every night of the week. Looking back, the artist Edmund Russell thought that he had never seen such hospitality. “With five or six in the family, the table was spread for twenty. Once-invited-always-invited. One took a vacant seat without ceremony, came in at any time, left in the middle of a meal, sat by some poor student for one course, moved over beside a princess for another, or, as special privilege finished the repast with The Old Lady herself.” The food was vegetarian but “no one would ever have known it, so rich and varied the magical dishes.”36 A platter of chicken fricassee, prepared for the compulsively carnivorous, was usually carried away untouched.

  Corpulent, unhealthy, and habitually untidy, Helena nevertheless struck most of her guests as captivating. To Pall Mall Gazette editor W. T. Stead, who was simultaneously delighted and repelled, Helena presented her portrait and declared that he might call himself what he liked but she knew he was a good Theosophist. Stead thought that she had the manners of a very unconventional man, but he liked her. Her repartee was marvelous of course: when someone called her the worst-dressed woman in the world, she retorted that was impossible, since she didn’t dress at all. When asked if the stories about her were apocryphal, she never bothered to affirm or deny. “Mud,” she would say, “has rained down on me for so long I no longer attempt to open an umbrella.”37

  There was not a would-be mystic in London who sooner or later did not beat the path to Lansdowne Road. Among the first was William Butler Yeats, a tall, pale, angular youth of twenty-two, “all dreams and all gentleness,”38 as one of his friends described him. Despite his maiden speech at the Dublin Hermetic Society, it was neither Madame Blavatsky nor her Mahatmas who had initially drawn Yeats to Theosophy but Mohini Chatterji, whom he had met in Dublin in 1885.39 “He sat there beautiful,” Yeats recalled, “as only an Eastern is beautiful, making little gestures with his delicate hands, and to him alone among all the talks I have heard, oratory, and even the delight of ordered words, seemed nothing, and all thought a flight into the heart of truth.”40 In London, Yeats talked incessantly about Indian mysticism and the wonderful seer Mohini, and in Bedford Park, where he lived with his family, he painted the signs of the zodiac on the ceiling of his bedroom.

  Soon after his friend Charley Johnston met H.P.B., Yeats armed himself with a letter of introduction from him and called upon Madame at Maycot, where he found “an old woman in a plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humor and audacious power.”41 She also seemed to him “a sort of female Dr. Johnson, impressive I think to every man or woman who had themselves any richness.”42 Playing patience at a small table, she kept scribbling on the green baize with a stick of white chalk while she talked to Yeats, who saw at once that she had “more human nature than anybody else.”43 Unlike many of her other visitors, he had carefully read the S.P.R. Report and he was plagued by whether or not to believe Hodgson. His poet friend William Ernest Henley had shrugged off that question as irrelevant by saying that “she is a person of genius, but a person of genius must do something—Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her coffin.”44 Yeats could not accept that explanation, nor could he reconcile the weight of Hodgson’s evidence with what he saw and heard of H.P.B. and so he
kept waiting “with impatience for the explanation that never came.”45

  When Helena moved into London, Yeats was still waiting, but by then had joined the Theosophical Society where he got an earful of dogma from her disciples. It must have been either Bert or Arch who told him “how he heard often her Master’s mystic ring in the middle of the night, and though the sound was faint and sweet the whole house was shaken,”46 and someone else whispered to him that “she is not a living woman at all, the body of the real Madame Blavatsky was discovered thirty years ago on the battlefield of —-.”47 Yeats could not remember the name, something Russian he thought, but doubtless he had encountered the most recent version of the Mentana story.

  Helena herself had enough weird adventures to keep him intrigued and sometimes, when she was feeling tired or low, she would ramble on dreamily. “I go on writing as the Wandering Jew walks,” she sighed. “I once used to blame and pity the people who sell their souls to the Devil; I now only pity them—they do it to have somebody on their side.”48 And then she would switch to Alfred de Musset, whom she said that she had known and disliked, and Balzac whom she had met only once, and George Sand with whom she had dabbled in magic even though “neither of us knew anything about it.”49 That was fascinating to Yeats and thoroughly believable, but he had to lift his eyebrows at some of her more grisly stories. “Once my knee was very bad,” she confided to him, “and the doctor said I would be lame for life. But in the middle of the night the Master came in with a live dog split open in his hands, and he put the dog over my knee so that the entrails covered it, and in the morning I was well.”50

  Yeats decided that Madame “dreamed awake,” which not only was a nice way of putting it but as good a theory as anyone’s. Never present at a temper tantrum, Yeats thought Madame extremely kind and ventured to remark upon “how careful she was that the young men about her should not overwork.” Actually she worked them like galley slaves, but perhaps Yeats’s impression is based on an incident involving him: when someone reproved the poet for talking too much and wearying Madame, she clucked gravely, “No, no, he is very sensitive.”51

  After a while Yeats seems to have given up trying to figure out Madame, and decided simply to enjoy her and to tell his friends about her. To the Irish poet Katharine Tynan, he was obviously trying to make Lansdowne Road sound entertaining:

  A sad accident happened at Madame Blavatsky’s lately, I hear. A big materialist sat on the astral double of a poor young Indian. He was sitting on the sofa and he was too material to be able to see it. Certainly a sad accident!52

  He wanted to bring all his friends into the high priestess’s circle, most of all Maud Gonne, a Junoesque Irishwoman famous both as a beauty and a revolutionary, and, to Yeats, “the trouble of my life.”53 The bedazzled, lovesick young man was delighted to learn of Maud’s interest in the occult, even of her experimentation with hashish, which, in large doses, produced an out-of-body experience.

  “When I was experimenting with the occult,” she said in her autobiography, “always in the hope of gaining power to use for the great object of my life, I joined the Theosophical Society and went with Willie Yeats to visit that strange old woman, Madame Blavatsky, its founder.” Motioned to sit next to Madame, who was playing patience, she would best remember H.P.B.’s “big pale luminous eyes” and recall that she had glanced around the room at the Theosophists who “looked a nondescript gathering, though Willie told me there were interesting people among them.” The great-limbed Maud, no shrinking Alice Cleather, demanded of Madame whether politics were compatible with Theosophy; Maud, who had been criticized for her political views by the Dublin branch, sought absolution from no less than Madame herself.

  “My dear child,” H.P.B. murmured, “of course you can do what you like in politics. That has nothing to do with Theosophy. They must be flapdoodles in that Dublin branch. I will tell them so.”

  Maud noticed that the gas chandelier was flickering, no doubt because of air in the pipes. “Spooks in the room,” announced Helena loudly, then whispered to Maud, “They are all looking for a miracle.”

  When the gas finally went out completely, she declared in an even louder tone, “Spooks!” while keeping up a low commentary to Maud. “Now they think they have seen one. They also are flapdoodles.”54

  Others of Yeats’ friends found H.P.B. less to their taste: the Welshman Ernest Rhys, best known today as editor of the Everyman Library classics series, had apparently expected 17 Lansdowne Road to be a sort of Oriental temple of mysticism transplanted to London. Hence, he was disappointed to find a Victorian villa “with an air of prosperity suggesting the well-to-do bourgeois class.” He first met H.P.B. one twilight evening in the winter of 1888 when the fog was so thick that one could not see across the river and indoors heavy curtains shut out the fading daylight. Seated under a shaded gas lamp, Madame was playing cards with three pale young men “whose faces looked as if the diet and discipline they were subjected to were affecting their health.” H.P.B., dressed in a plain black gown girdled with a black rope, paused to glance up at Rhys and after holding out her hand briefly, went on with the game; her partners did not look up at all. Rhys and Yeats sat down to watch. Suddenly one of the players cried out in a shrill voice, “H.P.B., you’re cheating!”

  “Did you only find that out now?” She laughed and threw down her cards. “I have been cheating all through the game.”

  Listening and observing, Rhys was conscious of a powerful force radiating from H.P.B., “a something almost hypnotic, not accountable to ordinary human laws,”55 but finally she failed to convince him, and he did not become a convert. Afterward, when Yeats asked him what he thought of Madame, Rhys hesitantly confessed he had seen nothing to make him feel Theosophy offered great spiritual regeneration to mankind. Yeats countered that it was not fair to judge H.P.B. by a single meeting and urged him to return when Madame was giving instruction to her disciples.

  Helena was to exercise a peculiar fascination on the young Irish literary set who were searching for a fresh and comprehensive cosmology. To Yeats, Charles Johnston, Claude Falls Wright, George Moore, and George W. Russell (“AE”), Madame seemed to be trying to hold the world in the palm of her hand, whatever else might be said of her. Some of them, like Moore, who had encountered Mohini by chance and “fled before him,”56 continued to observe with interest from the sidelines. “AE,” however, despite an initial attraction to Mohini “instinctively as to a destiny,” drew the line at actually joining the Dublin Theosophical Society, By the fall of 1888, he was just beginning to waver when he wrote H.P.B.: “I am not a proclaimed Theosophist. I do not belong to the Society. For some reasons I am sorry; for many reasons I am glad.” One reason, he said, was that the T.S. was not representative of Theosophy, “only of itself—a gathering of many earnest seekers after truth, many powerful intellects, many saints and many sinners and lovers of curiosity.” Speaking for himself, he confessed that he would not mind witnessing phenomena or calling spirits from the “vasty deep,” but if that was Theosophy, he wanted none of it. “My ideal is to worship the One God in spirit and truth.”57

  Printing “AE’s” letter in Lucifer, Helena added an editorial footnote to his comment about phenomena: “It is not in the Theosophical Society that our correspondent can ever hope to evoke spirits or see any physical phenomena,”58 a rather remarkable statement considering her penchant for burying cups and saucers. Quickly “AE” replied that he had not meant he really wanted to see spooks; it had been his lower self speaking. “I earnestly trust no Member of the Society will ever indulge in the evocation of phenomena, whether for curiosity or for the gratification of the intellect.” He did, however, honestly believe that “the formation of the Society was a mistake,” not so much in motive but in leadership; since the speed of the slowest ship measures a fleet’s rate of progress, “the weak ones of the Society marks its position in the world.”59

  By the end of the year, however, “AE” would begin to read The Secre
t Doctrine, which he believed to be the faith of the future, and then would join the Dublin Society. Scon after his induction, he moved out of his parents’ home and went to live at the Society’s Headquarters at 3 Upper Ely Place. He survived his twelve-hour day as a clerk at the Guiness Brewery only by the prospect of returning to Ely Place and immersing himself in the pages of The Secret Doctrine. “AE” was twenty-one at the time, and his literary career still lay before him. Critics have commented that his poetry suffered from the limitation of a Theosophical world view, but to “AE” Theosophy was the only world. Forty-five years later, writing to Sean O’Faolain a month before his death, he would say, “You dismiss H. P. Blavatsky rather too easily as ‘hocus pocus.’ Nobody ever affected the thought of so many able men and women by ‘hocus pocus.’ “60

  It would be poets such as “AE” and Yeats who would continue to celebrate H.P.B.’s visions long after she had departed the scene. To “AE,” it did not matter if The Secret Doctrine was merely a romantic compilation; it still contained the grandest cosmogony ever conceived and would always remain to him one of the most provocative books ever written. To Yeats, who realized that Helena’s phenomena might well have been fraudulent, her philosophy had independent, inherent value and her Tibetan Mahatmas remained infinitely fascinating:

  Anashuya. Swear by the parents of the gods,

  Dread oath, who dwell on sacred Himalay,

  On the far Golden Peak; enormous shapes,

  Who were still old when the great sea was young,

  In their vast faces mystery and dreams...61