Chapter III: The Teachings (3)

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VOL. I NO. 3 CONTENTS SEPTEMBER 1911

Southwest Corner of the Temple in the Greek Theater,
Point Loma, Cal. _Frontispiece_
The New Cycle by H. P. Blavatsky 165
Recent Confirmation of H. P. Blavatsky's Teachings
by H. T. Edge, B. A. (Cantab.) 172
View in the Grounds of the International Theosophical
Headquarters (_ill._) facing 172
Lomaland Cañon and Hillside (_illustration_) facing 173
The Origin and Nature of Folk-music by Kenneth Morris 174
Lapland (_illustrated_) by P. F. 180
Cultivating Genius for Music by E. A. Neresheimer 182
Glimpses of Scandinavian Mythology by Per Fernholm, M. E. 184
The Dipylon and the Outer Ceramicus (_ill._)
by F. S. Darrow, A. M., PH. D. (Harv.) 189
The Theosophic Torch by Grace Knoche 190
The Pythagorean Solids
by F. J. Dick, M. INST. C. E., M. INST. C. E. I. 194
The "Black Age" by Ariomardes 196
Egyptian Art Under the XXVIth Dynasty (_illustrated_) by C. J. 200
The House of Lords, London (_illustrated_) by R. 201
Music Notes by Charles J. Ryan 202
Ancient Calendars by Travers 205
The Mysteries of Eleusis (_illustrated_) by H. T. E. 207
Glaciation, Past and Present (_illustrated_) by T. Henry 209
God and the Child (_verse_) 211
Power by Lydia Ross, M. D. 212
Sokrates (_illustrated_) by F. S. Darrow, A. M., PH. D. (Harv.) 215
Sokrates and Seneca (_illustration_) facing 222
Scenes in Cuba and Florida (_illustrations_) facing 223
A Visit to a Louisiana Sugar Plantation by Barbara McClung 223
The Lorelei (_illustrated_) by a Student-Traveler 225
The Western Four-Toed Salamander (_illustrated_)
by Percy Leonard 227
The Real Man by H. Coryn, M. D., M. R. C. S. 229
Book Reviews (by Carolus); and Notices 233

THE THEOSOPHICAL PATH

KATHERINE TINGLEY, EDITOR

VOL. I SEPTEMBER, 1911 NO. 3

There is but one Eternal Truth, one universal, infinite and changeless spirit of Love, Truth, and Wisdom, impersonal, therefore, bearing a different name in every nation, one Light for all, in which the whole Humanity lives and moves and has its being.--_H. P. Blavatsky_

THE NEW CYCLE: Extracts from an Article Written by H. P. Blavatsky, the Foundress of the Theosophical Society, for the first number of "La Revue Théosophique," 1889

The principal aim of our organization, which we are laboring to make a real brotherhood, is expressed in the motto of the Theosophical Society: "There is no religion higher than truth." As an impersonal Society we must be ready to seize the truth wherever we find it, without permitting ourselves more partiality for one belief than for another. This leads directly to a logical conclusion. If we acclaim and receive with open arms all sincere truthseekers, there can be no place in our ranks for the bigot, the sectarian, or the hypocrite, enclosed in Chinese Walls of dogma, each stone bearing the words "No admission." What place indeed could such fanatics occupy in them, fanatics whose religions forbid all inquiry and do not admit any argument as possible, when the mother idea, the very root of the beautiful plant we call Theosophy is known as--absolute and unfettered liberty to investigate all the mysteries of nature, human or divine!

With this exception the Society invites everyone to participate in its activities and discoveries. Whoever feels his heart beat in unison with the great heart of humanity; whoever feels his interests are one with those of every being poorer and less fortunate than himself; every man or woman who is ready to hold out a helping hand to the suffering; whoever understands the true meaning of the word "Egoism"; is a Theosophist by birth and by right. He can always be sure of finding sympathetic souls among us.

We have already said elsewhere, that "Born in the United States the Theosophical Society was constituted on the model of its mother country." That as we know, has omitted the name of God from its Constitution, for fear, said the fathers of the Republic, that the word might one day become the pretext for a state religion: for they desired to grant absolute equality to all religions under the laws, so that each form would support the State, which in its turn would protect them all. The Theosophical Society was founded on that excellent model....

Each Body, like each member, being free to profess whatever religion and to study whatever philosophy it prefers, provided all remain united in the tie of solidarity or Brotherhood, our Society can truly call itself a "Republic of conscience."

Though absolutely free to pursue whatever intellectual occupations please him the best, each member of our Society must, however, furnish some reason for belonging thereto, which amounts to saying that each member must bear his part, small though it be, of mental or other labor for the benefit of all. If one does not work for others one has no right to be called a Theosophist. All must strive for human freedom of thought, for the elimination of selfish and sectarian superstitions, and for the discovery of all the truths that are within the comprehension of the human mind. That object cannot be attained more certainly than by the cultivation of unity in intellectual labors. No honest worker, no earnest seeker can remain empty-handed; and there is hardly a man or woman, busy as they may think themselves, incapable of laying their tribute, moral or pecuniary, on the altar of truth....

In the present condition of the Theosophical history it is easy to understand the object of a Review exclusively devoted to the propagation of our ideas. We wish to open therein new intellectual horizons, to follow unexplored routes leading to the amelioration of humanity; to offer a word of consolation to all the disinherited of the earth, whether they suffer from the starvation of soul or from the lack of physical necessities. We invite all large-hearted persons who desire to respond to this appeal to join with us in this humanitarian work. Each co-worker, whether a member of the Society or simply a sympathizer, can help. We are face to face with all the glorious possibilities of the future. This is again the hour of the great cyclic return of the tide of mystical thought in Europe. On every side we are surrounded by the ocean of the universal science--the science of Life Eternal--bearing on its waves the forgotten and submerged treasures of generations now passed away, treasures still unknown to the modern civilized races. The strong current which rises from the submarine abysses, from the depths where lie the prehistoric learning and arts swallowed up with the antediluvian Giants--demigods, though with but little of mortality--that current strikes us in the face and murmurs: "That which has been exists again; that which has been forgotten, buried for aeons in the depths of the Jurassic strata may reappear to view once again. Prepare yourselves."

Happy are those who understand the language of the elements. But where are _they_ going for whom the word element has no other meaning than that given to it by physics or materialistic chemistry? Will it be towards well-known shores that the surge of the great waters will bear them, when they have lost their footing in the deluge which is approaching? Will it be towards the peaks of a new Ararat that they will find themselves carried, towards the heights of light and sunshine, where there is a ledge on which to place the feet in safety, or perchance is it a fathomless abyss that will swallow them up as soon as they try to struggle against the irresistible billows of an unknown element?

We must prepare ourselves and study truth under every aspect, endeavoring to ignore nothing, if we do not wish to fall into the abyss of the unknown when the hour shall strike. It is useless to leave it to chance and to await the intellectual and psychic crisis which is preparing, with indifference, if not with crass disbelief, saying that at the worst the flowing tide will drive us all in the course of nature towards the farther shore; for it is far more probable that the tidal wave will cast up nothing but a corpse. The strife will be terrible in any case between brutal materialism and blind fanaticism on the one hand, and philosophy and mysticism on the other--mysticism, that veil of more or less translucency which hides the eternal Truth.

But it is not materialism that will gain the upper hand. Every fanatic whose ideas isolate him from the universal axiom that "There is no religion higher than Truth" will see himself by that very fact rejected, like an unworthy stone, from the Archway called Universal Brotherhood. Tossed by the waves, driven by the winds, reeling in that element which is so terrible because unknown, he will soon find himself engulfed....

Yes, it must be so, it cannot be otherwise when the chilly and artificial gleam of modern materialism will disappear for want of fuel. Those who cannot form any idea of a spiritual Ego, a living soul and an eternal Spirit within their material shell (which owes its very existence to these principles); those for whom the great hope of an existence beyond the grave is a vexation, merely the symbol of an unknown quantity, or else the subject of a belief _sui generis_, the result of theological and mediumistic hallucinations--these will do well to prepare for the serious troubles the future has in store for them. For from the depths of the dark, muddy waters of materiality which hide from them every glimpse of the horizons of the great Beyond, there is a mystic force rising during these last years of the century. At most it is but the first gentle rustling, but it is a superhuman rustling--"supernatural" only for the superstitious and the ignorant. The spirit of truth is passing over the face of the waters, and in dividing them, is compelling them to disgorge their spiritual treasures. This spirit is a force that can neither be hindered nor stopped. Those who recognize it and feel that this is the supreme moment of their salvation will be uplifted by it and carried beyond the illusions of the great astral serpent. The joy they will experience will be so poignant and intense that if they were not mentally isolated from their body of flesh, the beatitude would pierce them like sharp steel. It is not pleasure that they will experience but a bliss which is a foretaste of the wisdom of the gods, the knowledge of good and evil, of the fruits of the tree of life.

But although the man of today may be a fanatic, a sceptic, or a mystic, he must be well convinced that it is useless for him to struggle against the two moral forces at large today engaged in the supreme contest. He is at the mercy of these two adversaries and there is no intermediary capable of protecting him. It is but a question of choice, whether to let himself be carried along on the wave of mystical evolution, or to struggle against this moral and psychic reaction and so find himself engulfed in the maelstrom of the rising tide. The whole world, at this time, with its centers of high intelligence and humane culture, its political, artistic, literary, and commercial life, is in a turmoil; everything is shaking and crumbling in its movement towards reform. It is useless to shut the eyes, it is useless to hope that anyone can remain neutral between the two contending forces; the choice is whether to be crushed between them or to become united with one or the other. The man who imagines he has freedom, but who, nevertheless, remains plunged in that seething caldron of foulness called the life of Society--gives the lie in the face of his divine Ego, a lie so terrible that it will stifle that higher self for a long series of future incarnations. All you who hesitate in the path of Theosophy and the occult sciences, who are trembling on the golden threshold of truth--the only one within your grasp, for all the others have failed you one after the other--look straight in the face the great Reality which is offered you. It is only to mystics that these words are addressed, for them alone have they any importance; for those who have already made their choice they are vain and useless. But you Students of Occultism and Theosophy, you well know that a word, old as the world though new to you, has been declared at the beginning of this cycle. You well know that a note has just been struck which has never yet been heard by the mankind of the present era; and that a new thought is revealed, ripened by the forces of evolution. This thought differs from everything that has been produced in the nineteenth century; it is identical, however, with the thought that has been the dominant tone and key-stone of each century, especially the last--absolute freedom of thought for humanity.

Why try to strangle and suppress what cannot be destroyed? Why hesitate when there is no choice between allowing yourselves to be raised on the crest of the spiritual wave to the very heavens beyond the stars and the universes, or to be engulfed in the yawning abyss of an ocean of matter? Vain are your efforts to sound the unfathomable, to reach the ultimate of this wonderful matter so glorified in our century; for its roots grow in the Spirit and in the Absolute, they do not exist, yet they _are_ eternally. This constant union with flesh, blood, and bones, the illusion of differentiated matter, does nothing but blind you. And the more you penetrate into the region of the impalpable atoms of chemistry the more you will be convinced that they only exist in your imagination. Do you truly expect to find in material life every reality and every truth of existence? But Death is at everyone's door, waiting to shut it upon a beloved soul that escapes from its prison, upon the soul which alone has made the body a reality; how then can it be that eternal love should associate itself absolutely with ever-changing and ever-disappearing matter?

But you are perhaps indifferent to all such things; how then can you say that affection and the souls of those you love concern you at all, since you do not believe in the very existence of such souls? It must be so. You have made your choice; you have entered upon that path which crosses nothing but the barren deserts of matter. You are self-condemned to wander there and to pass through a long series of similar lives. You will have to be contented henceforth with deliriums and fevers in place of spiritual experiences, of passion instead of love, of the husk instead of the fruit.

But you, friends and readers, you who aspire to something more than the life of the squirrel everlastingly turning the same wheel; you who are not content with the seething of the caldron whose turmoil results in nothing; you who do not take the deaf echoes of the dead past for the divine voice of truth; prepare yourselves for a future of which you have hardly dared to dream unless you have at least taken the first few steps on the way. For you have chosen a path, although rough and thorny at the start, that soon widens out and leads you to the divine truth. You are free to doubt while you are still at the beginning of the way, you are free to decline to accept on hearsay what is taught respecting the source and the cause of truth, but you are always able to hear what its voice is telling you, and you can always study the effects of the creative force coming from the depths of the unknown. The arid soil upon which the present generation of men is moving at the close of this age of spiritual dearth and of purely material satisfaction, has need of a divine symbol, of a rainbow of hope to rise above its horizon. For of all the past centuries our Nineteenth has been the most criminal. It is criminal in its frightful selfishness, in its scepticism which grimaces at the very idea of anything beyond the material; in its idiotic indifference to all that does not pertain to personal egotism--more than any of previous centuries of ignorant barbarism or intellectual darkness. Our century must be saved from itself before its last hour strikes. This is the moment for all those to act who see the sterility and folly of an existence blinded by materialism and ferociously indifferent to the fate of the neighbor; now is the time for them to devote all their energies, all their courage to the great intellectual reform. This reform can only be accomplished by Theosophy we say, by the Occultism of the Wisdom of the Orient. The paths that lead to it are many; but the Wisdom is one. Artistic souls foresee it, those who suffer dream of it, the pure in heart know it. Those who work for others cannot remain blinded to its reality, though they may not recognize it by name. Only light and empty minds, egotistical and vain drones, confused by their own buzzing will remain ignorant of the supreme ideal. They will continue to exist until life becomes a grievous burden to them.

This is to be distinctly remembered, however: these pages are not written for the masses. They are neither an appeal for reforms, nor an effort to win over to our views the fortunate in life; they are addressed solely to those who are constitutionally able to comprehend them, to those who suffer, to those who hunger and thirst after some Reality in this world of Chinese Shadows. And for those, why should they not show themselves courageous enough to leave their world of trifling occupations, their pleasures above all and their personal interests, at least as far as those interests do not form part of their duty to their families or others? No one is so busy or so poor that he cannot create a noble ideal and follow it. Why then hesitate in breaking a path towards this ideal, through all obstacles, over every stumbling-block, every petty hindrance of social life, in order to march straight forward until the goal is reached?

Those who would make this effort would soon find that the "strait gate" and the "thorny path" lead to the broad valleys of the limitless horizons, to that state where there is no more death, because one has regained one's divinity. But the truth is that the first conditions necessary to reach it are a disinterestedness, an absolute impersonality, a boundless devotion to the interests of others, and a complete indifference to the world and its opinions. The motive must be absolutely pure in order to make the first steps on that ideal path; not an unworthy thought must attract the eyes from the end in view, not one doubt must shackle the feet. There do exist men and women thoroughly qualified for this whose only aim is to dwell under the Aegis of their divine Nature. Let them, at least, take courage to live the life and not conceal it from the eyes of others! The opinion of no other person should be taken as superior to the voice of conscience. Let that conscience, developed to its highest degree, guide us in the control of all the ordinary acts of life. As to the conduct of our inner life, we must concentrate the entire attention on the ideal we have proposed to ourselves, and look straight ahead without paying the slightest attention to the mud upon our feet.

Those who make this supreme effort are the true Theosophists.

RECENT CONFIRMATION OF H. P. BLAVATSKY'S TEACHINGS ABOUT ANCIENT CONTINENTS AND RACES: by H. T. Edge, B. A. (Cantab.)

The London _Times' South American Supplement_ (May 30) contains the first half of an article on the ancient people of Peru, in which the writer speaks of the gigantic works in masonry wrought by a people who lived there ages before the Incas. Being on the wrong side of the Andes for fertility, these people built the enormous irrigation systems which still exist; and the writer asks why they did not cross the Andes to the well-watered slopes and plains on the east. The extent to which they had explored their own country and its mountain heights proves that the other country should have been within their grasp. Yet they took all this trouble to make the western slopes fertile.

The answer given is--that in those days perhaps there _was_ no land to the east of the Andes.

The writer then goes on to speak of the ancient continental distribution of land, of Atlantis, of the connexion between South America and Australasia, etc., in a way that is now growing familiar. People whose opinions are of weight are coming to see that the true explanation of the ancient American civilizations, as well as those of such isolated spots as Easter Island, with its marvelous statues, is to be sought along these lines. At the same time the subject has afforded a fertile field for cranks and others who pin their various fads or new gospels thereto. The latter, however, cannot last, but the truth is eternal. The myths will be exploded, but the actual facts as to past history will be proved.

In _The Secret Doctrine_ H. P. Blavatsky sums up all the available speculation and information on the subject of these ancient continents and weaves it into consistency by applying to it the keys of the Wisdom-Religion. There is little doubt that her writings have contributed largely, in more or less direct ways, to many of the other published utterances on the question.

It is maintained, and with reason, by Theosophists, that the statements of H. P. Blavatsky refer to actual facts and must therefore one day be verified. The history of discovery and speculation since she wrote has already done much to confirm this conviction. But as her teachings with regard to the ancient continents are inseparably bound up with her statements as to the ancient races of mankind, and indeed with the Theosophical teachings in general, it follows that these also will be confirmed.

The great importance of this enlarged knowledge about the human race and its history is that it so enlarges and ennobles our view of human life. Before the light of knowledge all narrow dogmas fade away. The errors of theology, the mistakes of scientific theory, our inadequate sociological ideas--all these must fade in the light which will be shed when the Theosophical teachings are more fully recognized. And all this remarkable progress in archaeology may be welcomed as one of the signs.

The publication to which reference has been made speaks of other countries of South America, but seems unable to do so without mentioning their antiquities. The Aztecs of Mexico, the Aymarás of Peru, come in for notice. The ancient people of Peru present analogies to the Egyptians, Babylonians, Indian peoples, Polynesians, and Malays, it is said; and some writers have theories about their connexion with Jews and Chinese. It is easy to see that speculation, left to itself, runs amuck among the theories.

The same writer, Comyns Beaumont, concludes his article on the ancient Peruvians in the issue for June 27, and says that:

Central America, as the "Enterprise" or "Easter Divide," a large submarine ridge, indicates, was connected to the Pacific Continent. On the other side Central America was connected in the East with the Mediterranean by another continental mass that spread across the Atlantic Ocean, and of which today the Antilles, Azores, Canaries, and the Atlas Mountains in Morocco are the existing remains. Peru also was a member of this vast continental system. Apart from the evidence of geological strata, confirmation of this is obtained from the study of sea fauna. The marine deposits of Peru, Chile, and Ecuador belong to the same genus as those of Central America, and to find the corresponding genus elsewhere one must search in the Mediterranean. Precisely, therefore, as Europe, Asia, and Africa possess a continuous land connexion, at the epoch when the Peruvians were in the forefront of civilization there existed a world which comprised the regions of the Mediterranean (then very different from nowadays), the lost Atlantic Continent, Central America, and Peru, and the lost Pacific Continent which embraced lands not only in the Pacific Ocean, but continued to where the Indian Ocean now washes the shores of Africa, India, and Mesopotamia.

Thus a step is made in the fulfilment of H. P. Blavatsky's prophecy that the present century would witness a recognition of many of the teachings she outlined in her writings.

But there is still much to be done. And not the least important point is to distinguish carefully between the "Sons of Light" and the "Sorcerers" among the mighty men of these perished lands. There was a true Wisdom and a false knowledge; and H. P. Blavatsky never fails to discriminate between those who preserved the light and those who fell into darkness. The Easter Island statues, for instance, she describes as resembling the sensual type of the Atlantean sorcerers rather than that of the "Buddhas" (so-called) of the Bamian colossi. The writer in the _Times Supplement_ calls the Easter Island statues "Turanian," employing thereby such familiar classifications as he finds to hand; and in any case he distinguishes them from that higher type loosely designated by the term "Aryan." This "Turanian" type he finds also in Chaldaea, India, Central America, etc., and alludes to their habit of building pyramids.

Finally he shows how inadequate are the speculations of many anthropologists as to the antiquity of man. Human bones disintegrate after a comparatively short time; so that the few we find are such as have been accidentally preserved. And these ancient civilizations tend to disprove the conventional theories of human evolution--which theories, however, change from year to year.

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF FOLK-MUSIC, as Exemplified in the Welsh National Melodies: by Kenneth Morris

Great attention is being paid nowadays to the collecting of old folk-songs in such countries as Ireland, Wales, and England; and there has been much discussion raised as to the nature and origin of a folk-song, properly so called. The subject is one of considerable interest, because it leads one to a point where the known and visible things melt away, and forces and influences of a deeper nature are at work. These may be called spiritual and formative; there is a hand guiding, but no one can see any hand; there is a creative mind at function, but it is not the mind of any human being.

In Wales one can still see the genuine folk-song coming into being; one can still watch, more or less, the processes incidental to its birth. In that country, poetry was never held to be a mere string of words that you could repeat as if you were reading an article from the newspaper; conversational methods of utterance are kept for conversation, or for the lower levels of prose, and there is a peculiar chant used for verse. The poem is born with a music of its own; and if it have no such music innate in it, and inseparable from its words, then for all its rhymes and scansion it is no poetry. So in speaking their poems the bards give full value to this music, using a kind of chant which is called "_hwyl_." The word means simply "sail"; the idea being that the inner music of the poem swells and extends and drives along the words, as the wind will fill and drive the sails of a ship. The method is perfectly natural; the least introduction of artificiality into it is absolutely damning: there you would get the desolating thump, thump, thump, of the motor boat instead of the free flow of the winds of heaven.

As regards the musical scale, this _hwyl_ is mainly monotonous; there is another kind or direction of scale in it, depending on the varying vowel sounds, which, though you chant them upon one musical note, have a certain rise and fall in them proper to themselves. If one imagines the scale of _do_, _re_, _mi_, _fa_, and the rest as being in a vertical line; then this scale of _a_, _e_, _i_, _o_, _oo_, etc., would fall horizontally; we can think of no better way of making a likeness for it. The richness of the vowels will make the music, and therefore the poetry. One can see this by comparing two lines, both popularly supposed to be poetry.

I am monarch of all I survey;

there is no music in that, and if one should attempt to put the hwyl into it, he would be guilty of the sin of untruth, which is the greatest of the crimes against poetry, according to the ancient doctrine of the bards.

I saw Osirian Egypt kneel adown

And one would be guilty of the same sin, should one repeat that lifelessly, and without the hwyl that existed around the mind of Keats before the line took verbal form, and out of which magical and alchemic element it was precipitated.

The bard, then, chants his poem, and the words are noted down, and pass from mouth to mouth; and as they pass, the horizontal scale takes on gradually some coloring of the vertical scale, and the chant becomes more and more a tune. The process is natural, and dependent upon no brain-mind; no composer gets to work upon it, and no one inserts in it consciously any ideas of his own. The Dorian mode, which (we quote from Mrs. Mary Davies, an authority on Welsh music) has a minor third as well as a minor seventh; and the Aeolian or _la_ mode, in which the third as well as the sixth and seventh are minor, are still largely in use in Wales; and we believe that these two modes represent a stage in the passing of the chanted poem, or the chant of the poem, into the full-fledged folk-tune. For one will sometimes hear an air which, in the printed collections is given in the arbitrary modern major or minor scales, sung a little differently, according to these older modes; and it would appear that all or nearly all the well-known Welsh national tunes have passed through such or similar stages.

It is here worthy of note that the Welsh hwyl--which is used not only in poetry, but in all the higher levels of prose as well, particularly in pulpit rhetoric--is not found, we believe, elsewhere in Europe, at any rate as a popular custom (for all poets _chant_ and do not _say_ their verses); but it is to be heard in Morocco, along the coast of Northern Africa, in Arabia, Persia, and throughout the East; where also certain of these older modes of music, such as the Dorian, are said to be in vogue to some extent. We imagine that the chant and the music-modes both vary as they go eastward; but it is a gradual growth or differentiation, not an abrupt change. The Persian poet, chanting his Hafiz, and the Welsh preacher, giving out the hymn, have much more in common with each other than either has with the modern conventional drawing-room reciter.

And then there is the national air, the last stage in the growth of that which began with some village bard's arrangement of his deep vowels and diphthongs. Long ago the words were forgotten, or lost all connexion with the tune they gave birth to; because at a certain stage the harpers took the tune up, and sang whatever words to it they might make up for the occasion. Such a tune as _All through the Night_, for example, would set out with such and such a bard on his wanderings. He would come to a wedding, and play it there, singing extempore verses to it filled full of joy and merriment. Then he would come to a house where there might be one newly dead; and his tune would again be called for; now it would be a dirge laden with mystical wailing and the joy that hides behind wailing. At the village fair it would appear as a dance; in the house of the warward chieftain it would ring and clamor with all the pomp and surging and uplift of the old wild, Quixotic, ridiculous wars. There would be different songs for it on each occasion; one hardly troubled much with the preservation of them, for song was a thing that a gentleman could call upon himself for at any time. Why keep the songs you sang today, when tomorrow you would surely sing other songs as good? Poetry was of all things the cheapest and most general where every other man, as you might say, was a poet.

One hears this kind of thing at the present day. Very few of the Welsh national tunes have any traditional words to them. If there is any special song attached to this tune or that, it will probably be the work of Ceiriog, who may be called the Robert Burns of Wales, or of some individual bard in the last two or three centuries, who sang such and such words to the tune on such an occasion, or in whose tragic or amusing history those words and that tune blended were pivotal, and have passed into a popular tradition.

Generally speaking, the words sung to all these airs are what are called _Pennillion_--_hen bennillion_, old verses; a kind of traditional folk-poetry arising no one knows from whom, and commemorating popular wisdom, historical events, personal peculiarities and eccentricities of long dead countryside celebrities, the beauties and delights of this or that locality, and so on. There will be war-songs, love-songs, dance-songs, dirges and nature-songs; a pennill on the three best dancers of Wales, and a pennill on the three prized things of three neighboring villages: the yews of Bettws, the bridge at Llandeilo, the sacred well at Llandybie. Unnumbered are these pennillion; perhaps more many than the tunes themselves to which they may be sung.

II

The old Welsh choirs and singing-parties--and they still do it, though of course foreign music, both the work of the great composers and the ribald stuff of the music halls, is making grand inroads--the old choirs would delight to take such and such a tune for the work of their evening, and sing song after song to it, now a dance, now a war-song, and now a dirge, one after the other; and whichever kind of song they might be singing, you would say that that tune was composed as, and could inevitably be, only suitable for that. You would say that, of course, by its very structure it would be impossible for it to be anything but martial; there was the very pride and beat of war in it; no blood could keep still, no feet forget to march at the sound of it. And then you would change your mind, and know that it could never be anything but a dirge; there as obviously the whole secret of sorrow in it; you were at one, hearing it, with everyone who might be mourning for their dearest dead; and you too, with them, were initiated into marvelous hopes and superhuman certainties and joy--carried out of time wherein men die, into that timelessness wherein they neither die nor are born. And that too would pass, and the singers would bring you into careless summer-evening merriment, and for the life of you, there was no keeping your feet from the shaking and wandering of dance.

One hears the multifold music of the world; the innumerable rhythms and variations of melody; combinations and intricacies many as the thoughts in the minds of terrestrial beings. And of those thoughts themselves, there will be all manner of ranks and no democratic equality. Some will be clansmen, so to say, in the house of merriment, others in the house of grief; mere commonalty of the mind, wearing at any time all the badges of their clan. These are cheap, every-day wayfarers, and stir the same emotion, or bring the same colorlessness, into whatever mind they may enter and whenever they may enter it. Others will be chieftains and tribal leaders, entering with greater circumstance, and imposing a larger subjection. Good or evil, they too bear always their own colors; grief will be grief and joy will be joy; love will be love, and hatred never anything but hatred, of the emotions that follow in their train.

But there are some few archetypal thoughts that you cannot so docket and always rely upon. They are the kings and high bards, standing beyond the limitations of tribe and sept. They will come in what insignia and royal robings they may choose, and rouse up gladness or sorrow, stillness or militancy according to their will. Such thoughts are those of death, of duration, of humanity, of compassion. You have spoken no true nor final word on death, when you have proclaimed him the king of terrors; though indeed, the thought of august death comes often in sorrowful and terrible disguise. Yet behind that dark regalia, what serenity, what unstirred meditative calm, what "peace that passeth all understanding," lie hidden! Compassion, too, comes doubly robed in the purple; dark with the sorrow that is in pity; glowing with the regality and gladness of unity with universal life. It is at once the martial conqueror of the world, boundless in hope and exultation; the sweet ministrant of the wounded, and the mourner at the graves of the fallen.

I think that there are expressions of music that correspond to these supernal and superpersonal thoughts; and that they are in fact simple tunes, and that many of them must be to be found in the folk-music of all nations. They are, as it were, archetypal patterns of song, root rhythms, sprung absolutely from the fountains of feeling, where feeling has not yet been diversified into all its countless forms of pain and delight. I think that the most beautiful of the Welsh airs fall into this class, or into that other corresponding with what we have called the tribal leaders of the thought plane. The Marches of the Men of Harlech, of Glamorgan or Meirionydd--indeed every district in Wales seems to have had its own war-tune in the ancient days--these are always distinctly martial, and there is no possibility of mistaking them or of making them anything else. _Y Galon Drom_, _Anhawdd Ymadael_, _Morfa Rhuddlan_ and a thousand others, again, are always dirges; to _Gyrru'r Byd o'm Blaen_, or to _Pwt ar y Bys_, you would never dream of doing anything but dance. All have with them a certain distinction and aristocracy in their own kind: about folk-music there is nearly always a bearing and a value, and vulgarity is impossible to the bulk of it. But beyond and higher than these there are those archetypal tunes which stir the source of whatever feeling they may be directed towards; one might mention perhaps _Llwyn On_ the Ash Grove, as a good example. There are hundreds of them among the Welsh airs.

Now the whole point of our inquiry is this--what was the creative or directing mind that brought these things to be? It was not the bard who first chanted the song; it was no one of the thousands of singers who modified and modified it as they passed it on, until presently the fixed tune was evolved, and changes and modifications ceased. These were all instruments in its evolution; but there was also an evolver. For it was brought, if indeed it is a primeval and radical thing, to no haphazard conclusion. The music that you make up is one thing; the music of the spheres is another: though it might happen indeed, that sitting down to compose, there should be revealed to you a measure from the music of the spheres. No doubt that would have happened occasionally--probably only occasionally--with the great transcendent geniuses of music: but then, there was no great transcendent genius, neither Wagner nor Bach nor Beethoven, concerned in the making of the folk-tune. We can posit the soul of Beethoven, wrapt up into the universal soul, hearing immortal immeasurable things, and after, producing some fragment of them in a sonata or a symphony! But what soul was it here, who heard the rhythm and measure of the star-music, and what the mountains are singing in their hearts to make them eternal, and the song that drives the rivers and the rain, and the bardic carol of the sun, and the ineffable yearning of the souls of men, upward towards their divinity and evolutionary destined grandeur--who heard, and set all these things bleakly and magnificently down in the folk-song? I will not apologize for speaking of the folk-song and the sonata in one breath: of the gods also are the mountain and the pansy.

Do we not see here the working of a Soul greater than that of any individual; the soul of the nation; the God that is this people or that? His compositions are marked by a unity, as are those of any composer: you can tell an Irish Air at a hearing, or a Welsh Air. And He, or It, reveals through them greater and deeper things than are known to any individual among his people; ancient memories that _they_ may have wholly forgotten; aspirations after spiritual glories which not one of them may have ever foreseen or hoped for. So all the deepest things that are in the national consciousness may be poured through the playing of these composerless compositions; and we cannot doubt that they remain a most potent link between the people and its hidden divinity.

LAPLAND: by P. F.

More than one-fourth of Sweden is occupied by that vast wilderness, Lapland. It is a remnant of archaic nature; its majestic snow-crowned peaks are all of the very oldest geological structure. In primeval times it was a compact mass of rock-ground; but time, with the aid of water and ice, has formed a network of valleys between the remaining ranges and peaks, and great lakes receive the melting snow and preserve its crystalline purity, mirroring the snow-capped giants; from them the water seeks its way to the sea by numerous mighty rivers, winding around the towering masses and making many a daring leap down gorges in foaming and roaring and whirling play.

It is a wilderness of singular beauty and serene atmosphere, and one who has once tasted of its life will ever thereafter feel the longing for its grandeur and silence; for where can man feel the pulse of real life better than in places like this where the eternal snow protects the original purity of Nature? It has been found that the farther north one passes, the more alive become the soil and rock, radiating life in such abundance that it can often be actually seen as a kind of electric discharge. In summer-time, there is no vegetation like that around and above the Polar Circle, no colors and fragrance of flowers like those to be found in the sanctuary of these remote valleys where human foot so seldom intrudes. And where can one witness such interplay between Earth and its outer atmospheric layers, manifesting in all the varied phenomena of northern lights and mystic, trembling color-screens? One could sometimes fancy himself in the very forecourt of a grander mode of existence.

H. P. Blavatsky tells us in _The Secret Doctrine_ that these mountain ranges were part of previous great continents occupied by earlier great races of humanity. What have they not witnessed? At one time in far-past aeons, enjoying a tropical climate, fertile soil, and a golden human life in all the bounteousness of Nature; at another, resting for ages below the water, or stripped of their luxuriant garb by a mighty ice-cover. Truly the history of it all is written somewhere and somehow even now; and as one treads the archaic rock-ground in a solitude that seems teeming with life, one begins to understand something of the language of the great silence around, and to feel the presence of the ancient past.

Since prehistoric times the Lapps, with their nomadic herds of reindeer, have been the warders of this pristine land. But like most ancient remnants of human races they are at present rapidly disappearing, and the "Sons of the Sun," as the Lapps call themselves, have had to give up much of their ground to the children of the present civilization. Lapland is entering upon a new era; railroads have already found their way across the wastes to bring its immense reserves of iron-ore out to the world; its waterfalls are being harnessed in the service of man; and its natural resources utilized in many novel ways. Though at the same latitude as southern Greenland, its climate is by no means so forbidding; it is, moreover, undergoing a slow but sure change which seems to be one of the causes why the reindeer are dying out. Evidently there are mighty forces at work, rendering hitherto shielded places on Earth accessible to our civilization as a preparation for a new phase of life awaiting all humankind.

CULTIVATING GENIUS FOR MUSIC: by E. A. Neresheimer

The natural gift for music which during recent years is so frequently found in very young children of all civilized nations, is a phenomenon that has given rise to much speculation on the part of active theorists. However, the "brain molecule" scientists have been significantly silent on that--to them--perplexing question, and so have the other doctors of learning who explain every human quality on a theory of "hereditary transmission." Nor does the "gift of God, or Holy Spirit" theory explain this wonderful but most natural manifestation of the progress of the human soul.

No theory will account for these and other gifts in children, that has not for its basis knowledge of the natural growth from one life to another--reincarnation.

When we reflect how diligently the smallest accomplishment must be earned before we can call it our own, and how delightfully secure we are in its possession when once we have attained to it, the question is then more like this: May it not be that a musical prodigy is after all _the Soul himself_ that has labored through many lives on earth with ceaseless diligence, following its aspirations and love for music, and is now earning the fruitage thereof?

Many people say: "Oh! I am so fond of music"; but they never go to a concert or to an opera; nor are they any more fond of music in reality than of hearing themselves talk, because the beginning of music is to them the sign to begin a conversation quickly. To the majority music scarcely yet exists.

There are some people who have a quiet love for music; they go unobtrusively to places where good music is made, listen with attention, and go home in a serene, satisfied mood. Such persons, from their youth on, embrace every opportunity to hear music in high and low places; they look longingly at the instruments displayed in music-stores and, perchance, in the hours that others devote to rest or folly, they plod away for years unaided, practising on some unsuitable instrument. No one pays particular attention to such a budding artist. Perhaps he himself is not aware that his judgment grows better, riper, keener; that the finer distinctions of music are becoming to him sharply defined and thus satisfactory to his consciousness; his ear, too, waxes critical at dissonances, and his very soul also delights in the musical gems, in the flowing rhythms and harmonies.

The long weary days that are drowned for the multitude in an ocean of sensation, do not exist for the person who is deeply, truly, interested in music. Such a one may not hear music for days or weeks, nor have any particular melody running through his brain; but in his sub-conscious mind there is such a reservoir of harmonies that flow and flow all the time, making him thoughtful, meditative, happy. He laughs or sighs like other people, but there is something besides, that shows in his countenance or manner, something that one instinctively feels is lofty; perhaps it is music running through his blood, singing all the while.