Chapter II: Part 2

“Perchance the future may reserve for me
A happiness whose hope I now resign:
Perchance amid the busy world may be
Some soul responsive still to mine.”

He was also a member of the Legation to England and afterward became Secretary to the French Embassy at Naples. In 1824 he was appointed Chargé d’Affaires to Tuscany, and remained in that position five years. He made the acquaintance of Louis Bonaparte, the former King of Holland, who was a scientist and philosopher rather than a statesman. Queen Hortense also attempted to have an interview with him, but this he carefully evaded. His mother, however, was a relative of the wife of Lucien Bonaparte and he met several members of that family under circumstances somewhat romantic. Pierre Bonaparte was with him at Paris in the Revolution of 1848.

His older uncle died in 1823, and he became heir of the estates. This uncle was known as M. de Lamartine de Monceau and was by seniority the head of the family. He had never married because his parents opposed the choice he had made. He was thrifty and had increased the value of his property. Lamartine now took his uncle’s designation.

The marriage of Lamartine took place during this period. The bride was Miss Marianne Birch, an English lady of beauty and fortune. She was of amiable disposition and Lamartine’s mother became warmly attached to her.

Neither the accession of wealth, his aristocratic rank, nor diplomatic engagements deterred him from literary composition. In 1823 the _Nouvelles Meditations_ were published, and two years later, _The Last Canto of Childe Harold_. Lamartine afterward described this latter work as a servile imitation in which his enthusiasm as a copyist and its success were alike “mediocre”—a punishment for feigning an admiration which was not altogether sincere. He had, likewise, another penalty to encounter. Two lines in it are versified in English as follows:

“I seek elsewhere (forgive, O Roman shade!)
For men, and not the dust of which they’re made.”

For this apparent slur he was involved in a controversy leading to a duel and dangerously wounded. At his solicitation to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, his antagonist, Colonel Pepé, was not prosecuted.

Louis XVIII. was succeeded in 1824 by the Count d’Artois as Charles X. The attempt was now made to reinstate the Government as it existed before the Revolution.

In 1829, at the instance of Chateaubriand, then a member of the Coalition Ministry, Lamartine was recalled. He never ascertained the reason, but attributed it to the influence of Madame Recamier, with whom Chateaubriand was intimate. That lady, however, took an early opportunity to set the matter right by visiting the mother and sisters of Lamartine and inviting him and them to a drawing-room entertainment.

The reactionist Ministry under M. de Polignac was formed in the autumn of that year. It was the final separation of the men of the former century from the men of the time. A portfolio was offered to Lamartine but declined. He was attached to the dynasty, but he had the prescience of its overthrow. “I had seen it coming from afar,” says he. “Nine months before the fatal day, the fall of the new monarchy had been written for me in the names of the men whom it had commissioned to carry it on.”

He was sent on a special mission to Prince Leopold, then Duke of Saxe-Cobourg, and afterward King of Greece;[5] and had received the appointment of ambassador to that country when the Revolution of July overthrew the dynasty. The ministry of Louis-Philippe then offered him his choice of the embassies to Vienna and London. The King visited him to solicit his acceptance, but he was inexorable. The title of Louis-Philippe was legally defective; he was not the next heir to the throne, and he had not been placed on it by the choice of the people of France. For these reasons it was important to him that the supporters of Charles X. should accept places under him and thus strengthen his pretensions. But says Lamartine: “One should not take part gratuitously in a fault which he did not himself commit.”

M. de St. Aulaire was at that time Minister at Vienna, but greatly desired to be transferred to England. He also waited upon Lamartine, anxious to find out which place he was going to accept. Lamartine quickly assured him.

“If,” said he, “I had the ambition to be ambassador to London, I would instantly sacrifice it without hesitation, in remembrance of the good offices which you did to me at the time of my entrance into the great world. But you can go to London without any indebtedness to me, except good will.”

The same year Lamartine was elected one of the “Immortals,” in the French Academy.

The same year he visited England. He there made the acquaintance of Talleyrand. The old statesman received him cordially, and in one interview predicted his career. Lamartine, he remarked, was reserving himself for something more sound and grand than the substituting of an uncle for a nephew upon a throne that had no stable foundation. “You will succeed in it,” he added. “Nature has made you a poet; poetry will make you an orator; tact and thinking will make you a statesman. I know men somewhat; I am eighty years old. I see farther than the objects in sight. You are to have a grand part to perform in the events which will succeed to the present state of affairs. I have witnessed the intrigues of Courts; you will see the movements of the people deceptive in other ways. Let verses go; you know that I adore yours. They are not for the age in which you are now living. Improve yourself in the grand eloquence of Athens and Rome. France will yet have scenes like those of Rome and Athens in her public places.”

From this period Lamartine spent much of his time abroad. He never forgot that he was a citizen of France, but he entertained a strong dislike for the Orleans dynasty. Yet his mother had been educated in the family with the King, and this somewhat increased his perplexity.

He writes of her death pathetically, as the saddest event of his life. He had been loved and cherished by her with a devotion made sublime by its absolute self-abnegation. His first lessons in books and knowledge had been given by her, and he was endowed personally with her most prominent characteristics. She had seemed to know instinctively when and why he suffered, and she possessed a power of divination to foresee his career. Her death, the result of a terrible accident, was to him like the rending violently away of a vital part of his body.

“I hardly thought that I could survive the shock,” he wrote in the _Souvenirs_. “I was absent from home when the accident occurred which cut short her days. I came back in haste, arriving in time to follow the coffin in which her remains were enshrouded, to the cemetery of the village where we had lived during our infancy.”

The weather was bitterly cold, but this he did not feel. He returned to the house at Milly, now empty for the winter and a thousand times more empty since she who had given it life and soul was sleeping the eternal sleep. Overcome by his grief, he made his way to the little room where the papers of the family were kept, and threw himself down on the floor. There he lay for hours in an ecstasy of woe. The moaning of the wind and the ticking of the clock seemed to be repeating the funeral hymn.

JOURNEY TO THE EAST.

One desire that the mother of Lamartine had instilled into him was that of visiting the East. As she read to him, a boy of eight years, from the Bible about the places where wonderful events had taken place, he resolved that he would some time behold them with his own eyes. Now that he was disengaged from public life there was an opportunity. There was much, however, to persuade him to remain at home; his father and sisters, and besides, he had a beautiful residence at Saint-Point with a wife and daughter to whom he was fondly attached. But he felt that imagination had likewise its necessities and passions.

“I was born a poet,” he pleads. “When young, I had heard the word of Nature, the speech which is formed of images and not of sounds. I had even translated into written language some of those accents that had stirred me, and that had in their turn stirred other souls. But these accents did not now satisfy me.”

“Besides, I was, I had almost always been, a Christian in heart and in imagination; my mother had made me such.” This pilgrimage though not as of the Christian, at least of the man and the poet, would delight her in the celestial abode where he saw her, and she would be to them as a second Providence between them and dangers.

His duty to his country was likewise considered. He had sacrificed to it this dream of his for sixteen years. There was need for heaven to raise up new men; the present politics made man ashamed and angels weep. “Destiny gives an hour in a century for humanity to be regenerated; that hour is a revolution; and men let it pass to tear one another to pieces: thus they give to revenge the hour given by God for their regeneration and progress.”

All was duly made ready for the journey. He set sail from Marseilles, in the brig _Alceste_, on the eleventh of July, 1832, expecting to be absent two years. His wife and daughter and three friends, one of them a physician, composed the party. The voyage was full of incident, and his journal abounds with adventures and predictions. Lamartine was what imaginative persons term a visionary. He was really oriental and tropical in temperament, and ready to catch the spirit of the region to which he was sailing; for Syria, Arabia and Palestine have always been renowned for mystics, seers and prophets.

As the vessel passed the coast of Tunis, he wrote his impressions. He had never loved the Romans nor taken the least interest in behalf of Carthage; but he sympathized with Hannibal. “I love or I abhor, in the physical sense of the word,” says he. “At first sight, in the twinkling of an eye, I have formed my judgment of a man or woman for always.” He adds that “this is the characteristic of individuals with whom instinct is quick, active, instantaneous, inflexible. What, it will be asked, what is instinct? It is to be cognized as the highest reason—the innate reason, the reason that does not argue, the reason such as God has made and not what man finds out. It strikes us like the lightning without which the eye would have difficulty of searching it out. It illuminates everything at the first flash. The inspiration in all the arts, as upon the field of battle, is as this instinct, this reason that divines. Genius also is instinct and not logic and labor.”

Nevertheless he sets aside much that is often regarded as original, or inspired. This utterance is fit for the book of _Ecclesiastes_: “There is nothing new in nature and in the arts. Everything that is now being done has been done before; everything that is said has been said already; everything that is thought has been thought. Every century is the plagiarist of another century; for all that we are so much, artists or thinkers, perishable or fugitive, we copy in different ways from one immutable and eternal model,—nature, the thought, one and diverse, of the Creator.”

He had little to say in favor of the Greeks. “For me,” says he, “Greece is like a book the beauties of which are tarnished, because we have been made to read it before we were able to understand it. Nevertheless, the enchantment is not off from everything. There is still an echo of all those great names remaining in my heart. Something holy, sweet, fragrant, mounts up with the horizons in my soul. I thank God for having seen, while passing by this land, the country of the Doers of Great Deeds, as Epaminondas called his fatherland.”

He felt keenly a sense of isolation that he had no one to participate in these sentiments. “Always,” says he, “when a strong impression stirs my soul I feel the necessity to speak or to write to some one of what I am experiencing, to find in some degree a joy from my joy, an echoing of that which has impressed me. Isolated feeling is not complete: man has been created double. Ah! when I look around me, there is yet a void. Julia and Marianne fill everything for themselves alone; but Julia is still so young that I tell her only what is suited to her age. It is all future; it will soon be all present for us; but the past, where is it now?

“The person who would have most enjoyed my happiness at this moment, is my Mother. In everything that happened to me, pleasant or sad, my thought turns involuntarily to her. I believe I see her, hear her, talk to her, write to her. One who is remembered so much is not absent; whoever lives so completely, so powerfully in ourselves is not dead for us.”

“Empty dream! She is there no more; she is dwelling in the world of realities; our vagrant dreams are no more anything to her; but her spirit is with us, it visits us, it follows with us, it protects us: _our conversation is with her in the eternal regions_.”

He goes on to describe his condition.

“Before I had reached the age of maturity I had lost the greater part of those here below whom I most loved, or who most loved me. My love-life had become concentrated; my heart had only a few other hearts to take voyage with. My memory had little more than graves where it might rest here in the earth; I lived more with the dead than with the living. If God were to strike two or three of his blows around me, I feel that I would be detached entirely by myself, for I would contemplate myself no more. I would love myself only in the others; and it is only there that I can love.”

“One begins to feel the emptiness of existence from the day when he is no more necessary to anybody, from the hour when he can no more be dearly loved. The sole reality here below, I have always felt, is love, love under all its forms.”

“To us poets, beauty is evident and perceptible; we are not beings of abstraction, but men of nature and instinct; so I have travelled many times through Rome; so I have visited the seas and the mountains; so I have read the sages, the historians and the poets; so have I visited Athens.”

On the fifth of September the brig arrived at Bayreuth. Lamartine engaged a house for the season and established his family there while he travelled over the country. He had for a long time entertained grave doubts of his daughter’s health, and had brought her with him in the hope that a residence in Syria would restore her.

Ibrahim Pacha was at this time making his conquests, and at his orders, the French travellers were everywhere received with courtesy and the most generous hospitality.

The heat was too great for setting out at once, so Lamartine addressed a letter to Lady Hester Stanhope, asking permission to visit her. This lady had been the confidential secretary of her uncle, William Pitt, the famous minister, and was supposed to be betrothed to Sir John Moore. After their deaths she left Europe and made her home in the East. She had gained a certain authority over many of the Arabian chiefs who venerated her as an inspired person. She received Lamartine cordially, saying that their stars were friendly and in concurrence. He declined her offer to cast his horoscope or to have any discussion on matters of religion. “God alone possesses the truth,” said he, “we have only faith.”

“Believe what you please,” said she. “You are one of those men nevertheless that I expected, whom Providence has sent to me, and who have a grand part to perform in the work which is preparing. You will shortly go back to Europe; Europe is finished. France alone has as yet a grand mission to fulfill, and you will participate in it, I know not how.”

She added that he had four or five stars, and explained further: “You ought to be a poet; that is legible in your eyes and the upper part of your countenance. Lower down you are under the influence of different stars that are almost in opposition; there is an influence of energy and activity.”

She asked his name; she had never heard it before. She predicted that he would soon return to Europe, but would come back to the East, insisting that it was his fatherland. He acknowledged that it was the fatherland of his imagination.

Lamartine and his friends were hospitably entertained but she would not regard his departure as being more than for a season.

Forming a caravan at Bayreuth he set out on the eighth of October. At Jaffa or “Yaffa,” the governor had received letters from Mehemet Ali and Ibrahim Pacha, then masters in the East, commanding all the officials to aid him in his journey, to furnish escorts, and to supply him with every convenience that he required. When the caravan reached the “village of Jeremiah” it was met by Abu Gosh, the brigand chief. He demanded of Lamartine whether he was the Frank Emir, whom his friend, Lady Stanhope, the Queen of Palmyra, had placed under his protection, and in whose name had sent him the magnificent garment of cloth of gold in which he was then arrayed. Lamartine knew nothing of the gift but assured the chief that he was the man.

Abu Gosh at that time had the whole region of Southern Palestine in subjection clear to Jericho. He now provided a strong guard for the caravan.

Lamartine found no difficulty in identifying the places around Jerusalem. “Almost never,” says he, “did I encounter a place or object the first sight of which was not to me as what I remembered. Have we lived twice or a thousand times? Is our memory simply an impression that has been obscured, which the breath of God brings out again vividly? Or have we a faculty in our imagination to anticipate and perceive in advance before we actually do behold?”

The monks of the Convent of St. John the Baptist, in the wilderness of that name, received the travellers with sincere cordiality. Lamartine left there a part of his caravan, going on only with the Arabian and Egyptian guard. They confined their movements to visiting places in the suburbs, made historic by traditions of the New Testament.

He pays a deserved tribute to the Turks for their management of the “Holy Sepulchre.” Instead of destroying it, they had preserved everything, maintaining strict police regulations, and a silent reverence for the place which the Christians were far from manifesting. While the intolerance of the various sects would lead the triumphant party to exclude its rivals from the place, the Turks are impartial to them all.

The Mussulmans are the only tolerant people, he stoutly affirms. Let Christians ask what they would have done if the fortunes of war had delivered to them the City of Mecca and the Kaaba.

On the thirtieth of October, the caravan set out for the river Jordan and the Dead Sea. On returning to the neighborhood of Jerusalem, Lamartine received a letter from his wife that determined him to forego the extending of his journey into Egypt. He went back to Bayreuth, arriving the fifth of November.

Autumn in that country has the warmth, the renewing of vegetation and other conditions, like spring in the northerly climates of the temperate zone. Lamartine had purchased Arab horses of superb quality while in Palestine, and one for his daughter. It was at the end of November that he took her out for her first excursion with the animal. The air was exhilarating and the mountain scenery in its most attractive guise. In an ecstasy of excitement the young girl declared it the longest, most beautiful, most delightful ride that she had ever taken.

It was also the last. On the second of December she was taken suddenly ill and died the next day. The parents were overwhelmed with grief. The last hope of their house was thus cut off in the glad days of adolescence.

They remained at Bayreuth through the winter. On the fifteenth of April they set out for their return homeward and sailed for Constantinople.

Lamartine interspersed his narrative of this voyage with reflections upon what he observed and meditated. “I would like to sail all the while,” says he, “to have a voyage with its chances and distractions. But what I read in my wife’s eyes goes deep into my heart.[6] The suffering of a man is nothing like that of a woman, a mother. A woman lives and dies in one sole thought, or one solitary feeling. Life for a woman is a something possessed; death, a something lost. A man lives with everything that he has to do with, good or bad; God does not kill him with a blow.”

On the subject of travelling and sojourning abroad, he speaks philosophically:

“When a man is absent from his country, he sees affairs more perfectly. Details do not obstruct his view, and important matters present themselves in their entireness. This is the reason why prophets and oracles lived alone in the world and remote. They were sages who studied subjects in their entirety and their judgment was not warped by the little passions of the day. The statesman, likewise, if he would judge and foresee the outcome, must often absent himself from the scene in which he performs the Drama of his time. To predict is impossible, for foreknowledge is for God alone; but to foresee is possible, and forethought is for man.”

Lamartine analyzes closely the doctrines of Saint-Simonism, and what he considers their weak points. “We must not,” he says, “judge new ideas by the derision which they encounter during the period. All great thoughts were first received in the world as aliens. Saint-Simonism has in it a something true, grand and beautiful; the application of Christianity to civil society, the legislation of Human Brotherhood.

“From this point of view I am a Saint-Simonian.

“What has placed this Society under an eclipse, though not under death, is not the want of an idea, nor the lack of disciples. In my opinion it wants a leader, a master, a manager. If there should be found a man of genius and virtue who was religious and at the same time prudent, who would bring the two horizons into one field of vision which should be placed under the direction of the nascent ideas, I have no doubt that he would transform it into a potent reality. Times in which there is an anarchy of ideas, are favorable seasons for the germinating of new and heroic thoughts.

“Society, to the eye of the philosopher, is in a state of disorder. It has neither direction, object nor leader; and it is reduced accordingly to the instinct of conservatism. A sect that is religious, moral, social and political,—that has a creed, a watchword, an object, a leader, and mind, if it were to advance compactly and directly at the midst of the disordered ranks in the present social order, would inevitably gain the victory. But it must bring safety and not ruin, attacking only what is injurious and not that which helps, and calling religion back to reason and love, prudence and Christian Brotherhood, having universal charity and usefulness as its only title and only foundation.

“A law-maker requires young men ardent in zeal and on fire with the hunger for faith, from which however, senseless dogmas have been rejected. The organizers of Saint-Simonism have taken for their first article of belief: war to the death between the family, property and religion on one hand and ourselves on the other. They ought to perish. The world, by the force of speech is not conquered; it is to be converted, stirred, wrought into activity, changed.

“So long as an idea is not practical, it is not presentable to the world of society. Human nature goes from the known to the unknown, but not from the known to the absurd. That will be held back in the subordinate effort. Before great revolutions, the signs are to be seen on the earth and in the sky. The Saint-Simonians have had one class of those signs: they have broken up as a body, and they are now more slowly at work making leaders and soldiers for the new army.”

The vessel and its convoy arrived in the Bosphorus on the twenty-fifth day of May. Lamartine, his wife and friends now took up their residence at Buyukdéré, for the next two months. During this period they were recipients of the most friendly attentions. The Grand Seigneur himself, and the principal officials at Constantinople extended courtesies and cordial demonstrations, exceeding any that had ever before been bestowed to “Franks.” This was in recognition of the substantial help which had been given to prevent the further dismemberment of the Ottoman empire. Lamartine had been heralded everywhere as a personage of distinction, and his reception was warm and cordial, almost as if he had been a royal prince. His opinions were treasured, and his advice eagerly sought by the ministers and representatives of the Government. He was admitted to places from which other Europeans had been excluded, and so long as he remained in Turkish territory, every necessary provision was made for his safety and honorable recognition.

His journal of the voyage records minutely the occurrences and observations which thus came within his notice.

Footnote 2:

Talleyrand did not know Lamartine at this period. When some of his
verses were recited to Lamennais he sprang from his chair, exclaiming,
“Eureka! we have found a poet!”

Footnote 3:

Edward Gibbon, the historian, who had known Lamartine’s mother in her
girlhood, spent a year at a house near her residence. He greatly
admired the child Alphonse and predicted his future career.

Footnote 4:

The concièrges and porters at the large mansions in France were
allowed to keep a lottery. A _quine_ consisted of five prizes.

Footnote 5:

Leopold declined the crown of Greece and became the King of Belgium.

Footnote 6:

The body of the daughter, at her dying request, had been embalmed and
sent directly home for interment at Saint Point. The mother was in
many respects like her husband’s mother, a devoted wife and indulgent
parent, as well as the kindest of neighbors.

* * * * *

“Whoso takes good advice is secure from falling; but whoso rejects it, falleth into the pit of his own conceit.”

_Gems from the East._

PASSAGE TO INDIA.
(Extracts Selected.)
WALT WHITMAN.

(Curious in time I stand, noting the efforts of heroes,
Is the deferment long? bitter the slander, poverty, death?
Lies the seed unreck’d for centuries in the ground? lo, to God’s due
occasion,
Uprising in the night, it sprouts, blooms,
And fills the earth with use and beauty.)

O Thou transcendent,
Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them,
Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving,
Thou moral spiritual fountain—affection’s source—thou reservoir,
(O pensive soul of me—O thirst unsatisfied—waitest not there?
Waitest not haply for us somewhere there the Comrade perfect?)
Thou pulse—thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,
That circling, move in order, safe, harmonious,
Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space,
How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if, out
of myself
I could not launch, to those, superior universes?

Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,
But that I, turning, call to thee O soul, thou actual Me,
And lo, thou gently mastereth the orbs,
Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space.
Greater than stars or suns,
Bounding O soul thou journeyest forth;
What love than thine and ours could wider amplify?
What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours O soul?
What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection,
strength?
What cheerful willingness for others’ sake to give up all?
For others’ sake to suffer all?

Reckoning ahead O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d,
The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,
Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,
As filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

Passage to more than India!
O secret of the earth and sky!
Of you O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!
Of you O woods and fields! of you strong mountains of my land!
Of you O prairies! of you gray rocks!
O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!
O day and night, passage to you!

O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!
Passage to you!

Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!
Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!
Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?
Have we not grovel’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere
brutes?
Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?

Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

O my brave soul!
O farther, farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!

To determine the real relations that exist between man and God is my thought. It is the need of the times. We need to convince ourselves that man is the object of all earthy resources if we ask ourselves if he is a means to an end. If man is linked to all, is there nothing above him to which, in his turn, he is bound? If he is the last of the unexplained transformations which reach up to him, may he not be the tie between visible and invisible nature? The action of the world is not an absurdity; it leads up to an end, and this object cannot be society constituted as ours is. There is a terrible gap between us and the heavens.

In reality, we cannot ever enjoy or always suffer. To gain either paradise or hell an enormous change must take place in us; without either place, the masses can conceive no idea of God at all.

Is not the idea of motion stamped on the systems of worlds, sufficient to prove God to us? We busy ourselves very little about the pretended nothingness which precedes birth while we fumble in and ransack the dark gulf that awaits us, that is, we make God responsible for our future and we demand from him, no record of the past. To get out of this difficulty the soul has been invented, but it is repugnant to our feelings to render God obligated for human baseness, our disillusions, our decline and fall. How can we admit in ourselves a divine principle over which a potent liquor can get the advantage?

Can we imagine immaterial faculties which matter may utterly subjugate whose exercise a grain of opium can prevent? Is not the communication of motion to matter an unexplored abyss whose difficulties have been rather displaced than resolved by Newton’s system? Motion is a _great soul_ whose alliance with matter is quite as difficult to explain as is the production of thought in man.—BALZAC, _Louis Lambert_. (Translated by Harriett Green Courtis.)

THE HUMAN CELL.
BY ARTHUR A. BEALE, M. B.

“To demonstrate that Brotherhood is a fact in Nature; to investigate the laws of Nature and the divine powers in Man.”

When we fall away from the path of duty, when torn by the storms of passion we forget that there reposes within the complexities of our nature a divine spark—much more, perhaps, that we ourselves are a universe, nay, a universe of Universes, a Great Eternal God, controlling, energizing and creating worlds that live and have their day and cease to be. But it is so. Hour by hour worlds are falling away and with them ebb the vital forces of our being. Take a flake of scurf from the head and put it under the microscope,—a new vista is opened up. And yet, this is only a type of millions of like or dissimilar entities, which are so bound together as to compose the mighty universe of man’s body,—the least important of his constitution. These little lives take different shapes to suit different necessities, but they agree in certain essential features which we learn to call _the cell_. And looking lower still this cell is of the same type as those found in the animals and again in the plants. How very little difference, too, between these and the monads of the mineral kingdom!

But keeping to man, these cells form themselves into societies, which we call tissues, these into others we call organs, and the organs form together a corporate organization, the body, which in a healthy state is subservient to the synthesizing forces emanating from the Heart, where lives the source of life, the divine Ruler. So the organs work together in harmony. If any organ begins to absorb more attention and life than is due to it, not only does it suffer itself, but brings discord into the whole.

But as long as it observes its own duty and fulfils its place, so does it maintain its own status, and receive its own benefits; for thus, and thus alone, can it participate in the higher impulse, that comes from that sacred centre.

As of the organs so of the cells of which each is composed, they must act in accordance with the unified impulse of the organ, but so must each cell be true to the heart of its own tiny body—whence, as I shall try to show, comes the true impulse, by which it evolves,—that centre where are played the divine harmonies and where stands the God directing his forces in the building of “the temple not made with hands.”

This is a Universal Activity. It is the same process going on through all the kingdoms of the Universe, from the tiny crystals to plants, from plants to animals, and animals to man.

But specializing the cell we note not only that all the body is composed of cells or the deposit of cells, but that one type of cells develops from another type, and ultimately all cells result from one single cell “into which,” in the words of Darwin, “life was breathed by the Creator”—of course always understanding that we have not specified the nature of the Creator.

If this is so, and no one in these times will dare to dispute it, it begins to dawn upon us that this curious complex body of man is, as it were, a tremendous society of entities, the separate individualities of which, whilst retaining their place as such in the great body, are swamped in the individuality of that one. Not only so, but as it will be our endeavor to show later on, the healthy existence of each part greatly depends on its maintaining its loyalty and subservience to the supreme Chief, from which it gets its daily source of energy and inspiration.

What is true of the part is true of the whole and _vice versa_. For in its turn the body of man must be subservient to that of which it is a part, and answer to the call of that which represents the corporate body of bodies, and to the divine light within, “that lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” which is one with the Father, the Divine over soul, of which we are all dim reflections. So also of the part, the tiny microcosm of man, the cell, it is in its turn a universe, a universe so grand that the many revelations that scientific investigation has unveiled makes that science stand aghast; but these, we may venture to prophesy, are nothing to the occult secrets that still lie waiting for revelation.

All that the magnificent symbolism of the Gnostics has taught us concerning The Man Iesous and his relation to Ichthys the fish, the ark and the ship, can be well applied to the _cell_, which is a veritable Ark with its Holy of holies in which sit and meditate the holy ones, the _prajapati_ of the Hindus and the Christos of the Gnostics. Veritably it is _par excellence_ the Astral Vehicle, the ship floating on the watery ocean, veritably it is the Dagon, the fish-man, the new teacher coming from the unknown regions of the Silence, the boat of Vishnu carrying the God-Man into the world of Manifestation. We may well exclaim: O God, how manifest are thy works! how sublime are thy powers! And when we contemplate the tiny vehicle of life under the microscope we may well close-to the doors of the senses, take off the sandals and worship, for are we not at the very altar of the Temple—the temple of the Almighty; are we not face to face with the Creators? He that hath eyes to see let him see!

Amongst the great contributors to the Science of the Cell perhaps none has approached nearer the Holy of Holies—none so nearly tore aside the Veil of Isis, as H. P. B. has practically told us, than Professor Weissmann in his contribution on the Germ Plasm and the New Problem of Heredity as handled by him. Under the guiding hand of this savant we see the cell in a new light, we begin to see kingdom within kingdom; and had he but recognized the other side, had he but explored the dark side of the Moon, much more might have been written, many more mouths might have gaped and many more sceptics have smiled. Professor Weissmann however has found a mare’s nest. He has raised the devil, but forgotten to give him something to do, and as of old we cannot help exclaiming, what next! The cell of Weissmann like the cell of most other students, is a tiny ball of protoplasm with a central nucleus (the Holy of Holies, Fish Man, etc.) but unlike that of other writers, instead of containing more differentiated protoplasm, taking the forms of meaningless and accidental rods, our revered professor has discovered a Nest of Creators. He tells us that the greater portion of the cell does not in any way participate in the process of hereditary transmission. Nay, further still, not only does he regard the nucleus as the all important particle but to quote his own words: “The law that only a certain part of the nuclear matter is to be regarded as the hereditary substance appears to me to receive fresh support from all the more recent observations.”

Now the parts referred to are a series of minute rod-like structures called _chromatin rods_ that are very active and manifest all kinds of changes according to necessity, especially at that critical period in the history of a cell called cell-division, when it is about to propagate its species by _making itself_ into two by equal distributions of its substance between its two selves. For you must know that when a cell divides (and this does not refer to human cells alone, but all vegetable and animal cells from the simplest to the most complex) the products are two so-called “daughter cells,” but they are daughters without a mother. It is one of the most mystical processes in existence and contains much secret knowledge for it contains the mystery of the birth of two from one. In this process, called in scientific parlance _Karyokinesis_, these little rods play a most important part, nay, the _all-important_ part, for the whole process commences with them and proceeds from the centre outward. There is at the commencement of the process a disturbance, a series of vibrations throughout the nucleus. These little rods immediately form into a kind of reticulum or network; then this network arranges itself into an indefinite spiral, at which instant two mysterious bodies issue from the mass at opposite poles, and take up a position in the cell, at some distance from the coil of rods; then the spiral breaks up into two opposing sets of loops.

Ultimately these two sets of rods settle down in the neighborhood of the two little bodies (_centrosomes_) shot out, or, I should perhaps say, are attracted separately to the two poles of the cell by the _centrosomes_. Then a cell wall forms between; the one cell becomes two.

There are some very occult forces at work behind all this, and they generally are referred to, to cover our ignorance, as the law of polarity, albeit that this law, whatever it is, involves the most occult of the creative forces, in fact of all manifestation.

To go back, Dr. Weissmann does not consider these rods which he calls _idants_ as the essential units, but states that in their turn these are themselves composed of more minute bodies he calls _ids_.

In this respect, however, he considers protoplasm as a whole as composed, not of so many chemical compounds, having an indefinite and uncontrollable action on one another, but of collections of “molecules united into a single group.” These molecules he calls _biophors_. The biophors, as bearers of vitality, possess the power of growth and of multiplication by fission. But the biophors which go to make up the rods, have a more specific character of their own, and are the carriers of those minuter bodies still which this savant speaks of as the real creative units, or what he calls “_determinants_.” These ultimate determinants, smaller than microscopic, hold within their tiny hearts the ideal shape of the part which they are destined to control, carried and distributed in the process of evolution of the creature by the process of cell division.

This conception, enormous advance as it is on the previous materialism of Huxley’s protoplasm, is yet so pregnant with the taint of the materialistic age, that it requires modifying before it can even be admitted as a logical hypothesis. For one must ask; if the cell gets its impulse from the nucleus, the nucleus from the rods that inhabit it, these rods from the little biophors of which they are composed, and these from the determinants, where on earth do the determinants get it from? We are reminded, moreover, that there was a time, not far away, when this particular cell had no separate existence of its own. And if we are directed back to the ovaries, and from them to the germinal layer, and this from the cell again, still there is no escape, for we may well ask with the Duke of Argyle: “What then! Whence the first?”

But the thing has a more definite and easy solution, for if these material units are the Creators, and if as it is stated, the ingredients of matter, especially sentient matter (so-called) are constantly undergoing motion and change, by displacement; what about these units when the time comes for them to play their part, has not their substance been lost and replaced over and over again.

So we come back to our philosophy and we realize what our Chief, W. Q. Judge, taught us, that the cell only has an existence as an _idea_. Thinking of this word for a moment, looking it up in the dictionary we find the following _verbatim_ (Gr. idea, from _idein_, to see) “one of the archetypes or patterns of Created things, conceived by the Platonists to have existed from eternity in the mind of the Deity.”[7] Now look at the words used by Dr. Weissmann, _idants_ and _ids_. Is there not something very suggestive here. We are then dealing not with matter alone, but with ideas; nay, more, what is matter but an idea or congeries of ideas? For as has been well said we know nothing of matter _per se_ but only the manifestation of matter. It is the idea not the matter that takes form. Now we must surely recognize that ideas as _things_ are not causes but effects. So our professor all this time has been dealing with effects and gets these mixed up with the causes. If cells and the contents are ideas containing ideas, and if idea means that which is seen, then there must somewhere be a Seer, and such a seer without any sophistry must be a magician—not because we associate the word Seer with magician, but quite independently.

Now we have realized that the body of man is composed of many minuter entities, over which stands the supreme ruler. Each organ is composed of many entities, over which rules the conscious governor of that organ, and so on to the little cells which in their turn are composed of minuter creatures each having a conscious existence of its own, whilst that Consciousness is composed of the consciousness of all its component lives. That consciousness is in each case part of the Divine consciousness that pervades all things and acts in direct proportion to its plane of activity.

This Divine Consciousness in man which is the real man—real in the sense of permanency—is quite on a par with the Creators, though that real self is perhaps not known to any of our personal selves. But then stands that real Self at the commencement of each New Birth. As the process of evolution goes on each step in the meditation of this mighty Self as he contemplates existence, finds a responsive thrill in the tiny ovum, bound to himself by the strong bonds of Karma. As he emerges in contemplation from the mineral to the vegetable and on to the animal, so the sensitive plasm of the germ responds. Page after page of the history of man is retold till once more the story is complete to the point where the previous incarnation ended; then the child is born to carry on the history as best he may.

So in the cell the determinants are the little bundles of ideas coming from the Magician (ourselves) and being instilled bit by bit into the heart of each of those groups of molecules and ensouling it, so the tale is told and this side of manifestation opens out into the beautiful blossom of Humanity, moulded also in part by the parental influences which can make or mar the impulse as it comes straight from the Creator’s mind. Make or mar, and yet how few women think of the real, sacred and holy duty of parentage. How hellish the times in which any dares to point the finger of scorn and shame at a blessed pregnant woman. But as we are beginning to understand, soon shall we be able to reverence them all as the sacredness of motherhood is understood.

This little picture contains the whole of our philosophy, and it must be left more or less to the intuitions of each. But in closing we can say this much. The study of the cell teaches that Brotherhood is a fact in nature. It teaches that that brotherhood depends on the harmonious coördinate activity of many entities, working together united by the recognition of the one source of life and inspiration. It also teaches the great Divine mystery that hangs about every new birth, and that the real seat of that Divinity is in the Hearts of all Creatures.

There is one more lesson that we ought not to miss. We have seen the magnificent results of harmonious action which is always synthetical and finds its highest expression in Love and Compassion issuing from the heart.

Sometimes the same force becomes converted into Hate, when once the centrifugal disintegrating force is set going and gains the ascendancy, selfish in nature, self-centred, it cuts away the bonds that bind man to his fellows; he tries, but in vain, to carry on an existence of his own, but he soon finds that he has no existence, no meaning, no life apart from the whole. The foolish virgins repent too late, their light has gone out, they have no oil of life with which to kindle their lamps anew. In their own blind conceit they are lost. Nay, but look! Have not some demons, spooks and malignant fiends got hold of them and, having gained an entrance, are now without their consent messengers of Disease and Death. Is this not so of the cells? Some little impulse causes them to pursue a course contrary to the interests of the whole; for a time they are centres of discord; and neuralgia, rheumatism, indigestion, etc., are the result. But anon the cells fall away and, as entities, die. The smaller containing entities, the Chromatin rods, little pregnant particles of life are set free. Losing their parental protection and cares, they go on with the impulse given them, till some malignant breeze sweeps over them and they become the victims and servants of hate, disease and Death. Are these not the germs of disease that science is fighting about just now? Verily! verily! who shall deny? These little escaped convicts, the rods, previously servants of Love, become now the free agents of disease. They are none other than the bacilli, associated with so many pestilences; and a further disintegration produces spores—the ingredients of bacilli. These are not the diseases, nor yet the cause (primary), they are merely the vehicles of disease. Can we not see how well this applies to every organism and organization as an entity? Poor lost bacilli, how hardly have ye been used by your masters!

Footnote 7:

_The Library Dictionary._

* * * * *

“He who does not recognize bread and salt is worse than a wild wolf.”

_Gems from the East._

THE SOKRATIC CLUB.
By SOLON.
(_Continued._)

So much interest had been aroused by the conversation on Art and the Drama as an Educative Factor which I have already recorded, that there was a larger attendance than usual at the next meeting of the Club. Everyone was glad to see Madam Purple who it was known to all had established a school to revive the ancient wisdom and to teach the laws of physical, moral and mental health and of spiritual development and for the purpose of accentuating the importance of Music and Drama as vital educative factors had already reproduced one of the old Greek Tragedies in such a way as to arouse the attention of the public and astonish the critics, touching a new chord and awakening new possibilities for the influence of the stage on the lives and characters of the people.

Dr. Roberts had evidently not yet been convinced of the importance of this work though he had seen and even praised the production of Æschylus’ Eumenides, for he still reiterated his old objections. The discussion so far had been on general lines, but now it turned more particularly on the Drama.

_Dr. Roberts._—“I cannot see how the performance of Eumenides or any play you may take from the ancients can have any such effect that you claim it will have. The people who attend will see no more in it than in any other play. Of course it will have its own characteristics and no doubt its classical beauty, but will not these peculiar features appeal only to the very few? How will you make it a factor in the education of the masses?”

_The Professor._—“I do not think you understand the real character of the ancient drama, Doctor. Probably, also with the exception of the recent production, you base your ideas of the attractiveness of Greek Plays upon the presentations which are occasionally given at one of the Universities. Classical these may be in a sense, I admit, but certainly they are severe.”

_Dr. Roberts._—“How can they help but be severe. I remember when at college that one of these plays was acted by some of the students, but for my part I saw nothing particular in it.”

_Mme. Purple._-“Was not that possibly because those who produced the play and enacted the parts, themselves saw nothing in it beyond the mere incident as told in so many words?