Bubbles of the Foam | Page 3

bubble of the foam, so beautiful in its play of colour, while it endures: so evanescent, so hollow, leaving behind it when it bursts and disappears nothing but a memory, and a bitter taste of brine? And as love is but a bubble, so are all its victims merely bubbles of a bubble: for this also is mirage.
[Footnote 3: I was sorely tempted to give it the title of Mere Foam: which, if the reader would kindly understand mere in its German, its Russian, its Latin, and its ordinary English sense, would be an exact translation. But it has an unfortunate suggestion (meerschaum) which made it impossible.]
Mirage! mirage! That is the keynote of the old melancholy Indian music; the bass, whose undertone accompanies, with a kind of monotonous solemnity, all the treble variations in the minor key. The world is unreal, a delusion and a snare; sense is deception, happiness a dream; nothing has true being, is absolute, but virtue, the sole reality; that which most emphatically IS,[4] attainable only through knowledge, the great illuminator, the awakener to the perception of the truth. We move, like marionettes, pulled by the strings of our forgotten antenatal deeds, in a magic cage, or Net, of false and hypocritical momentary seemings: and bitter disappointment is the inevitable doom of every soul, that with passion for its guide in the gloom, thinks to find in the shadows that surround it any substance, any solid satisfaction; any permanent in the mutable; any rest in the ceaseless revolution; any peace which the world cannot give. Who would have peace, must turn his back upon the world; it lies the Other Way. Three are the Ways: the Way of the World, the Way of Woman, the Way of Emancipation.
[Footnote 4: Sat. The thesis of Socrates, that virtue is knowledge: probably borrowed, by steps that we cannot trace, through Pythagoras or "Orpheus" from the East.]
Does anyone in Europe care about this last, this Way of Emancipation? No: it is Liberty that preoccupies the European, who about a century ago seemed, like the old Athenian, suddenly to catch sight of Liberty in a dream.[5] And yet, who knows? For Europe also is disappointed: there seems, after all, to be something lacking to this Liberty, something wrong. With her Utopias ending in blind alleys, or issues unforeseen: with her sages discovered to be less sages than they seemed: with her Science turning superstitious, her Literature wallowing in the gutter, and her women descending from the pedestal of sex to play the virago in the contamination of the crowd: with so many other things, not here to be considered, to raise a doubt, whether this Liberty is taking her just where she wished to go, what wonder if even Europe should begin to meditate on means of emancipation, even if only from vulgarity, and steal a furtive glance or two towards the East, to see, whether, by diligently raking in the ashes of ancient oriental creeds, she might not discover here and there a spark, at which to rekindle the expiring candle of her own. For there seems to be some curious indestructible asbestos, some element of perennial, imperturbable tranquillity and calm, away in India, which is conspicuous only by its absence, in the worry of the West. Where does it come from? What does it consist in? Is there a secret which India has discovered, which Europe cannot guess? Is there anything in it, after all, but barbaric superstition, destined to fade away and disappear, in the sunrise of omniscience?
[Footnote 5: [Greek: honar heleutherias horh?ntas. Plutarch.]]
I cannot tell: but well I recollect a fugitive impression left on me by an early morning in Benares, now many years ago. I threaded its extraordinary streets, narrower than the needle's eye, and crowded with strange, lithe, nearly naked human beings, with black, straight, long wet hair, and brown shining skins, jostled at every step by holy bulls or cows, roaming at their own sweet will with large placid lustrous eyes, in an atmosphere heavy with the half-delicious, half-repulsive odour of innumerable flowers, mostly yellow, that lay about everywhere in heaps, fresh and rotten, till I came out finally upon the river bank. A light steamy mist, converted by the low sun's horizontal rays into a kind of reddish-golden veil, hung in the quiet air, lending an almost magical effect to the long row of great temples, whose steps run down into the river, along the northern bank: half of them in ruins, and looking as if they must presently slide away into the water and disappear. And as I floated slowly down, I watched with curiosity, half wondering if I was dreaming, the throng of devotees, sitting, lying, gliding here and there, like an antique procession on an old Greek frieze or vase;