Memoirs of My Dead Life | Page 8

himself--the conversion of the Yogi. It is amusing for a moment to imagine these two Western barbarians sitting with the emaciated saint on the ledge in front of the cave. Thinking to win his sympathy, they tell him that on one point they are all agreed. The Brahman's eyes would dilate; how can this thing be? his eyes would seem to ask, and it is easy to imagine how contemptuously he would raise his eyes when he gathered gradually from their discourse that his visitors believed that chastity was incumbent upon all men. "But all men are not the same," he would answer, if he answered his visitors; "I dwell in solitude and in silence, and am chaste, and live upon the rice that the pious leave on the rocks for me, but I do not regard chastity and abstinence as possessed of any inherent merits; as virtues, they are but a means to an end. How would you impose chastity upon all men, since every man brings a different idea into the world with him? There are men who would die if forced to live chaste lives, and there are men who would choose death rather than live unchaste, and many a woman if she were forced to live with one husband would make him very unhappy, whereas if she lived with two men she would make them both supremely happy. But the news has reached me even here that in the West you seek a moral standard, and this quest always fills me with wonder. There are priests among you, I can see that, and soldiers, and fishermen, and artists and princes and folk who labor in the fields--now do you expect all these men, living in different conditions of life, to live under the same rule? I am afraid that the East and the West will never understand each other. The sun is setting, my time for speech is over," and the wise man, rising from the stone on which he has been sitting, enters into the cave, leaving the priest and the parson to descend the rocks together in the twilight, their differences hushed for the moment, to break forth again the next day.
Schopenhauer has a fine phrase, one that has haunted my mind these many years, that the follies of the West flatten against the sublime wisdom of the East like bullets fired against a cliff.
How can it be otherwise? For when we were naked savages the Brahmans were learned philosophers, and had seen as far into every mystery as mortal eyes will ever see. We have progressed a little lately; our universities, it is true, are a few hundred years old, but in comparison with the East we are still savages; our culture is but rudimentary, and my correspondent's letter is proof of it. It is characteristic of the ideas that still flourish on the banks of the Thames, ideas that have changed only a little since the Mayflower sailed. It would have been better if Columbus had delayed his discovery for, let us say, a thousand years. I am afraid the Mayflower carried over a great many intellectual weeds which have caught root and flourished exceedingly in your States--Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington. A letter arrived from Washington some two or three months ago. The writer was a lady who used to write to me on all subjects under the sun; about fifteen years ago we had ceased to write to each other, so she began her letter, not unnaturally, by speaking of the surprise she guessed her handwriting would cause me. She had broken the long silence, for she had been reading "The Lake," and had been much interested in the book. It would have been impolite to write to me without alluding to the aesthetic pleasure the book had given her, but her interest was mainly a religious one. About five years ago she had become a Roman Catholic, she was writing a book on the subject of her conversion, and would like to find out from me why I had made Father Gogarty's conversion turn upon his love of woman, "for it seems to me clear, unless I have misunderstood your book, that you intended to represent Gogarty as an intellectual man." It is difficult to trace one's motives back, but I remember the irritation her letter caused me, and how I felt it would not be dignified for me to explain; my book was there for her to interpret or misinterpret, as she pleased; added to which her "conversion" to Rome was an annoying piece of news. Fifteen years ago she was an intelligent woman and a beautiful woman, if photographs do not lie, and it was disagreeable for me to think of her going on her knees in a