The Crest-Wave of Evolution | Page 5

leads? Supposing the
note China is struck in the Far Eastern Octave; would there not be a
vibration of some corresponding note in the octave Europe? Supposing
the Octave West Asia were under the fingers of the Great Player, would
not the corresponding note in Europe vibrate?
Now let us look at history. Right on the eastern rim of the Old World is
the Chino-Japanese field of civilization. It has been, until lately, under
pralaya, in a night or inactive period of its existence, for something
over six centuries: a beautiful pralaya in the case of Japan; a rather ugly
one, recently, in the case of China. Right on the western rim of the Old
World are the remnants of the once great Celtic people. Europe at large
has been very much in manvantara, a day or waking period, for a little
over six hundred years. Yet of the four racial roots or stocks of Europe,
the Greco-Latin, Teutonic, Slavic, and Celtic, the last-named alone has
been under pralaya, sound asleep, during the whole of this time. Let me
interject here the warning that it is no complete scheme that is to be

offered; only a few facts that suggest that such a scheme may exist,
could we find it. Before Europe awoke to her present cycle of
civilization and progress, before the last quarter of the thirteenth
century, the Chinese had been in manvantara, very much awake, for
about fifteen hundred years. When they went to sleep, the Celts did
also.
I pass by with a mere note of recognition the two dragons, the one on
the Chinese, the other on the Welsh flag; just saying that national
symbols are not chose haphazard, but are an expression of inner things;
and proceed to give you the dates of all the important events in Chinese
and Celtic, chiefly Welsh, history during the last two thousand years. In
1911 the Chinese threw off the Manchu yoke and established a native
republic. In 1910 the British Government first recognized Wales as a
separate nationality, when the heir to the throne was invested as Prince
of Wales at Carnarvon. Within a few years a bill was passed giving
Home Rule to Ireland; and national parliaments at Dublin and at
Cardiff are said to be among the likelihoods of the near future. The
eighteenth century, for manvantara, was a singularly dead time in
Europe; but in China, for pralaya, it was a singularly living time, being
filled with the glorious reigns of the Manchu emperors Kanghu and
Kien Lung. In Wales it saw the religious revival which put a stop to the
utter Anglicization of the country, saved the language from rapid
extinction, and awakened for the first time for centuries a sort of
national consciousness. Going back, the first great emperor we come to
in China before the Manchu conquest, was Ming Yunglo, conqueror of
half Asia. His contemporary in Wales was Owen Glyndwr, who
succeeded in holding the country against the English for a number of
years; there had been no Welsh history between Glyndwr and the
religious revival. In 1260 or thereabouts the Mongols completed the
conquest of China, and dealt her then flourishing civilization a blow
from which it never really recovered. About twenty years later the
English completed the conquest of Wales, and dealt her highly
promising literary culture a blow from which it is only now perhaps
beginning to recover. In the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries
the great Sung artists of China were painting infinity or their square
feet of silk: painting Natural Magic as it has never been painted or

revealed since. In those same centuries the Welsh bards were writing
the Natural Magic of the Mabinogion, one of the chief European
repositories of Natural Magic; and filling a remarkable poetical
literature with the same quality:--and that before the rest of Europe had,
for the most part, awakened to the spiritual impulses that lead to
civilization. In the seventh and eighth centuries, when continental
Europe was in the dead vast and middle of pralaya, Chinese poetry,
under Tang Hsuan-tsong and his great predecessors, was in its Golden
Age--a Golden Age comparable to that of Pericles in Athens. In the
seventh and eighth centuries, Ireland was sending out scholars and
thinkers as missionaries to all parts of benighted Europe: Ireland in her
golden age, the one highly cultured country in Christendom, was
producing a glorious prose and poetry in the many universities that
starred that then by no means distressful island. In 420, China, after a
couple of centuries of anarchy, began to re-establish her civilization on
the banks of the Yangtse. In 410, the Britons finally threw off the
Roman yoke, and the first age of Welsh poetry, the epoch of Arthur and
Taliesin, which has been the