Chapter 17

I have described what image--always opposite to the natural self
or the natural world--Wilde, Henley, Morris copied or tried to
copy, but I have not said if I found an image for myself. I know
very little about myself and much less of that anti-self: probably
the woman who cooks my dinner or the woman who sweeps out my study
knows more than I. It is perhaps because nature made me a
gregarious man, going hither and thither looking for conversation,
and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest conviction, that
I love proud and lonely images. When I was a child and went daily
to the sexton's daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem in
her School Reader that delighted me beyond all others: a fragment
of some metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the birds
sing scorn upon mankind. In later years my mind gave itself to
gregarious Shelley's dream of a young man, his hair blanched with
sorrow studying philosophy in some lonely tower, or of his old
man, master of all human knowledge, hidden from human sight in
some shell-strewn cavern on the Mediterranean shore. One passage
above all ran perpetually in my ears--

Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre-Adamite, and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence,
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation and unwearied study,
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science
Over those strong and secret things and thoughts
Which others fear and know not.

MAHMUD
I would talk
With this old Jew.

HASSAN
Thy will is even now
Made known to him where he dwells in a sea-cavern
'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible
Than thou or God! He who would question him
Must sail alone at sunset where the stream
Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
And, when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
'Ahasuerus!' and the caverns round
Will answer 'Ahasuerus!' If his prayer
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise,
Lighting him over Marmora; and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
Thence, at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference,
The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare
Win the desired communion.

Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the Theosophists
because they had