Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (81 page)

Yeats decided that Madame “dreamed awake,” which not only was a nice way of putting it but as good a theory as anyone’s. Never present at a temper tantrum, Yeats thought Madame extremely kind and ventured to remark upon “how careful she was that the young men about her should not overwork.” Actually she worked them like galley slaves, but perhaps Yeats’s impression is based on an incident involving him: when someone reproved the poet for talking too much and wearying Madame, she clucked gravely, “No, no, he is very sensitive.”
⁵¹

After a while Yeats seems to have given up trying to figure out Madame, and decided simply to enjoy her and to tell his friends about her. To the Irish poet Katharine Tynan, he was obviously trying to make Lansdowne Road sound entertaining:

A sad accident happened at Madame Blavatsky’s lately, I hear. A big materialist sat on the astral double of a poor young Indian. He was sitting on the sofa and he was too material to be able to see it. Certainly a sad accident!
⁵²

He wanted to bring all his friends into the high priestess’s circle, most of all Maud Gonne, a Junoesque Irishwoman famous both as a beauty and a revolutionary, and, to Yeats, “the trouble of my life.”
⁵³
The bedazzled, lovesick young man was delighted to learn of Maud’s interest in the occult, even of her experimentation with hashish, which, in large doses, produced an out-of-body experience.

“When I was experimenting with the occult,” she said in her autobiography, “always in the hope of gaining power to use for the great object of my life, I joined the Theosophical Society and went with Willie Yeats to visit that strange old woman, Madame Blavatsky, its founder.” Motioned to sit next to Madame, who was playing patience, she would best remember H.P.B.’s “big pale luminous eyes” and recall that she had glanced around the room at the Theosophists who “looked a nondescript gathering, though Willie told me there were interesting people among them.” The great-limbed Maud, no shrinking Alice Cleather, demanded of Madame whether politics were compatible with Theosophy; Maud, who had been criticized for her political views by the Dublin branch, sought absolution from no less than Madame herself.

“My dear child,” H.P.B. murmured, “of course you can do what you like in politics. That has nothing to do with Theosophy. They must be flapdoodles in that Dublin branch. I will tell them so.”

Maud noticed that the gas chandelier was flickering, no doubt because of air in the pipes. “Spooks in the room,” announced Helena loudly, then whispered to Maud, “They are all looking for a miracle.”

When the gas finally went out completely, she declared in an even louder tone, “Spooks!” while keeping up a low commentary to Maud. “Now they think they have seen one. They also are flapdoodles.”
⁵⁴

Others of Yeats’ friends found H.P.B. less to their taste: the Welshman Ernest Rhys, best known today as editor of the Everyman Library classics series, had apparently expected 17 Lansdowne Road to be a sort of Oriental temple of mysticism transplanted to London. Hence, he was disappointed to find a Victorian villa “with an air of prosperity suggesting the well-to-do bourgeois class.” He first met H.P.B. one twilight evening in the winter of 1888 when the fog was so thick that one could not see across the river and indoors heavy curtains shut out the fading daylight. Seated under a shaded gas lamp, Madame was playing cards with three pale young men “whose faces looked as if the diet and discipline they were subjected to were affecting their health.” H.P.B., dressed in a plain black gown girdled with a black rope, paused to glance up at Rhys and after holding out her hand briefly, went on with the game; her partners did not look up at all. Rhys and Yeats sat down to watch. Suddenly one of the players cried out in a shrill voice, “H.P.B., you’re cheating!”

“Did you only find that out now?” She laughed and threw down her cards. “I have been cheating all through the game.”

Listening and observing, Rhys was conscious of a powerful force radiating from H.P.B., “a something almost hypnotic, not accountable to ordinary human laws,”
⁵⁵
but finally she failed to convince him, and he did not become a convert. Afterward, when Yeats asked him what he thought
of
Madame, Rhys hesitantly confessed he had seen nothing to make him feel Theosophy offered great spiritual regeneration to mankind. Yeats countered that it was not fair to judge H.P.B. by a single meeting and urged him to return when Madame was giving instruction to her disciples.

Helena was to exercise a peculiar fascination on the young Irish literary set who were searching for a fresh and comprehensive cosmology. To Yeats, Charles Johnston, Claude Falls Wright, George Moore, and George W. Russell (“AE”), Madame seemed to be trying to hold the world in the palm of her hand, whatever else might be said of her. Some of them, like Moore, who had encountered Mohini by chance and “fled before him,”
⁵⁶
continued to observe with interest from the sidelines. “AE,” however, despite an initial attraction to Mohini “instinctively as to a destiny,” drew the line at actually joining the Dublin Theosophical Society, By the fall of 1888, he was just beginning to waver when he wrote H.P.B.: “I am not a proclaimed Theosophist. I do not belong to the Society. For some reasons I am sorry; for many reasons I am glad.” One reason, he said, was that the T.S. was not representative of Theosophy, “only of itself—a gathering of many earnest seekers after truth, many powerful intellects, many saints and many sinners and lovers of curiosity.” Speaking for himself, he confessed that he would not mind witnessing phenomena or calling spirits from the “vasty deep,” but if that was Theosophy, he wanted none of it. “My ideal is to worship the One God in spirit and truth.”
⁵⁷

Printing “AE’s” letter in
Lucifer,
Helena added an editorial footnote to his comment about phenomena: “It is not in the Theosophical Society that our correspondent can ever hope to evoke spirits or see any physical phenomena,”
⁵⁸
a rather remarkable statement considering her penchant for burying cups and saucers. Quickly “AE” replied that he had not meant he really wanted to see spooks; it had been his lower self speaking. “I earnestly trust no Member of the Society will ever indulge in the evocation of phenomena, whether for curiosity or for the gratification of the intellect.” He did, however, honestly believe that “the formation of the Society was a mistake,” not so much in motive but in leadership; since the speed of the slowest ship measures a fleet’s rate of progress, “the weak ones of the Society marks its position in the world.”
⁵⁹

By the end of the year, however, “AE” would begin to read
The Secret Doctrine,
which he believed to be the faith of the future, and then would join the Dublin Society. Scon after his induction, he moved out of his parents’ home and went to live at the Society’s Headquarters at 3 Upper Ely Place. He survived his twelve-hour day as a clerk at the Guiness Brewery only by the prospect of returning to Ely Place and immersing himself in the pages of
The Secret Doctrine.
“AE” was twenty-one at the time, and his literary career still lay before him. Critics have commented that his poetry suffered from the limitation of a Theosophical world view, but to “AE” Theosophy was the only world. Forty-five years later, writing to Sean O’Faolain a month before his death, he would say, “You dismiss H. P. Blavatsky rather too easily as ‘hocus pocus.’ Nobody ever affected the thought of so many able men and women by ‘hocus pocus.’ “
⁶⁰

It would be poets such as “AE” and Yeats who would continue to celebrate H.P.B.’s visions long after she had departed the scene. To “AE,” it did not matter if
The Secret Doctrine
was merely a romantic compilation; it still contained the grandest cosmogony ever conceived and would always remain to him one of the most provocative books ever written. To Yeats, who realized that Helena’s phenomena might well have been fraudulent, her philosophy had independent, inherent value and her Tibetan Mahatmas remained infinitely fascinating:

Anashuya.
Swear by the parents of the gods,

 Dread oath, who dwell on sacred Himalay, 

On the far Golden Peak; enormous shapes,

Who were still old when the great sea was young, 

In their vast faces mystery and dreams...
⁶¹

H.P.B. loved being adored by sensitive young men of artistic temperament, but of all of them who descended on Lansdowne Road, only one would achieve for Madame a special significance. His worth would come not from his poetic vision because he was not literary, but from his willingness to sacrifice his personal concerns in order to serve her. His name was George R. S. Mead, the son of a colonel in the Ordnance, and he had taken honors at Cambridge after shifting from mathematics to the classics. For a while he taught school but after reading
Esoteric Buddhism
and meeting Mohini and Bertram Keightley, he began to study Hindu philosophy, later entering Oxford to take up philosophy in general, then moving on to the University of Clermont-Ferrand. However, it was not until meeting H.P.B. in 1887 that he made a complete conversion to Theosophy and joined the Lansdowne Road household as her private secretary. His clipped beard, narrow nose, and long curved mustache gave his face a sharp intellectual look, but to Willie Yeats, who took an instant dislike to him, Mead’s intellect was “that of a good size whelk,”
⁶²
and his manner overrighteous. Annie Besant, describing him several years later, would find Mead an “earnest disciple, a man of strong brain and strong character, a fine scholar and untiring worker.”
⁶³

Such were the major figures who drifted in and out of Helena’s world, but there were others: the Wilde family would be mildly impressed, especially Oscar’s older brother, Willie, a journalist on the
Telegraph,
who did his best to see that nothing derogatory about H.P.B. appeared in that paper’s columns; their mother Lady Wilde, who dabbled in Spiritualism and seemed to think that Madame’s At-Homes were seances; and finally Oscar’s wife, Constance, who had spent the early years of her marriage arranging receptions for literary figures. Of late, however, since Oscar had become rich and famous and had mysterious new companions of whom his wife knew nothing—young men whom Oscar entertained in hotel rooms and explained his frequent absences by saying he had taken up golf—the shy Constance had little to do. She decided to write a book because everyone wrote books; she joined ladies’ committees, promoted missions to the heathen, and had herself initiated into what purported itself to be an occult Egyptian order; and she also joined the Theosophical Society, where she became acquainted with H.P.B. Just being around Madame gave her a second-hand importance, and besides, it always provided an interesting talking point for those dreary receptions Constance was obliged to attend.

Everyone who wanted to appear au courant went to see H.P.B., or at least talked as if they had; and even thirty-five years later the fabulous Lady Margot Asquith would recall in her memoirs that she had attended one of H.P.B.’s séances. She had met Madame, “a Russian Jewess,” at a private home in Brook Street to hear her views on God. But once Lady Asquith got a glimpse of Madame’s “heavy white face, as deeply pitted with smallpox as a solitaire board,” and of the “palpitating ladies” who surrounded her, she took a seat near the window, as far from H.P.B. as she could get without actually leaving the room. According to Asquith, the Madame gave a conclusive shudder, heaved her bosom, and whispered, “A murderer has passed below our windows.” Swiveling around to peer out, Lady Margot wrote that “I strained my eyes up and down Brook Street to see the murderer, but there was not a creature in sight.” Of course, she remarked in her autobiography, the Madame had been “an audacious swindler.”
⁶⁴

Obviously it was not H.P.B. whom Lady Asquith met, for she rarely left Lansdowne Road and certainly not to conduct a séance, nor had she ever had smallpox. But it made for a story.

It is surprising that in this hectic period H.P.B. got any work done at all but she did. Keeping sacrosanct the hours between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. she spent the first half of 1888 on
The Secret Doctrine.
Most of Volume One and part of Volume Two was being retyped by the Keightleys, with Bert working at a small table near the end of her desk. Between them sat a large ash tray that always served as an excellent barometer of the day’s progress; if things were going well, the ash tray would hold a few half-smoked stubs; if she were encountering blocks, the dish would be heaped with butts and matches by six o’clock. Sometimes she made Bert rummage through every drawer and piece of paper in search of some obscure note, and accompanied the request by “a stream of scolding, stinging comments on my work, laziness and general incompetence.”
⁶⁵
One of Bert’s biggest headaches was that of verifying Madame’s countless quotations, a difficult task because she claimed the books were not in the house and also because the page numbers were always wrong. After hours at the British Museum, Bert finally figured out that Madame reversed the page numbers, writing p. 321 for p. 123; once he made this discovery, his job went somewhat more smoothly.
⁶⁶

During this period Helena also had the editorial assistance of Edward Douglass Fawcett, who had briefly given her a hand at Ostend the previous year. How much Fawcett actually helped is a matter of controversy: both the Keightleys would later single him out as a source of immense assistance, claiming he supplied many quotations from scientific works and also did some of the writing; Fawcett himself went much further, implying that much of the second volume was his.