The Crest-Wave Of Evolution Part 9

"The loss of even the hundredth or the thousandth part of the persons who were then slain, carried away captive, or done to death in Kalinga would now be a matter of deep regret to His Majesty. Although a man should do him any injury, Devanampiya Piadasi holds that it must patiently be borne, so far as it possibly can be borne... for His Majesty desires for all animate beings security, control over the pa.s.sions, peace of mind, and joyousness. And this is the chief of conquests, in His Majesty's opinion: the Conquest of Duty."

Some time later he took the vows of a Buddhist monk, 'entered the Path'; and, as he says, 'exerted himself strenuously.'

He has been called the 'Constantine of Buddhism'; there is much talk among the western learned, about his support of that movement having contributed to its decay. They draw a.n.a.logy from Constantine; even hint that Asoka embraced Buddhism, as the latter did Christianity, from political motives. But the a.n.a.logy is thoroughlv false. Constantine was a bad man, a very far-gone case; and there was little in the faith he adopted, or favored, as it had come to be at that time, to make him better;--even if he had really believed in it. And it was a defined religio- political body, highly antagonistic to the old state religion of Rome, that he linked his fortunes with. But no sovereign so mighty in compa.s.sion is recorded in history as having reigned, as this Asoka. He was the most unsectarian of men. Buddhism as it came to him, and as he left it, was not a sect, but a living spiritual movement. For what is a sect?--Something _cut off_-- from the rest of humanity, and the sources of inner life. But for Asoka, as for the modern Theosophical Movement, there was no religion higher than--_Dharma_--which word may be translated, 'the (higher) Law,' or 'truth.' or 'duty.' He never ceased to protect the holy men of Brahminism. Edict after edict exhorts his people to honor them. He preached the Good Law; he could not insist too often that different men would have different conceptions as to this _Dharma._ Each, then, must follow his own conception, and utterly respect his neighbors'. The Good Law, the Doctrine of the Buddhas, was universal; because the objective of all religions was the conquest of the pa.s.sions and of self. All religions must manifest on this plane as right action and life; and that was the evangel he proclaimed to the world. There was no such sharp antagonism of sects and creeds.

There is speculation as to how he managed, being a world-sovereign --and a highly efficient one--to carry out the vows of a Buddhist monk. As if the begging bowl would have been anything of consequence to such an one! It is a matter of the status of the soul; not of outward paraphernalia. He was a practical man; intensely so; and he showed that a Chakravartin could tread the Path of the Buddhas as well as a wandering monk. One can imagine no Tolstoyan playing at peasant in him. His business in life was momentous. "I am never satisfied with my exertions and my dispatch of business," he says.

"Work I must for the public benefit,--and the root of the matter is in exertion and dispatch of business, than which nothing is more efficacious for the public welfare. And for what end do I toil? For no other end than that I may discharge my debt to animate beings."

And again:

"Devanampiya Piadasi desires that in all places men of all religions may abide, for they all desire purity of mind and mastery over the senses."

Well; for nine and twenty years he held that vast empire warless; even though it included within its boundaries many restless and savage tribes. Certainly only the greatest, strongest, and wisest of rulers could do that; it has not been done since (though Akbar came near it). We know nothing as to how literature may have been enriched; some think that the great epics may have come from this time. If so, it would only have been recensions of them, I imagine. But in art and architecture his reign was everything. He built splendid cities, and strewed the land with wonderful buildings and monoliths. Patna, the capital, in Megasthenes' time nine miles long by one and a half wide, and built of wood, he rebuilt in stone with walls intricately sculptured. Education was very widespread or universal. His edicts are sermons preached to the ma.s.ses: simple ethical teachings touching on all points necessary to right living.

He had them carved on rock, and set them up by the roadsides and in all much-frequented places, where the ma.s.ses could read them; and this proves that the ma.s.ses could read. They are all vibrant with his tender care, not alone for his human subjects, but for all sentient beings. "Work I must.... that I may discharge my debt to all things animate." And how he did work without one private moment in the day or night, as his decrees show, in which he should be undisturbed by the calls of those who needed help. He specifies; he particularizes; there was no moment to be considered private, or his personal own.

And even then he was not content. There were foreign lands; and those, too, were ent.i.tled to his care. I said that the southern tip of India, with Ceylon, were within his sphere of influence: his sphere of influence was much wider than that, however. Saying that a king's sphere of influence is wherever he can get his will done, Asoka's extended westward over the whole Greek world. Here was a king whose will was benevolence; who sought no rights but the right to do good; whose politics were the service of mankind:--it is a sign of the Brotherhood of Man, that his writ ran, as you may say--the writ of his great compa.s.sion,--to the Mediterranean sh.o.r.e:--

"Everywhere in the dominions of Devanampiya Piadasi, and likewise in the neighboring realms, such as those of the Chola, Pandya, Satiyaputra and Keralaputra, in Ceylon, in the dominions of the Greek king Antiochus, and in those of the other kings subordinate to that Antiochus--everywhere, on behalf of His Majesty, have two kinds of hospitals been founded: hospitals for men, and hospitals for beasts. Healing herbs, medicinal for man and medicinal for beasts, wherever they were lacking, have been imported and planted. On the roads, trees have been planted, and wells have been dug for the use of men and beasts."

And everywhere, in all those foreign realms, he had his missionaries preaching the Good Law. And some of these came to Palestine, and founded there for him an order at Nazareth called the Essenes; in which, some century or two later, a man rose to teach the Good Law--by name, Jesus of Nazareth.--Now consider the prestige, the moral influence, of a king who might keep his agents, unmolested, carrying out his will, right across Asia, in Syria, Greece, Macedonia, and Egypt; the king of a great, free, and mighty people, who, if he had cared to, might have marched out world-conquering; but who preferred that his conquests should be the conquests of duty. Devanampiya Piadasi: the Gracious of Mien, the Beloved of the G.o.ds: an Adept King like them of old time, strayed somehow into the scope and vision of history.

VIII. THE BLACK-HAIRED PEOPLE

Greece shone between 478 and 348,--to give the thirteen decades of her greatest spiritual brightness. Then came India in 321; we lose sight of her after the death of Asoka in the two-thirties, but know the Maurya Empire lasted its thirteen decades (and six years) until 185. Then China flamed up brilliantly under the Western House of Han from 194 to 64;--at which time, however, we shall not arrive for a few weeks yet.

Between these three national epochs there is this difference: the Greek Age came late in its manvantara; which opened (as I guess), roughly speaking, some three hundred and ninety years before:--three times thirteen decades, with room for three national flowerings in Europe--among what peoples, who can say?-- We cannot tell where in its manvantara the Indian Age may have come: whether near the beginning, or at the middle. But in China we are on firm ground, and the firmest of all. A manvantara, a fifteen-century cycle, began in the two-forties B. C.; this Age of Han was its first blossom and splendid epoch; and we need feel no surprise that it was not followed by a night immediately, but only by a twilight and slight dimming of the glories for about thirteen decades again, and then the full brilliance of another day. Such things are proper to peoples new-born after their long pralaya; and can hardly happen, one would say, after the morning of the manvantara has pa.s.sed. Thus in our own European cycle, Italy the first-born was in full creative energy from about 1240 to 1500: twenty-six decades;--whereas the nations that have held hegemony since have had to be content each with its thirteen.

And now to take bird's-eye views of China as a whole; and to be at pains to discover what relation she bears, historically, to ourselves and the rest of the globe.

Do you remernber how Abraham haggled with the Lord over the Cities of the Plain? Yahveh was for destroying them off hand for their manifold sins and iniquities; but Abraham argued and bargained and brought him down till if peradventure there should be found ten righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord promised he would spare them. But ten righteous there were not, nor nothing near; so the Cities of the Plain went down.

I suppose the Crest-Wave rarely pa.s.ses from a race without leaving a wide trail of insanity in its wake. The life forces are strong; the human organisms through which they play are but--as we know them. Commonly these organisms are not directed by the Divine Soul, which has all too little of the direction of life in its hands; so the life-currents drift downward, instead of fountaining up; and exhaust these their vehicles, and leave them played out and mentally--because long since morally--deficient.

So come the cataclysmic wars and reigns of terror that mark the end of racial manvantaras: it is a humanity gone collectively mad. On the other hand, none can tell what immense safeguarding work may be done by the smallest sane co-ordinated effort upwards. If peradventure the ten righteous shall be found--but they must be righteous, and know what they are doing--I will spare, and not destroy, saith the Lord.

(He said nothing about respectabilities. I dare say there was quite a percentage of respectable chapel-going Sabbath-observing folk in the Cities of the Plain.)

And yet there must be always that dreadful possibility--which perhaps has never become actual since the fall of Atlantis--that a whole large section of mankind should go quite mad, and become unfit to carry on the work of evolution. It is a matter of corrupting the streams of heredity; which is done by vice, excess, wrong living; and these come of ignorance. Heaven knows how near it we may be today; I do not think Christendom stands, or has stood, so very far, from the brink. And yet it is from the white race, we have supposed, that the coming races will be born; this is the main channel through which human evolution is intended to flow.--We are in kall-yuga; the Mysteries are dead, and the religions have taken their place: there has been no sure and certain link, organized on this plane, between the world and its Higher Self. Each succeeding civilization, under these circ.u.mstances, has run a greater risk.

Of what race are we? I say, of no race at all, but can view the matter as Human Souls, reincarnating egos, prepared to go where the Law bids us. Races are only temporary inst.i.tutions set up for the convenience of the Host of Souls.

We see, I suppose, the results of such a breakdown in Africa.

Atlanteans were segregated there; isolated; and for a million years degenerated in that isolation to what they are. But their ancestors, before that segregation began, had better airs.h.i.+ps than we have; were largely giants, in more respects than the physical, were we are pygmies. Now they are--whatever may be their potentialities, whatever they may become--actually an inferior reace. And it is a racial stock that shows no signs of dying out. What then?--I suppose indeed there must be backward races, to house backward egos;--though for that matter you would think that our Londons and Chicagos and the rest, with their slums, would provide a good deal of accommodation.

Or consider the Redskins, here and in South America: whether Atlanteans, or of some former subrace of the Fifth, at least not Aryans. Take the finest tribes among them, such as the Navajos.

Here is a very small hereditary stream, kept pure and apart: of fine physique; potentially of fine mentality; unsullied with vices of any sort: a people as much nearer than the white man to natural spirituality, as to natural physical health. It is no use saying they are so few. Two millenniums ago, how many were the Anglo-Saxons? Three millenniums ago, how many were the Latins? Supposing the white race in America failed. The statistics of lunacy--of that alone--are a fearful _Mene, Tekel Upharsin_ written on our walls, for any Daniel with vision to read. I think Naure must also take into account these possibilities. Does she keep in reserve hereditary streams and racial stocks other than her great and main ones, _in case of accidents?_ Are the Redskins among these?

_The Secret Doctrine_ seems to hint sometimes that the founders of our Fifth Root Race were of Lemurian rather than Atlantean descent. Nowhere is it actually said so; but there are a number of pa.s.sages that read, to me, as if they were written with that idea, or theory, or fact, in mind. Is it, possibly, that a small pure stream of Lemurian heredity had been kept aloof through all the years of Atlantis, in reserve;--some stream that may have been, at one time, as narrow as the tribe of Navajos?--This may be a very bold conclusion to draw from what is said in _The Secret Doctrine;_ it may have no truth in it whatever: other pa.s.sages are to be found, perhaps, that would at least appear to contradict it. But if it is true, it would account for what seems like a racial anomaly--or more than one. Science leans to the conclusion that the Australian aborigines are Aryan: they are liker Aryans than anything else. But we know from _The Secret Doctrine_ that they are among the few last remnants of the Lemurians. Again, the Ainos of j.a.pan are very like Europeans: they have many physical features in common with the Caucasians, and none in common with the peoples of East Asia. Yet they are very low down in the scale of evolution:--not so low as the Australian Blackfellow, but without much occasion for giving themselves airs. A thousand years of contact with the much- was.h.i.+ng j.a.panese have never suggested to them why G.o.d made soap and water. Like many other people, they have the legend of the flood: remember, as you may say, the fall of Atlantis; but unlike us upstarts of the Fourth and Fifth Races, they have also a legend of a destruction of the world by fire and earthquake--a cataclysm that lasted, they say, a hundred days. Is it a memory of the fate of Lemuria?

Is a new Root-Race developed, not from the one immediately preceding it, but from the one before? Is Mercury's caduceus, here too, a symbol of the way evolution is done? Did the Law keep in reserve a Sishta or Seed-Race from Lemuria, holding it back from Atlantean development during the whole period of the Atlanteans;--holding it, all that while, in seclusion and purity --and therefore in a kind of pralaya;--at the right moment, to push its development, almost suddenly, along a new line, not parallel to the Atlantean, but _sui generis,_ and to be Aryan Fifth presently?--Is the Law keeping in reserve a _Sishta_ or Seed-Race of Atlantean stock, holding that in reserve and apart all through our Aryan time, to develop from it at last the beginnings of the Sixth, on the new continent that will appear?

Or to do so, at any rate, should the main Aryan stock fail at one of the grand crises in its evolution, and become of too corrupt heredity to produce fitting vehicles for the egos of the Sixth to inhabit?

When we have evolved back to Sanskrit for the last time: when the forces of civilization have played through and exhausted for the last time the possibilities of each of the groups of Aryan languages, so that it would be impossible to do anything more with them--for languages do become exhausted: we cannot write English now as they could in the days of Milton and Jeremy Taylor; not necessarily because we are smaller men, but because the fabric of our speech is worn much thinner, and will no longer take the splendid dyes;--and when that final flowering of Sanskrit is exhausted too--will the new Sixth Race language, as a type, be a derivation from the Aryan? Then how?--Or will it, possibly, be as it were a new growth sprung out of the grave of Fourth Race Chinese, or of one of that Atlantean group through which, during all these millions of years, such great and main brain-energies have not on the whole been playing as they have been through the Aryans; and which might therefore, having lain so long fallow, then be fit for new strange developments and uses?

All of which may be, and very likely is, extremely wide of the mark. Such ideas may be merest wild speculation, and have no truth in them at all. And yet I think that if they were true, they would explain a thing to me otherwise inexplicable: China.

We are in the Fifth Root-Race, and the fifth sub-race thereof: that is, beyond the middle point. And yet one in every four of the inhabitants of the globe is a Fourth Race Chinaman; and I suppose that if you took all the races that are not Caucasian, or Fifth Race, you would find that about half the population of the world is Atlantean still.

Take the languages. A Sanskrit word, or a Greek, or Old Gothic, or Latin, is a living organism, a little articulate being. There is his spine, the root; his body, the stem; his limbs and head, the formative elements, prefixes and suffixes, case-endings and what not. Let him loose in the sentence, and see how he wriggles gaily from state to state: with a flick of the tail from nominative to genitive, from singular to plural: declaring his meaning, not by means of what surroundings you put about him, but by motions, changes, volitions so to say, of his own. 'Now,' says he, 'I'm _pater,_ and the subject; set me where you will, and I am still the subject, and you can make nothing else of me.' Or, 'Now,' says he, 'I'm _patrem,_ and the object; go look for my lord the verb, and you shall know what's done to me; be he next door, or ten pages away, I am faithful to him.' _Patrem filius amat,_ or _filius amat patrem,_ or in whatever order it may be, there is no doubt who does, and who (as they say) _suffers_ the loving.--But now take a word in English. You can still recognise him for the same creature that was once so gay and jumpy-jumpy: _father_ is no such far cry from _pater:_--but oh what a change in sprightliness of habits is here! Time has worn away his head and limbs to almost unrecognisable blunt excrescences. Bid him move off into the oblique cases, and if he can help it, he will not budge; you must shove him with a verb; you must goad him with a little sharp preposition behind; and then he just _lumps_ backward or forward, and there is no change for the better in him, as you may say. No longer will he declare his meaning of himself; it must depend on where you choose to put him in the sentence.--Among the mountains of Europe, the grand Alps are the parvenus; the Pyrenees look down on them; and the Vosges on the Pyrenees; and--pardon me!--the little old time-rounded tiny Welsh mountains look down on them all from the heights of a much greater antiquity. They are the smallest of all, the least jagged and dramatic of all; time and the weather have done most to them. The storm, like the eagle of Gwern Abwy in the story, has lighted on their proud peaks so often, that that from which once she could peck at the stars in the evening, rises now but a few thousand feet from the level of the sea. Time and springs and summers have silenced and soothed away the startling crags and chasms, the threatening gestures of the earth at infinity, and clothed them over with a mantle of quietness and green fern and heather and dreams. When the Fifth Race was younger, its language was Alpine: in Gothic, in Sanskrit, in Latin, you can see the crags and chasms. French, Spanish and Italian are Pyrenean, much worn down. English is the Vosges. Chinese is hardly even the Welsh mountains. Every word is worn perfectly smooth and round.

There is no sign left at all of prefix or suffix, root or stem.

There are no parts of speech: any word without change can do duty for any part of speech. There is no sign of case or number: all has been reduced to an absolute simplicity, beyond which there is no going. Words can end with no consonant but the most rounded of all, the nasal liquids _n_ and _ng._ There is about as much likeness to the Aryan and Semitic languages--you can trace about as much a.n.a.logy between them--as you can between a centipede and a billiard-ball.

There are definite laws governing the changes of language. You know how the Latin _castrum_ became in English _ciaster_ and then _chester;_ the change was governed by law. The same law makes our present-day vulgar say _cyar_ for _car;_ that word, in the American of the future, will be something like chair. The same law makes the same kind of people say _donchyer_ for _don't you;_ some day, alas! even that will be cla.s.sical and refined American.

Well; we know that that law has been at work in historic times even on the Chinese billiard-ball: where Confucius said _Ts'in_ like a gentleman, the late Yuan s.h.i.+ Kai used to say _Ch'in._ So did the Dowager Empress; it was eminently the refined thing to do. So we ourselves have turned _Ts'in_ into _China._--And that is the one little fact--or perhaps one of the two or three little facts--that remain to convince us that Chinese and its group of kindred languages grew up on the same planet, and among the same humankind, that produced Sanskrit and Latin.

But does not that suggest also the possibility that Alpine Aryan might some day--after millions of years--wear down or evolve back even into billiard-ball Chinese? That human language is _one thing;_ and all the differences, the changes rung on that according to the stages of evolution?

In the Aryan group of languages, the bond of affinity is easily recognisable: the roots of the words are the same: _Pitri, pater, vater,_ are clearly but varying p.r.o.nunciations of the same word. In the Turanic group, however--Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Tatar, Mongol and Manchu--you must expect no such well-advertised first-cousins.h.i.+p. They are grouped together, not because of any likeness of roots: not because you could find one single consonant the same in the Lappish or Hungarian, say, and in the Mongol or Manchu words for _father_--you probably could not;--but because there may be syntactical likenesses, or the changes and a.s.similations of sounds may be governed by the same laws. Thus in Turkic--I draw upon the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_--there is a suffix z, preceded by a vowel, to mean your: _pederin_ is 'father'; 'your father'

becomes _pederiniz;_ _dostun_ means 'friend'; 'your friend'

becomes not _dostuniz,_ but _dostunus;_ and this trick of a.s.similating the vowel of the suffix is the last one in the stem is an example of the kind of similarities which establish the relations.h.i.+p of the group. As for likeness of roots, here is a specimen: _gyordunus_ is the Turkish for the Finnish _naikke._--So here you see a degree of kins.h.i.+p much more remote than that you find in the Aryan. Where, say, Dutch and Gaelic are brothers--at least near relations and bosom friends,--Turkish and Mongol are about fifteenth cousins by marriage twice removed, and hardly even nod to each other in pa.s.sing. And yet Turks and Mongols both claim descent from the sons of a common father: according to legends of both peoples, the ancestor of the Turks was the brother of the ancestor of the Mongols. (Always remember that in speaking of Turks thus scientifically, one does not mean the Ottomans, who inherit their language, but are almost purely Caucasian or even Aryan, in blood.)

Now take the Monosyllabic or South-Eastern Asiatic Group: Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, Annamese, and Tibetan. Here there are only negatives, you might say, to prove a relations.h.i.+p.

They do not meet on the street; they pa.s.s by on the other side, noses high in the air; each sublimely unaware of the other's existence. They suppose they are akin--through Adam; but whould tell you that much has happened since then. Their kins.h.i.+p consists in this: the words are each are billiard-b.a.l.l.s--and yet, if you will allow the paradox, of quite different shapes.

Thus I should call a Tibetan name like _nGamri-srong-btsan_ a good jagged angular sort of billiard-ball; and a Chinese one like _T'ang Tai-tsong_ a perfectly round smooth one of the kind we know.--The languages are akin, because each say, where we should say 'the horse kicked the man,' _horse agent man kicking completion,_ or words to that effect,--dapped out nearly in spherical or angular disconnected monosyllables. But the words for _horse_ and _man,_ in Chinese and Tibetan, have respectively as much phonetic likeness as _geegee_ and _equus,_ and _Smith_ and _Jones._ As to the value and possibilities of such languages, I will quote you two p.r.o.nouncements, both from writers in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica._ One says: "Chinese has the greatest capacity of any language ever invented"; the other, "The Chinese tongue is of unsurpa.s.s jejuneness."

In the whole language there are only about four or five hundred sounds you could differentiate by spelling, as to say, _s.h.i.+h,_ p.r.o.nounced like the first three letters in the word _s.h.i.+rt_ in English. That vocable may mean: _history,_ or _to employ,_ or _a corpse, a market, a lion, to wait on, to rely upon, time, poetry, to bestow, to proclaim, a stone, a generation, to eat, a house,_ and all such things as that;--I mention a few out of the list by way of example.* Now of course, were that all to be said about it, Chinamen would no doubt sometimes get confused: would think you meant a corpse, when you were really talking about poetry, and so on. But there is a way of throwing a little breathing in, a kind of hiatus: thus _Ts'in_ meant one country, and _Tsin_ another one altogether; and you ought not to mix them, for they were generally at war, and did not mix at all well. That would potentially extend the number of sounds, or words, or billiard-b.a.l.l.s, from the four hundred and twenty in modern polite Pekinese, or the twelve hundred or so in the older and less cultured Cantonese, to twice as many in each case. Still that would be but a poor vocabulary for the language with the vastest literature in the world, as I suppose the Chinese is. Then you come to the four tones, as a further means of extending it. You p.r.o.nounce _s.h.i.+h_ one tone--you sing it on the right note, so to say, and it means _poetry;_ you take that tone away, and give it another, the dead tone, and very naturally it becomes _a corpse:_--as, one way, and another I have often tried to impress on you it really does.--Of course the hieroglyphs, the written words, run into hundreds of thousands; for the literature, you have a vocabulary indeed. But you see that the spoken language depends, to express its meaning, upon a different kind of elements from those all our languages depend on. We have solid words that you can spell: articles built up with the bricks of sound-stuff we call letters: _c-a-t_ cat, _d-o-g_ dog, and so on;--but their words, no; nothing so tangible: all depends on little silences, small hiatuses in the vocalizition,--and above all, _musical tones._ Now then, which is the more primitive?

Which is nearer the material or intellectual, and which, the spiritual, pole?

------- * _Encyclopaedia Britannica:_ article, China: Language.

More primitive--I do not know. Only I think when the Stars of Morning sang together, and all the sons of G.o.d shouted for joy; when primeval humanity first felt stirring within it the Divine fire and essence of the Lords of Mind; when the Sons of the Fire mist came down, and found habitation for themselves in the bodies of our ancestors; when they saw the sky, how beautiful and kindly it was; and the wonder of the earth, and that blue jewel the sea; and felt the winds of heaven caress them, and were aware of the Spirit, the Great Dragon, immanent in the sunlight, quivering and scintillant in the dim blue diamond day;

"They prayed, but their wors.h.i.+p was only The wonder of nights and of days,"

--when they opened their lips to speak, and the first of all the poems of the earth was made:--it was song, it was tone, it was music they uttered, and not brute speech such as we use, it was intoned vowels, as I imagine, that composed their language: seven little vowels, and seven tones or notes to them perhaps: and with these they could sing and tell forth the whole of the Glory of G.o.d. And then--was it like this?--they grew material, and intellectual, and away from the child-state of the Spirit; and their tones grew into words; and consonants grew on to the vowels, to make the vast and varied distinctions the evolving intellect needed for its uses; and presently you had Atlantis with its complex civilization--its infinitely more complex civilization even than our own; and grammar came ever more into being, ever more wonderful and complex, to correspond with the growing curves and involutions of the ever more complex-growing human brain; and a thousand languages were formed--many of them to be found still among wild tribes in mid-Africa or America--as much more complex than Sanskrit, as Sanskrit is than Chinese: highly declensional, minutely syntactical, involved and worked up and filigreed beyond telling;--and that was at the midmost point and highest material civilization of Atlantis. And then the Fourth Race went on, and its languages evolved; back, in the seventh sub-race, to the tonalism, the chanted simplicity of the first sub-race;--till you had something in character not intellectual, but spiritual:--Chinese. And meanwhile--I am throwing out the ideas as they come, careless if the second appears to contradict the first: presently a unity may come of them;--meanwhile, for the purposes of the Fifth Root-Race, then nascent, a language-type had grown up, intellectual as any in Atlantis, because this Fifth Race was to be intellectual too,-- but also spiritual: not without tonalistic elements: a thing to be chanted, and not dully spoken:--and there, when the time came for, it to be born, you had the Sanskrit.

But now for the Sixth Root-Race: is that to figure mainly on the plane of intellect? Or shall we then take intellectual things somewhat for granted, as having learnt them and pa.s.sed on to something higher? Look at those diagrams of the planes and globes in _The Secret Doctrine,_ and see how the last ones, the sixth and seventh, come to be on the same level as the first and second. Shall we be pa.s.sing, then, to a time when, in the seventh, our languages will have no need for complexity: when our ideas, no longer personal but universal and creative, will flow easily from mind to mind, from heart to heart on a little tone, a chanted breath of music; when mere billiard-b.a.l.l.s of syllables will serve us, so they be rightly sung:--until presently with but seven pure vowel sounds, and seven tones to sing them to, we shall be able to tell forth once more the whole of the Glory of G.o.d?

Now then, is Chinese primitive, or is it an evolution far away and ahead of us? Were there first of all billiard-b.a.l.l.s; and did they acquire a trick of coalescing and running together; this one and that one, in the combination, becoming subordinate to another; until soon you had a little wriggling creature of a word, with his head of prefix, and his tail of suffix, to look or flicker this way or that according to the direction in which he wished to steer himself, the meaning to be expressed;--from monosyllabic becoming agglutinative, synthetic, declensional, complex--Alpine and super-Sanskrit in complexity;--then Pyrenean by the wearing down of the storms and seasons; then Vosges, with crags forest-covered; then green soft round Welsh mountains; and then, still more and more worn down by time and the phonetic laws which decree that men shall (in certain stages of their growth) be always molding their languages to an easier and easier p.r.o.nunciation,--stem a.s.similating prefix and suffix, and growing intolerant of changes within itself;--fitting itself to the weather, rounding off its angles, coquetting with euphony;-- dropping harsh consonants; tending to end words with a vowel, or with only the nasal liquids n and ng, softest and roundest sounds there are;--till what had evolved from a billiard-ball to an Alpine crag, had evolved back to a billiard-ball again, and was Chinese? Is it primitive, or ultimate? I am almost certain of this, at any rate: that as a language-type, it stands somewhere midway between ours and spiritual speech.

How should that be; when we are told that this people is of the Fourth, the most material of the Races; while we are on the proud upward arc of the Fifth? And how is it that H. P. Blavatsky speaks of the Chinese civilization as being younger than that of the Aryans of India, the Sanskrit speakers,--Fifth certainly? Is this, possibly, the explanation: that the ancestors of the Chinese, a colony from Atlantis some time perhaps long before the Atlantean degeneration and fall, were held under major pralaya apart from the world-currents for hundreds of thousands of years, until some time later than 160,000 years ago--the time of the beginning our our sub-race? A pralaya, like sleep, is a period of refreshment, spiritual and physical; it depends upon your mood as you enter it, to what degree you shall reap its benefits: whether it shall regenerate you; whether you shall arise from it spiritually cleansed and invigorated by contact with the bright Immortal Self within. Africa entered such a rest-period from an orgy of black magic, and her night was filled with evil dreams and sorceries, and her people became what they are. But if China entered it guided by white Atlantean Adepts, it would have been for her Fairyland; it would have been the Fortunate Islands; it would have been the Garden of Siw.a.n.g Mu, the paradise of the West; and when she came forth it would have been--it might have been--with a bent not towards intellectual, but towards spiritual achievements.

Compare her civilization, in historic times, with that of the West. Historic times are very little to go by, but they are all we have at present.--She attained marvelous heights; but they were not the same kind of heights the West has attained. Through her most troublous, stirring, and perilous times, she carried whole provinces of Devachan with her. It was while she was falling to pieces, that Ssu-K'ung T'u wrote his divinely delicate meditations. When the iron most entered her soul, she would weep, but not tear her hair or rage and grow pa.s.sionate; she would condescend to be heart-broken, but never vulgar. In her gayest moments, wine-flushed and Spring-flushed, she never forgot herself to give utterance to the unseemly. There is no line in her poetry to be excused or regretted on that score. She wors.h.i.+pped Beauty, as perhaps only Greece and France in the West have done; but unlike Greece or France, she sought her divinity only in the impersonal and dispa.s.sionate: never mistook for its voice, the voices of the flesh. She sinned much, no doubt; but not in her pursuit of the Beautiful; not in her wors.h.i.+p of Art and Poetry. She was faithful to the high G.o.ds there. She never produced a figure comparable to, nor in the least like, our Homers and Aeschyluses, Dantes and Miltons and Shakespeares. But then, the West has never, I imagine, produced a figure comparable to her Li Pos, Tu Fus, Po Chu-is or Ssu-k'ung T'us: giants in lyricism--one might name a hundred of them--beside whom our Hugos and Sapphos and Keatses were pygmies. Nor have we had any to compare with her masters of landscape-painting: even the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ comes down flat-footed with the statement that Chinese landscape-painting is the highest the world has seen.--And why?--Because it is based on a knowledge of the G.o.d-world; because her eyes were focused for the things 'on the other side of the sky'; because this world, for her, was a mere reflexion and thin concealment of the other, and the mists between her and the Divine 'defecate' constantly, in Coleridge's curious phrase, 'to a clear transparency.' Things seen were an open window into the Infinite; but with us, heaven knows, that window is so thick filthy with selfhood, so cobwebbed and begrimed with pa.s.sion and egotism and individualism and all the smoke and soot of the brain-mind, that given an artist with a natural tendency to see through, he has to waste half his life first in cleaning it with picks and mattocks and charges of dynamite. So it becomes almost inevitable that when once you know Chinese painting, all western painting grows to look rather coa.r.s.e and brutal and materialistic to you.