t. We want the painter, the musician, the poet, who will see the ideal below the objective in every work of Art.
Let us glance at Literature. Literature was sinking more and more towards the materialistic, and it was said that only the materialistic was the natural. The great school of French literature identified with the name of Zola claimed the world " natural" to represent its efforts. Never was a word more misapplied. It is not natural to go and grub in the mud and mire of human nature, and to put that on the literary canvas. It is not thus that Nature works. Nature is ever striving to turn the foul into the pure, and the ugly into the beautiful. Leave her to do her work and what is the result. A corpse falls on the ground and slowly rots. Is it natural only to trace the slow progress of decay and to paint in dark and hideous colours every stage of that gradual disintegration, and then to stop, as though, having traced decay, you had exhausted the possibilities of Nature ? Ah, no. Nature takes that rotting corpse and throws over it her earth and falling leaves, until she has covered it, and then, by her wondrous alchemy, out of pollution, out of disintegration, she brings new life, new colour, and new form, until a fair field of flowers covers the graveyard where the rotted corpses lie. Is it natural to describe the collecting of the manure into the dung-heap, and to fill our nostrils with the fetid stenches of the rotting filth, to rake it over to disgust our eyes and turn us sick? Nature covers that dung-heap with her creepers and hides it away from sight, while she changes it into the wholesome fertility of her fruitful earth, and gives us instead of this hideousness and fetor the crimson splendour and sweet fragrance of the rose. Such is Nature's working; and the true artist, the artist who is really natural, is the one who, like Nature, hides the hideous and transmutes it into beauty; who, looking into the life of the miserable, the poor, and the degraded, does [Page 15] not only draw the miserable forms, and sketch the squalor, the misery, and the degradation, but shows amid them sweet flowers of human purity, of human charity, of human tenderness, which makes even the slum a garden of the Lord, and shows how humanity can redeem even the vilest of social conditions. For we want our literature to inspire, and not to make us desperate. Far better paint a Utopia which inspires men to effort, than paint some rotting graveyard which tells only of the decay of death, and not the life that inevitably springs therefrom. And so I would have Theosophy everywhere proclaim the ideal in Art and in Literature, as it proclaims the subtle and invisible in Science, and doing this it will have its part in the great movement which is sweeping the world onwards to a nobler and a greater civilisation.
These ideas you may call " theosophical " if you will, for so they are, provided you do not limit them to the Theosophical Society. They are theosophical, but they belong to humanity, to the WISDOM, and not to a single organisation. Once I heard a Theosophist use a phrase that I was very sorry to hear: " our ideas." Ideas are the property of no men or body of men. They are free to every mind that can grasp them. T have heard it said: " The clergy are beginning to steal our ideas." But they are not ours any more than they are theirs. There is no theft in the commonwealth of thought; all belongs to everyone. Did we invent these ideas ? Did we discover them ? Have we any patent rights in thoughts old as the world and great as humanity itself ? Nay, they belong to the world, and glad and joyous the day will be when there is no longer the need of a Theosophical Society, because everyone will have embraced the truths which it is endeavouring to spread. Enough for us, my theosophical brethren, if we be allowed to act as pioneers of this movement so much greater than ourselves. Let us rejoice with joy ever deepening every time a great truth comes to human hearts clad in the garb most familiar and most welcome to them. Let us rejoice when The