it would have been sufficient that he
imagined it. I had already written in my diary, under some date in 1887,
that Madame Blavatsky's Masters were "trance personalities," and I must
have meant such beings as my black Titan, only more lasting and more
powerful. I had found when a boy in Dublin on a table in the Royal Irish
Academy a pamphlet on Japanese art and read there of an animal painter so
remarkable that horses he had painted upon a Temple wall, had slipped down
after dark and trampled the neighbours' fields of rice. Somebody had come
into the temple in the early morning, had been startled by a shower of
water drops, had looked up and seen painted horses still wet from the
dew-covered fields, but now "trembling into stillness."

I had soon mastered Mathers' symbolic system, and discovered that for a
considerable minority--whom I could select by certain unanalysable
characteristics--the visible world would completely vanish, and that
world, summoned by the symbol, take its place. One day when alone in a
third-class carriage, in the very middle of the railway bridge that
crosses the Thames near Victoria, I smelt incense. I was on my way to
Forest Hill; might it not come from some spirit Mathers had called up? I
had wondered when I smelt it at Madame Blavatsky's--if there might be some
contrivance, some secret censer, but that explanation was no longer
possible. I believed that Salamander of his but an image, and presently I
found analogies between smell and image. It must be from thought but what
certainty had I, that what had taken me by surprise, could be from my own
thought, and if a thought could affect the sense of smell, why not the
sense of touch? Then I discovered among that group of students that
surrounded Macgregor, a man who had fought a cat in his dreams and awaked
to find his breast covered with scratches. Was there an impassable
barrier between those scratches and the trampled fields of rice? It would
seem so, and yet all was uncertainty. What fixed law would our experiments
leave to our imagination?

Mathers had learning but no scholarship, much imagination and imperfect
taste, but if he made some absurd statement, some incredible claim, some
hackneyed joke, we would half consciously change claim, statement or joke,
as though he were a figure in a play of our composition. He was a
necessary extravagance, and he had carried further than anyone else, a
claim implicit in the romantic movement from the