hurch, with a lost
soul peering in anguish through the red bars of hell. Each and every
apparition was of the old life; all were emissaries from the forsaken
West summoning me back to my renounced allegiance. When the fever left
me, returning reason slowly brought order amid the welter of confused
ideas, as the ants sorted the grain for distracted Psyche, and for the
first time I considered in the detachment of reminiscence the nature of
my action in leaving England. I sifted the evidence at length as I lay
under the verandah slowly recovering strength; and when at last judgment
was delivered, it took the necessary form of condemnation.

I saw now that unless a man is prepared to discard every western usage,
to slough off his inherited cast of thought, to renounce his faith,
wholly and finally to abandon his country and his father's house, his
flight is but the blind expedient of cowardice or pride. Here and there
may be born one who can so cut himself off from the parent stem as to
endure a fruitful grafting upon an oriental stock, but I knew that I at
least was none such. I was no more prepared for so uncompromising a
renunciation than any other weakling who seeks prestige by parade of
exotic wisdom, and deems himself a seer if he can but name the Triad, or
tell the avatars of Vishnu, I had not the credulity which may justify
the honest renegade, and the western blood still ran too warmly in my
veins. I felt that were I to stay in the East for fifty years, I should
never reach the supreme heights of metaphysical abstraction whence men
really appear as specks and life as a play; therefore to remain was to
avow myself a runaway and to live henceforth despicable in my own eyes.
For over the unfathomable deep of oriental custom the torrent of our
civilization flows unblending, as in the Druid's legend the twin streams
of Dee flow clear through Bala lake, and never mingle with its waters.
Not for our use is that intricate mind which in logic needs more than
two premises to a conclusion, and in art is intolerant of all void
space, entangling its figures in labyrinths of ornament which Maya
herself might have devised to distract the sight from truth.

The Hindu has the true dignity of contemplation, and superbly removes
himself from the sordid greeds of life. But in imagining and reviling an
abstraction called Matter, he abides in the errors of the first Greek
sages, and mines so far beneath the trodden earth that when he lo