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 aw o
 
 THREE MODERN SEERS
 
 {F$y the same Author. 
 
 KIT'S WOMAN. 
 
 " In its way this is a little work of genius ; its 
 appeal is direct, its moral teaching forcible, 
 without a suggestion of cant. In the delightful 
 Cornish dialect of the different characters is 
 contained a mass of stringent philosophy on 
 love and life which hits one with the force of 
 novelty, as well as falling on the ear with the 
 music, almost, of poetry." — Bystander. 
 
 MY CORNISH NEIGHBOURS. 
 
 "Mrs. Havelock Ellis' unity is the unity of 
 one actual place. She studies her Cornish 
 neighbours with that quiet and patient pleasure 
 which is necessary for getting the truth out of 
 any rooted and real people." 
 
 G. K. Chesterton in the Daily News. 
 
 ATTAINMENT. 
 
 "Mrs. Havelock Ellis gives us here a story 
 of enthusiasms, of high ideals, and hearty 
 attempts to reach them. There is a certain 
 wise simplicity about the way the story is told, 
 which, while showing appreciation of the 
 ideals, also shows in sympathetic manner 
 where they must fail of attainment." 
 
 Daily Telegraph.
 
 \J^uuJ^%<jjJ^^
 
 THREE 
 MODERN SEERS 
 
 By 
 MRS. HAVELOCK ELLIS 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 STANLEY PAUL & CO 
 
 i CLIFFORD'S INN
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 HAZELI., WATSON AND VINEY, LD., 
 
 LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
 
 THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 
 
 TO 
 
 MY HUSBAND 
 
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 
 
 WHOSE HELP IN MY WORK 
 HAS BEEN ITS GREATEST STIMULUS 
 
 %^r ^r J*. ~i ^.*^ I
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The three men I have called seers in these 
 chapters have been chosen as representing 
 various sides of the moral, intellectual, and 
 spiritual outlook of our age. Hinton, 
 a veritable Don Quixote of the newer 
 morality, Nietzsche, a modern Lucifer of 
 the intellect, and Carpenter, a Child of the 
 Spirit, all meet on the common ground of 
 a striving towards perfection of individual 
 character as the chief factor in social 
 progress. However contradictory their 
 methods may appear at first sight, these 
 prophets of a sane morality are at one in 
 their plea for a solidarity working from 
 within outwards. In their individual con- 
 ceptions we find that their belief is, that 
 evil is the handmaid of good, and that good
 
 8 PREFACE 
 
 is the ultimate conclusion of the whole 
 matter. If the messages of these three 
 latter-day prophets were amalgamated, a 
 practical working scheme for daily living 
 could be easily evolved. To have the 
 courage to face problems according to 
 Hinton, to dare to knock down traditions 
 and conventions according to Nietzsche, 
 to be serene and brave enough to live out 
 what we have discovered, through our 
 introspection and destruction, according to 
 Carpenter, is the way to the larger vision 
 and the definite action. Every experiment 
 in fine living is a novitiate for the newer 
 experience which is bound to follow. To- 
 day we are on the verge of a great up- 
 heaval in our social life, and the followers 
 of men like these three seers of the new 
 order must have the courage to work into 
 definite action the ideals the forerunners 
 have proclaimed. 
 
 I have not attempted to put these studies 
 into literary style, but present them prac-
 
 PREFACE 9 
 
 tically as they were delivered from the 
 lecture platform some years ago, in the 
 hope that they may help those who are 
 groping in the new paths, and who may 
 be glad of a few hints as to the byways 
 which lead to the open road. 
 
 E. M. O. Ellis. 
 
 Carbis Bay Cornwall. 
 March, 1910.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 JAMES HINTON'S LIFE 
 
 Hinton a believer in the marriage of science and religion — 
 His teaching an outcome of his unconventional life — 
 Hinton's progressiveness and aggressiveness — Died before 
 his time — Why he is a great moral teacher— His analogy 
 of painting and morality — A saviour of women — Passion a 
 basis of ethics — "Myself in and for others" . pp. 17-50 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 JAMES HINTON'S ETHICS 
 
 Hinton's personal characteristics — A forerunner of 
 Nietzsche and Carpenter — Affinities of genius with weakness 
 — Nature and morality — Physical and spiritual worlds one — 
 Hinton's "dangerous views" — Monogamy and polygamy — 
 Asceticism and excess — Hinton's conception of true sexual 
 
 freedom pp. 53-87 
 
 11
 
 12 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 
 
 Pain biologically a guardian angel of the body — Also 
 guardian angel of 9011I — Examples in life — " Forward ends " 
 of pain pp. 91-120 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 
 
 False conception of pleasure — Hinton's view of it as lover 
 of nature and mystic — The ascetic and sensualist foes to 
 right understanding of pleasure— Pleasure a right in itself — 
 Restraint alone not enough — Sexual love as a sacrament — 
 Nature makes goodness and pleasure one in the marriage 
 relation — Relationship between man and woman a mystical 
 one pp. 123-153 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 
 
 Nietzsche a breaker of standard moral values — Mere 
 morality valueless— Individuality the first thing to obtain — 
 Nietzsche a tonic — Views on sin and suffering — Antagonism 
 to sympathy — Nietzsche's views on women — His attitude to 
 Christianity pp. 157-181)
 
 CONTENTS 13 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 EDWARD CARPENTER'S MESSAGE TO HIS AGE 
 
 Carpenter's personal serenity — Reason for this — His atti- 
 tude to the problems of the moment — His conception of true 
 democracy — His attitude to love, death, and failure — Real 
 life from within — Faith and its result . . pp. 193-227
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 JAMES HINTON'S LIFE
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 JAMES HINTON'S LIFE 
 
 Hinton a believer in the marriage of science and 
 religion— His teaching an otitcome of his uncon- 
 ventional life — Hinton's progressiveness and 
 aggressiveness— Died before his time — Why he 
 is a great moral teacher— His analogy of painting 
 and morality— A saviour of -women— Passion a 
 basis of ethics—" Myself in and for others." 
 
 James Hinton's name is known to many, 
 but the essential characteristics of the man 
 and his work are known to few. Fear — 
 the fear of the orthodox towards the newer 
 revelation of truth — lias stood in the way 
 of a true understanding of a real seer. 
 A man who dared to say, " Christ was 
 the Saviour of men, but I am the saviour 
 of women, and I don't envy Him a bit," 
 has to be reckoned with in a different way 
 from the one chosen by Ellice Hopkins in
 
 18 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 the Life and Letters of James Hinton ? 
 which, so far, is the only personal record 
 we have of this man. 
 
 Hinton was a force, a great force, be- 
 cause he was a veritable child of Nature 
 as well as a practical doctor, a mystic, and 
 a very warm-hearted human creature. A 
 child of Nature and a seer can unravel a 
 few mysteries for us. " Practical mystics," 
 said Lord Rosebery once, when speaking 
 of Gordon, "are among the great driving 
 forces of the world." 
 
 The more we study James Hinton the 
 more we realise that he was such a driving 
 force, and he came with his message at 
 a time when science seemed at war with 
 religion. Hinton was a modern seer who 
 realised some of the strange wonders that 
 may arise from the mystic marriage of 
 science with religion. We are learning 
 more and more that this union is not a 
 wizard's dream, but a great reality. Hinton 
 was one of the first modern scientists to
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 19 
 
 realise that the physical and the spiritual 
 
 are not two worlds, but one, the physical 
 
 being the appearance or phenomenon of 
 
 which the spiritual is the reality. 
 
 " Matter," says Hinton, " is a mere symbol or 
 expression, without any meaning of its own, for some 
 unknown fact. To deny it is no less absurd than to 
 assert it ; it has to be interpreted. 11 
 
 What Hinton felt to be more important 
 than to invent, or even to discover, another 
 world, was to rightly interpret this, and 
 here comes in the sanity of this man as 
 against those who, while trying to grasp the 
 things beyond their reach, fail to understand 
 and interpret what is under their eyes and 
 waiting for service at their hands. 
 
 " We are in the spiritual and eternal world, 11 wrote 
 Hinton : " there is no other in which we can be, for 
 there is no other. These physical existences, as we 
 call them, are the spiritual and eternal existence 
 as it is perceived by us, related to the true existence, 
 as the ' appearance 1 perceived by the eye is related 
 to the physical object of which it is the appearance. 
 That is, our existences are the phenomena of the 
 eternal existence. 11
 
 20 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Hinton knew that there is really no need 
 for us, at intervals, to insist on people fixing 
 their thoughts on eternal tilings, for he 
 realised well enough that there are no others. 
 All this to him was not cant, but revelation, 
 and joy, and freedom, as it was to Sweden- 
 borg and Joan of Arc after their revelations. 
 Hinton, however, was before his time, and 
 he shared the fate of his kind. He was 
 tortured by mediocrity. His message was 
 too big, and his interpreters were too small. 
 The consequence is, that he stands to-day 
 in the public mind as a cross between a 
 dangerous sensualist and an impossible 
 idealist, and, though tongues wag over him 
 and heads shake, the real man and his real 
 mission remain unfocussed. 
 
 To understand a man and his work it is 
 necessary to follow the life which makes 
 the work. I knew Mrs. Hinton and also 
 Miss Caroline H addon, Mrs. Hinton s sister 
 and Hinton's great helper in his work. I 
 have also had the valuable help of his great
 
 HINTONS LIFE 21 
 
 friend and co-worker, Mrs. Boole, in pre- 
 paring these chapters on Hinton's life and 
 work, so that I feel I may speak with a 
 certain authority, and without impertinence, 
 on some matters which are not realised 
 about this mystic scientist, of whom indeed 
 it might be written over any mistakes he 
 may have made, " Much shall be forgiven 
 him, for he loved much." 
 
 James Hinton was the son of a well- 
 known Baptist minister, the Rev. Howard 
 Hinton, and Eliza Birt, his wife. He was 
 born at Reading in 1822, and was the third 
 of eleven children. His father was an excel- 
 lent geologist and naturalist, and it is said 
 that he was an eloquent preacher. This 
 eloquence was certainly inherited by his son, 
 who often outran eloquence in an incon- 
 tinence of speech which led him into many 
 difficulties of action. A breath of scandal 
 on these difficulties by casual outsiders, who 
 rarely can truly interpret what they neither 
 know nor understand, may account for some
 
 22 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 of the wild stories still current about this 
 man, who understood and helped women 
 and so was often misinterpreted by those 
 whom he had helped most. 
 
 James Hinton's chief characteristics were 
 inherited from his mother, who was a rare 
 personality. Probably Hinton's attitude 
 towards all women came in the first instance 
 from his love of one woman, his mother. 
 His childhood was happy, but the loss of his 
 brother Howard, from scarlet fever, brought 
 him in contact with stern realities when he 
 was about twelve. He then became his 
 mother's right hand. He never went to a 
 public school or college, and this may 
 account for much that was characteristic 
 and peculiar in his character. Perhaps we 
 may rightly attribute Hinton's entire absence 
 of prejudice, and his singular freedom from 
 the intellectual prepossessions of any par- 
 ticular school of thought, to this fact. 
 
 Yet, realising the innate individuality 
 of the man, one hesitates to declare that
 
 HINTONS LIFE 23 
 
 Winchester or Oxford would have pruned 
 him into a conventional shape. He was 
 so entirely himself. He was quite un- 
 traditionalised about his clothes, his ideals, 
 his aims, and his actions. The man who 
 went down Fleet Street barefooted and 
 dressed as a beggar in order to understand 
 the feelings of a tramp, and who got drunk 
 simply to see if he would feel inclined to 
 beat his wife, might have been influenced 
 a great deal through such experiments, but 
 very little through a public-school and 
 college routine. The friend who came to 
 see him and found him eating a mutton 
 chop and dissecting a human ear at the 
 same time, would have found it difficult to 
 place this intense, enthusiastic, unconven- 
 tional, and in many ways uncontrolled nature 
 under the banner of " good form " and 
 " balance " to which the world gives its 
 favour. 
 
 It is true Hinton lacked ballast, and his 
 philosophy needs co-ordinating, but it is a
 
 24 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 philosophy which repays investigation and 
 which as yet has not been given in its 
 fulness to the world. 
 
 This seer, with the almond-shaped blue 
 eyes, liquid as a woman's, soft skin, brown 
 hair, long and high forehead, narrow, pallid 
 and hollow cheeks, large quivering nostrils, 
 and curved mouth betokening the ascetic 
 and the sensualist alike— the upper lip being 
 thin, and the lower full and sensitive — this 
 quivering, vibrating creature, dreadfully thin, 
 not with illness, but through the fire which 
 consumed him, this muscularly strong man 
 with the tenderness of a woman, has still to 
 be reckoned with in our solution of modern 
 problems. 
 
 We have many things to face in the near 
 future. Perhaps the biggest revolution the 
 world has ever known is close at hand — the 
 revolution of love. Hinton is a distinct 
 herald of purer and saner revelations than 
 we dare as yet to realise. He was not only 
 a very original thinker on many matters,
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 
 
 ZO 
 
 but during the last five years of his life he 
 was as a prophet consumed with a terrific 
 message. 
 
 In 1872, three years before his death, in a 
 letter to Miss Haddon, he said he had a 
 feeling that his unpublished manuscripts 
 would be far the most important of his 
 works, for he knew that the records of his 
 thinking would be more far-reaching than 
 his made-up books. It is with some of these 
 manuscripts that I propose to deal. 
 
 Hinton's great love of truth, his immense 
 intellectual courage, which led him to accept 
 the consequences of any logical conclusion, 
 whatever it might cost him, make this 
 suggestive thinker and his work valuable to 
 modern students of sociology and ethics. 
 Hinton's purity of life and intense love 
 of two women, his mother and his wife, 
 his harebrained and impulsive assertions, 
 at times, to the unreasoning small-talkers 
 around him, from whom he always expected 
 understanding, in spite of the continual
 
 26 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 well-meaning misinterpretation of his aims 
 and his life, endear him to us, because of 
 his great humanity and his love of truth. 
 He missed the advantages and disadvantages 
 of a public-school and college training, but 
 the world educated him in a very real sense. 
 
 The first work he did to earn his living 
 was to take a situation as a youth at a 
 wholesale draper's in Whitechapel. Here 
 he realised, in a way he never forgot, the 
 cruelty of the undeveloped man and the 
 degradation of the wronged woman. His 
 life in Whitechapel made its mark on all 
 his future life, though he was only there a 
 year. After that he went to Bristol as an 
 insurance clerk. At nineteen he fell in love 
 with Margaret Haddon. One feels very 
 tender towards this ill-clothed, uncouth, 
 reserved youth, who could not express his 
 feelings and who only turned white when 
 in the presence of the woman he loved. 
 
 James Hinton could never be made to 
 care about his outward appearance. I
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 27 
 
 remember well how Mrs. Hinton emphasised 
 the fact of the incompatibility of genius, 
 not only with tidiness, but with domestic 
 happiness. She knew, Hinton knew, we all 
 know, that mediocrity of temperament is 
 the best security for domestic happiness, but 
 domestic happiness may not be the be-all 
 and end-all of the divine plan for all Nature's 
 children. Hinton was a veritable child of 
 Nature, and he was also a genius, in the 
 sense that he has interpreted genius, as a 
 vehicle through which the intimate heart 
 of Nature can express herself for God, a 
 temperament of impulse and naturalness 
 whose affinity is more often with weakness 
 than with strength. Genius is not, accord- 
 ing to Hinton, supreme, intellectual or other 
 power, but unconscious and glad obedience 
 to the impulses of Nature. 
 
 In his twentieth year Hinton entered at 
 St. Bartholomew's, and when he had quali- 
 fied he practised as assistant surgeon at 
 Newport in Essex. Here we get the first
 
 28 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 record of his religious doubts. The time 
 had arrived when he felt he must cast off the 
 orthodox views he had gained from others 
 and search for truth for himself, and not 
 only for himself, but to reassure the woman 
 he loved. We have a glimpse into the 
 double agony he went through when he felt 
 lie must renounce every cherished belief. 
 He knew, young as he was, that no good 
 woman can really dedicate herself except to 
 a dedicated man. He began even in his 
 youth to realise — what it takes some of us 
 nearly all our lives to grasp— that neither 
 comfort, money, fame, nor even love itself 
 can satisfy any life which is not first dedi- 
 cated to truth and the service of others. 
 
 The tension of Hinton's mind about re- 
 ligion was relieved by a journey to Jamaica 
 in 1847, as medical officer in an emigrant 
 ship. During a year's absence we find in 
 his letters to his future wife that things 
 were opening out for him. On his return 
 he became engaged to Margaret H addon, and
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 29 
 
 he was then a dedicated man in two senses 
 — to a woman and to work. The curious 
 combination of arrogance and humility which 
 we find in his letters at this time gives the 
 keynote to all his future life. He seemed 
 always to be either kicking against the 
 pricks or bowing his head. " I look upon 
 myself as a sort of conglomeration of faults, 
 a kind of aggregate of defects put into a 
 bodily shape," he says. 
 
 In 1852 he married, and in 1853 his first 
 child, Howard, was born, and then we get a 
 ten years' record of hard work and domestic 
 happiness, not without struggle, for more 
 children came, and his income was small. 
 
 It is very interesting to follow him 
 through his work as a general practitioner. 
 In these days it is a universally received fact 
 that mind can affect matter. To Hinton it 
 came as a great revelation when he was 
 studying homeopathy that — 
 
 " anything that acts on the emotions will cause or 
 cure disease, because of the simple fact that all the
 
 30 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 emotions produce a specific effect upon the small 
 vessels, the capillaries, which expand under exciting 
 and pleasing emotions and contract under depressing 
 ones. 1 '' 
 
 We have only to look around us and we 
 can see daily before us emotions setting up 
 those processes which cause diseases and cure 
 them. One rarely finds a person who is 
 passionately in love ill, and one rarely finds 
 a bad-tempered grumbler well. Hinton 
 gives an instance of the triumph of mind 
 over matter during his study of homeopathy, 
 which led him to many of his conclusions 
 about suggestion. One of the physicians 
 at the Homeopathic Hospital wanted to go 
 to the Derby, but there were still some 
 patients to see, and two of the cases were 
 serious. Hinton took his friend's duty, and 
 as he had experimented often with bread 
 pills, he gave these patients sugar of milk. 
 Some days after, both patients came again, 
 cured. One had found his pains much 
 worse after the physic, but he soon began
 
 HINTONS LIFE 31 
 
 to mend, and the other was cured at 
 once ! 
 
 Social and moral questions gradually 
 became absorbing matters in Hinton's life. 
 He jotted down his impressions, theories 
 and facts, every night. The manuscripts to 
 which I have had access would alone be a 
 life's work for any man, but when one thinks 
 of him as a celebrated aurist and also a 
 writer of such published books as Man and 
 His Dwelling- Place, and Life in Nature, 
 there is no wonder that the brain gradually 
 became overtaxed and that the man died 
 before his time. His thoughts were always 
 written down as they came to him, and they 
 continually outgrew their expression. To 
 pick out his meaning from these rapidly 
 written pages is sometimes almost as difficult 
 as it was for his hearers to unravel sense 
 from nonsense, when he incessantly talked 
 out to all sorts of muddle-headed people 
 the results of his, as yet, unformulated con- 
 clusions. His passionate desire for know- 
 
 3
 
 32 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 ledge made him long to give up his life to 
 philosophy, but in 18G3 he resolutely locked 
 his manuscripts away and accepted an 
 appointment as aural surgeon at Guy's 
 Hospital. At the same time he worked a 
 specialist's practice in the West End. 
 Money worries obliged him to do this, 
 and there was no other way out while 
 he had a wife and family depending on 
 him. 
 
 In 1866 Mr. Toynbee, his great friend 
 and fellow-worker, died, and Hinton suc- 
 ceeded to his practice and lived in Savile 
 Row. Then, at last, came the reaction 
 from the torture of money worries, and 
 prosperity and congenial friends made life 
 a different thing for James Hinton. 
 
 In 1869 he felt justified in unlocking his 
 manuscripts, and he devoted his evenings 
 to philosophy. He worked feverishly to 
 make up for lost time, and the strain was 
 too great. His large practice, his incessant 
 activity, and the mere mechanical writing
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 33 
 
 of his manuscripts were alone too much 
 for one man's nervous strength. 
 
 In 1871 he passed through what Ellice 
 Hopkins calls a moral revolution, but she 
 is careful not to tell us what that revolution 
 was. No competent biographer of James 
 Hinton can, however, ignore this. He, 
 above all men, would like the world to 
 profit by what he foresaw and endured in 
 the foretelling ; and in these chapters on 
 James Hinton I shall deal with these sub- 
 jects in an open and fearless way. 
 
 I do not want to hurt the susceptibilities 
 of any student or disciple of his who, ac- 
 cepting his more orthodox sayings, is yet 
 nervous of his later conclusions and sug- 
 gestions. I feel, however, that a man of 
 this type needs an interpreter who has 
 no fear of what the world may say or 
 what the world can do if the truth is 
 given to it. 
 
 No sincerity of purpose, no perplexed 
 striving for truth, no action however igno-
 
 34 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 rant and painful in its results, need crave 
 for an apology from a world whose pre- 
 vailing creed is, not the fine one Hinton 
 proclaimed, " Love and do what you like," 
 but " Do what you like, only don't be found 
 out." I shall make no excuse, later on, for 
 saying the truth, as far as I know it, of this 
 man's conclusions on some grave questions. 
 
 A single, big, loving and humble nature 
 like that of James Hinton will, nay, must, 
 through its very warmth and impulsive- 
 ness, make mistakes ; but mistakes are not 
 treacheries against love and the eternal 
 verities, but experiments in self-education. 
 Once we look upon eternity as being here 
 and now, death is seen as a mere station 
 on our journey. It was surely this to 
 Hinton. Hinton was a man who gave to 
 the world a message he was too hurried 
 to co-ordinate, and who died before his time 
 and before he could even grasp the might 
 of his own gospel. 
 
 James Hinton had a very special mes-
 
 HINTONS LIFE 35 
 
 sage for humanity, but it has not been 
 delivered yet. This message is even more 
 peculiarly valuable in that he had not the 
 serenity of faith of Edward Carpenter or the 
 egoism and intellectual pride of Nietzsche. 
 A man who is seeking attracts the seeker ; 
 a man who is honest helps truth. Hinton 
 was a searcher for realities and a single and 
 devoted lover of Nature and her laws. 
 
 Though he had not " arrived," he has, 
 perhaps, through that very fact, helped 
 some to see further than might otherwise 
 have been possible, and for the sake of 
 what we owe him we have no right to 
 keep back a word of his meaning if we feel 
 we can in any way interpret his intricate 
 philosophy. Whether his conclusions are 
 false or true, the man himself was true 
 and so deserves a hearing. 
 
 As late as 1870 he wrote in a letter : 
 
 " Will my friends try after I am dead, for I 
 cannot do it myself; I cannot say it as I mean and 
 wish to tell the world, how beautiful and rich and
 
 36 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 absolutely good, full of joy and gladness beyond 
 all that heart can wish or imagination paint, I feel 
 that the world is, this human life. 11 
 
 In 1874 he gave up his practice and spent 
 the summer in Lulworth in Dorsetshire. 
 In his last letter to his son he says : 
 
 "There is a wrong, an intense wrong, in our society, 
 running all through our life, and it will be made 
 righter some day. I dashed myself against it, but 
 it is not one man's strength that can move it. It 
 was too much for my brain, but it is by the failure 
 of some that others succeed, and by my very foolish- 
 ness, perhaps, there shall come a better success to 
 others, perhaps more than any cleverness or wisdom 
 of mine could have wrought, and I hope I have 
 learnt, too, to be wiser. We have not come to the 
 end, though I am so exhausted that I seem scarcely 
 able to believe in anything more before me." 
 
 James Hinton died very suddenly at the 
 last, of acute inflammation of the brain. 
 He had gone to the Azores to see if a 
 change would rest him, but he died at 
 Porta Delgada in a hospital, after a few 
 days of intense suffering, in which he knew
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 37 
 
 no one. This was on December 16th, 1875, 
 when he was fifty-three years of age. 
 
 What is the particular line of thought 
 which this extraordinary man has left us 
 to work out ? What object had he before 
 him in searching out and combining so 
 many curious and interesting details of 
 psychology and metaphysics ? 
 
 Hinton always looked on the art of the 
 teacher as superior to that of the doctor, 
 and he considered it monstrous that children 
 should be taught nothing of morals and of 
 their duties as citizens. This many-sided 
 man was pre-eminently a teacher — a great 
 moral teacher more than anything else — 
 and all the arts he loved helped him to his 
 moral conclusions. He was a passionate 
 lover of music, and it gave him intense 
 delight to follow the way in which music 
 was constructed. He used to bury his 
 face in his hands when something he liked 
 was being played at the Monday Popular 
 Concerts, and those who were near him said
 
 38 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 that he looked afterwards as if lie had passed 
 through a great spiritual crisis. 
 
 As Miss Ellice Hopkins truly says, his 
 most marked peculiarity was the intensely 
 emotional character of his intellect. In 
 approaching his solution of many moral 
 problems we must always bear this in mind, 
 and also we must remember that in many 
 ways he needed ballast. In spite of this, 
 however, here and there, and, in fact, in 
 the greater part of his work and conclusions, 
 we must also remember that we are dealing 
 with a seer, one who could, and did, pierce 
 the veil of the commonplace and so-called 
 material facts of life and see beyond. In 
 this very matter of music he says : 
 
 " I perceive how music represents the universe. 
 It is an ideal, and it is emphatically a representative 
 of the universe because it especially embraces discords, 
 things evil in themselves, yet making an essential 
 part of the perfection of the whole.' 11 
 
 His study of pictures came later, and his 
 analysis of these, even more than that of
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 39 
 
 music, opened up new ideas about morals 
 and life. It was characteristic of the man 
 to send some of his David Coxes to public- 
 houses, so that they should be explained to 
 the people there. His personal study of 
 how a true artist expresses himself in a 
 picture gave him the key as to how a man 
 who wanted to make life an art should 
 proceed. He saw, through his study of 
 pictures, how the growing artist works 
 through mere impulse into elaborate detail, 
 and from elaborate detail into a freedom 
 which, through its very width and know- 
 ledge, can dispense with slavish adherence 
 to tradition and detailed morality, using 
 these only as almost unconscious factors in 
 the simplicity of the greater and stronger 
 expression of himself. 
 
 To Hinton, then, the law was the same 
 for both art and life. First, impulse, 
 then elaboration of detail and restraint of 
 impulse, and after that the deeper ex- 
 pression where detail and restraint are lost
 
 40 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 in the larger beauty of simplicity and 
 freedom. 
 
 The life of the animal is a life completely 
 at one with Nature and with impulse, but 
 it is a life below morality. The restraints of 
 the conscious personality and the elaborate 
 detail of morality have no part in the impulse 
 of the mere animal desires and actions. The 
 life of the ordinary average man is not 
 at one even with Nature. A practical 
 farmer may perhaps dare to assert that the 
 life of the young man about town is not 
 nearly as sound and close to Nature as the 
 clean, sweet life of a dog, a cow, or a horse. 
 
 Hinton saw this as a doctor as well as a 
 mystic. In animals, unless man interferes, 
 we get a nature harmony. In the average 
 man and woman we get impulses and con- 
 ventions contradicting one another. It is 
 natural animal impulse fighting with elabo- 
 rate moral detail and conventional tradition. 
 Restraint and duty push back impulse, or 
 else impulse conquers. Restraint and duty
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 41 
 
 often go to the wall, and we say of the 
 artist, in life or in art, this is failure, that 
 is disaster. We can all see the conflict of 
 impulse and goodness around us. 
 
 A good person is often dull, or cold, or 
 hard, or too elaborate in restraint, and with 
 an absence of delight in living. A false 
 terror of impulse brings about an unreasoned 
 sense of sin. Neither the person of uncon- 
 trolled impulses nor the person of unnatural 
 restraint can, as artist or man, get to the 
 perfect simplicity which the good man and 
 the real artist must attain if they wish to 
 achieve true greatness. The fuller freedom 
 has welded both impulse and elaboration 
 into an harmonious whole, making for 
 beauty, simplicity, and a freedom which 
 needs neither licence nor restraint. 
 
 Now, what Hinton realised as beauty in 
 art he believed to be possible in morals. 
 He stated that it is possible for man to 
 attain to a life in which nature and passion 
 can be at one with goodness. He always
 
 42 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 felt goodness and impulse ought not to be 
 antagonistic. Hinton wanted men and 
 women to live above the law, not below it. 
 He wanted them to live above mere im- 
 pulse, and above the elaboration of the 
 letter of morality, so that the true spirit of 
 goodness can have a chance. 
 
 The highest life, according to Hinton, 
 was one in which the impulses move 
 spontaneously in the direction of right. He 
 would have no waste of healthy, natural 
 human feelings. The history of the indi- 
 vidual passes through the irresponsible 
 passion of the child, which is almost as 
 unconscious of evil as in the animal. Later 
 the evil comes in, when passion is pursued 
 consciously or for conscious pleasure instead 
 of for unconscious service. It is just at this 
 point, when pleasure is emphasised and 
 service is ignored, that gluttony and lust 
 come in and spoil pleasure and service alike. 
 It is at this stage that, in alarm, man 
 brings in restraint, not on his sweet natural
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 43 
 
 impulses, but on his gluttony, and then we 
 see what happens ! He confounds the 
 gluttony with the impulse, and restrains or 
 condemns the good with the bad. We all 
 know the process well enough. It is all 
 around us, and we are all more or less 
 suffering from the wrong conception that 
 it is asceticism that is good and licence 
 only that is bad. 
 
 They are both bad, because they are both 
 equally self-centred, and so equally dangerous 
 to human progress. Asceticism and licence 
 are both enemies to the real freedom in 
 which strength and purity, joy and exu- 
 berance, are essential factors. This greater 
 freedom which unites service and pleasure 
 is what James Hinton gave his life to teach. 
 
 He was the pioneer of a freedom which 
 could easily dispense with both licence and 
 restraint. He knew well enough that before 
 we can really get this freedom a law- 
 breaker is essential, and by a law-breaker 
 he meant one who will dare to break the
 
 44 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 letter in order to free the spirit. " I want 
 one law for men and women," he said, " a 
 law of the spirit. One law, the absolute 
 desire for good in both." 
 
 Why he called himself a saviour of women 
 was that he realised in the relations of men 
 and women more than anywhere else how 
 far away from being real artists we are. 
 Uncontrolled impulse, elaboration of worldly 
 detail, a hypocritical upholding of immoral 
 so-called moralities all around us, all this is 
 evident enough ; but what of the simplicity 
 and beauty of the lover who has passed 
 beyond mere impulse and elaborate restraint 
 into a perfect freedom ? How many of 
 these lovers, either among men or women, 
 can any one of us count on our fingers ? 
 
 Hinton believed absolutely in woman, and 
 he realised how hampered she is in a society 
 which has reached a certain high code of 
 sexual morality whose best tenets are only 
 held by the average man in theory. He 
 saw clearly how the result of this lip
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 45 
 
 morality reacts on every class of woman in 
 the community. It affects the class the 
 average man monopolises and enervates, and 
 the class he prostitutes and despises. 
 
 Intense suffering is the lot of both the 
 pampered and the prostituted. Both are in 
 chains and are to be equally pitied. Hinton 
 saw this as a doctor, as a very human 
 person, and above all as a social reformer 
 and as a truly unselfish man. 
 
 " I think of him pre-eminently," said one of his 
 most intimate friends, " as the one man I have 
 known who never tolerated selfishness or self-regard 
 in any shape or under any disguise, who hunted 
 them pitilessly out of every corner in life. Each 
 thing is to be put aside as soon as it grows into 
 a self form. 1 ' 
 
 James Hinton's conclusions about social 
 reform, especially with regard to women, 
 are open to question, but his motives were 
 absolutely pure and simple. Whether pas- 
 sion should be made a basis of ethics is, of 
 course, open to discussion, and his gospel
 
 46 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 of " others' needs," wants more explanation 
 than we have had as yet from his inter- 
 preters. To the very last Hinton did not 
 know the world. He had neither the good 
 nor the bad qualities of the real man of 
 the world. He was Nature's child, and his 
 visions and ideals were not those of the 
 drawing-room, but of the heavens ; and yet, 
 fixed as his vision was on a star, his im- 
 pulsive, earth-bound nature was as much 
 torn and tossed, to the very end, as the 
 villa-bound, strenuous, and perplexed seekers 
 for truth who listened to his gospel. 
 
 Hinton was always open to the conviction 
 that a newer vision might come to him at 
 any time and modify or intensify the old 
 one. The conception of truth, not Truth 
 itself, he knew to be a fluid and not a rigid 
 thing. As he characteristically said once, 
 "My notions, though rather clever, may be 
 the merest moonshine, no more likely to be 
 true than that cats should walk on their 
 tails."
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 47 
 
 He taught, and truly, that right is only 
 a rigid thing when you are acting for self, 
 and a fluid thing if acting for others. For 
 instance, a man to whom keeping the 
 Sabbath is a rigid thing will not only do 
 no manner of work in a technical sense 
 on Sunday, but he will refuse to save his 
 neighbour's ox from death. He is bound 
 by a rigid code which fossilises his impulses 
 to good and limits his service powers. 
 Hi n ton saw very clearly that we have 
 made our morals consist in shutting our 
 eyes to the relations of things. It will take 
 a long time to supplant our traditionalised 
 conception of morals by true morals. 
 Hinton said it would take three genera- 
 tions, and he wisely held that we must 
 begin with the children. 
 
 The people who follow in any degree their 
 own inner vision of a new order of morality 
 suffer from petty inquisition and social 
 ostracism. The fear of this makes many 
 good men and women cowards, and so a big 
 
 4
 
 48 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 human good is delayed. We must neither 
 be cowards nor restless ; but, above all, we 
 must not be cowards. Hinton died before 
 his time because the fight was too much 
 for him. He, was no coward, but he had 
 strained his nervous strength beyond its 
 power of resistance, and he had not, even as 
 a seer, the deeper knowledge which makes 
 us work without haste as well as without 
 rest. Sympathy from without, and deeper 
 understanding of his vision from within, 
 might have helped him. Serenity and more 
 faith certainly would have saved him much 
 of his mental suffering at the last. To be 
 the slayer or the slain in these great 
 matters implies a lack of equipoise. We 
 must never force the vision, but if it comes, 
 either to us or through us, we must accept 
 it. Nor let us crush the heart and soul out 
 of one who has not only seen, but pro- 
 claimed, a new truth. To come out of our 
 rigidity and cease condemning is the first 
 law of the spiritual life. Let us open our
 
 HINTON'S LIFE 49 
 
 eyes to all good, and be tender over all 
 limitations but our own. Condemnation, 
 or pulling down, is the dull thing. Our 
 work is to build up. 
 
 Hinton's morals go beyond the dictum 
 which says, " Live for self," and also beyond 
 that which says, " Live for others." He 
 would say, " Give a true, joyous, natural 
 response to every claim, whether of self or 
 others." This can only be done by wise steer- 
 ing between asceticism or restraint, and excess 
 or self-indulgence. In order to live out this 
 ideal of James Hinton's we should have to 
 look upon ourselves, and others, as a means 
 to an end, and, therefore, the means must be 
 cared for and fulfilled because of the end. 
 His great cry, then, is not " for myself and 
 others," but, "myself in and for others." 
 This idea touches vital questions of appetites 
 and desires, and also of human service, and 
 it is with his suggestions on these matters 
 that the three following chapters will be 
 concerned.
 
 50 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Every fighter for freedom and truth will 
 echo Hinton's own words : 
 
 " I am," he says, " like a man climbing a mountain. 
 Every limb strained to the utmost, every nerve tense ; 
 and he or she who would be with me must accept 
 life so, must climb the mountain or be content to 
 keep upon the plain. They must accept the strain, 
 the effort. They must face, closing their eyes even 
 that they may not see, the precipices with sheer 
 death at the bottom of them — the pathless rocks 
 that mock all thought of progress. They must 
 breathe that thin, keen air, and be content to walk on 
 ice, where each footstep is a slip, and would be a fall, 
 but that it enables us to take the next. 11
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 JAMES HINTON'S ETHICS
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 JAMES HINTON'S ETHICS 
 
 Hinton's personal characteristics— A forerunner of 
 Nietzsche and Carpenter — Affinities of genius 
 with weakness— Nature and morality— Physical 
 and spiritual worlds one— Hinton's " dangerous 
 views "—Monogamy and polygamy— Asceticism 
 and excess— Hinton's conception of true sexual 
 freedom. 
 
 Though James Hinton died in 1875, yet 
 to-day one rarely meets with any one who 
 has the least idea of his methods or of 
 himself. Some only know of him as a 
 celebrated aurist, others confuse him with 
 his son and speak vaguely of him as one 
 who had wrestled with the fourth dimension. 1 
 
 1 His son C. H. Hintoiij who died in 1907, edited some 
 of his father's writings under the title of The Art of Thinking 
 (1879); and was known by his varied and interesting essays 
 and romances bearing on the fourth dimension. His chief 
 books are : Scientific Romances (1884-96) ; A New Era of 
 Thought (1888) ; Stella : Studies of the Unseen (1895) ; The 
 Fourth Dimension (1904) ; An Episode of Flatland (1907). 
 
 53
 
 54 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Some few, with nervous hesitation, inquire 
 whether he was not an ardent advocate 
 of polygamy and whether he committed 
 suicide. Those whose interest has been 
 stirred read the Life and Letters of James 
 Hinton, by Ellice Hopkins, and come to 
 the conclusion that Hinton was a disguised 
 missionary with a leaning towards free love. 
 A few consider him as one who dealt 
 with obscure metaphysical problems of no 
 general interest. These ideas are either 
 exaggerations or misconceptions. Accord- 
 ing to Mrs. Hinton, the life edited by Miss 
 Hopkins only contains what was credible. 
 
 If, his wife declared, all could be put 
 down about this profound thinker it would 
 not be believed. Miss Hopkins only knew 
 James Hinton for two years before he died, 
 and she had imbibed from his teachings 
 only what belonged to her own conception 
 of things. She edited his letters at a time 
 when it was unadvisable from a worldly 
 point of view to tell the truth either about
 
 HINTONS ETHICS 55 
 
 the man or his message. Compromise and 
 expediency about a great man always leave 
 little men in the dark about him. Hinton 
 was a great and good man, though not a 
 goody-goody man. 
 
 Hinton once said to his wife, " People 
 will say when I am dead that I was such 
 a good man. Will you always say that I 
 was not ? You know that I am not." 
 " You are a darling ! " emphatically declared 
 Mrs. Hinton. 
 
 In a letter to Caroline Haddon, again, he 
 says : 
 
 " I have seen so simply and clearly that I am one 
 of the ' bad ' people. Their nature is my nature. I 
 am not unlike other men, only unlike those I have 
 been falsely put amongst. I see, too, more plainly 
 how I am unlike and apart from the good. Their 
 luxury I always loathed, but now I see that I loathe 
 their restraints too." 
 
 Such statements about himself as these 
 may account for some of the ideas that are 
 afloat about James Hinton. The world is
 
 56 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 curiously willing to take us at our own 
 estimate, and the man who rashly declares 
 himself to be bad is readily believed, 
 especially if he has an unfashionable and 
 unconventional truth to deliver. Hinton 
 had the courage to say, to do, and to face 
 things which in his day scared and be- 
 wildered the truth-seekers more than they 
 stimulated them. 
 
 He saw how we all try to bind giants 
 with cobwebs, so he endeavoured to clear 
 away some of the cobwebs in his own soul 
 and face the giants. He once caught him- 
 self, in a fit of absent-mindedness, writing a 
 prescription for an ointment to " rub round 
 the world." It was characteristic of the man. 
 James Hinton had intense vitality, immense 
 emotional force, great love of scientific 
 research, a reverent worship of and belief 
 in Nature, an overwhelming incontinence of 
 speech, and a child-like belief that his views 
 would be accepted and co-ordinated by those 
 to whom he turned for understanding. In
 
 HINTON'S ETHICS 57 
 
 spite of each failure he believed the next 
 kindred spirit would comprehend and balance 
 what he really meant, but as a rule it 
 happened that one more terrified truth- 
 seeker flew to the herd to be reassured. 
 
 Hinton had a nature at once mystical and 
 scientific. He was the modern forerunner 
 of this apparently incongruous marriage of 
 which we cannot as yet know the issue. 
 Hinton was as emotional and receptive as a 
 woman, while remaining intellectually crea- 
 tive and virile as a man. When a friend 
 said to Hinton's mother that he had some- 
 thing of the woman in him, she replied, 
 "You could not pay me a higher compliment. 
 I desire nothing better for my sons than 
 that they should have something of the 
 woman in them. Jesus Christ had." 
 
 James Hinton is very much judged 
 through his immature work or his very ex- 
 travagant outbursts, so that it is desirable 
 to dwell, in this chapter, on his real sanity 
 and suggestiveness. A few women, out of 

 
 58 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 a hurt vanity or a misapprehension of his 
 meaning, have called him bad names ; but 
 the insinuation merely indicates their want 
 of humour, of intellect, or of self-respect. 
 There are women still living, and notably 
 two who are no longer with us — Hinton's 
 wife and her sister Caroline Haddon — whose 
 whole attitude to finiteness and infiniteness 
 has borne the mark of his individuality and 
 goodness. 
 
 When I last saw Caroline Haddon, a 
 few years before her death, blind and eaten 
 up with gout and its kindred pains, I felt 
 that one need never worry about what 
 happens, but only as to how we take what 
 happens. Intellectually as keen as ever, 
 full of interest in this world and the next, 
 lying sightless and helpless, with a serenity 
 which baffled all mere speculation, I suddenly 
 realised as I talked to her that she was a 
 better testimony to the worth of James 
 Hinton than the ablest book that could be 
 written about him. He was the great in-
 
 HINTON'S ETHICS 59 
 
 fluence of her life, and she was a very brave 
 and a very good woman. Those who love 
 us, educate us, it has been well said, and 
 only those who love us, know us. It is 
 always well to draw near to the inner heart 
 of those for whom the crowd has stupid 
 names and a few people whole-hearted de- 
 votion. The so-called dangerous lunatics, 
 free-lovers, the despised and rejected of men, 
 have generally a true word for those who 
 will listen and understand. Even if these 
 people can be proved cracked, there is 
 always, as Maudsley declared once, a possi- 
 bility, in this way, of letting the light 
 through the crevices. 
 
 James Hinton was curiously the fore- 
 runner of men like Nietzsche and Edward 
 Carpenter. What they have co-ordinated 
 Hinton suggested. His books are full of 
 beautiful and inspiring things, but, busy man 
 as he was, he never had time to develop 
 his theories into a coherent whole. 
 
 Ellice Hopkins, in her book, has presented
 
 60 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 us with a sketch rather than a finished 
 portrait. Hinton was not only " a clean- 
 minded man with brains," as some one once 
 said of him, but he was a courageous solver 
 of extremely difficult problems, which few 
 of us have the sincerity or decency even 
 yet to face. He had no wish to pose 
 either as a saint or a sinner, though there 
 is a suggestion of both in the man and his 
 work. He was a human, direct, and impres- 
 sionable genius. He was indeed more a 
 man of genius than a man of talent, and 
 his conception of what genius means is a 
 help to the understanding of himself with 
 his paradoxes, inconsistencies, and weak- 
 nesses. 
 
 " So far from genius,'" he says, " being greatness 
 and imitating power, it is emphatically the reverse. 
 The men of talent are the men of power : they are the 
 strong. The affinities of genius are with weakness.'" 
 
 In the book of extracts from his manu- 
 scripts called Philosophy and Religion, he 
 says, " Talent is doing ; genius is suffering."
 
 HINTONS ETHICS 61 
 
 Man's work is done not by doing, but by 
 suffering. It is by what we bear that the 
 world is redeemed. Our doing is very 
 unimportant in itself, it is of no value. 
 Christ was a sufferer, not a doer. 1 
 
 Hinton was a lovable, big-souled creature, 
 who could rarely be got to a dinner-party 
 or to have his hair cut or his photograph 
 taken, and yet he dared to look Nature 
 right in the face and contrast man's puny 
 laws with her vast demands. He came to 
 look at moral nature with eyes trained 
 through looking at physical nature. " Nature 
 
 1 " Looking at a portrait of Beethoven," wrote Hinton, 
 " it was evident that it had in it the face of an animal ; it 
 was plainly the face of an animal combined with that of 
 a man. And this reveals genius again. Genius is a cross 
 between animal and man, both are in it ; it is an animal com- 
 bined with a man. . . . This indicates perfectuess in being one 
 with Nature ; here is genius getting closer to her again. 
 The gift of genius is simply that it cannot keep Nature — 
 the sensuous element of Nature — out. ... Of course the 
 world shall have its genius-period. That will be the age 
 of the integrated Greek. Man is genius, and his life is the 
 genius-life ; he accomplishes ends unforeseen and does by 
 instinct what he could not do by trying." — The Lawbreaker 
 pp. 150, 205.
 
 62 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 is the bride of the soul," he says. " Not 
 wedded yet, indeed, but to be wedded." 
 
 James Hinton is not a constructor of a 
 system or systems. He is a suggester of 
 right moral values. A man will approve 
 or condemn Hinton as he himself is in 
 harmony or antagonism with the things 
 around him. A mere conventionalist or a 
 rigid Puritan will have none of him. He 
 is, to use Whitman's phrase, " too fluid and 
 too chaste." It takes a good deal of human 
 love and understanding to get a just estimate 
 of the curious combination of arrogance and 
 humility which are characteristic of this 
 man. Morality to Hinton was not a mere 
 matter of goodness but of true relation 
 to facts, a relation which must, of the 
 necessity of things, be fluent and cannot 
 be rigid. 
 
 " If you make right a rigid thing," he says, " a rigid 
 thing in man's life is precisely as a dead thing in 
 a living body. It cannot partake in the life, and 
 so is disease. 11
 
 HINTON'S ETHICS 63 
 
 In The Lawbreaker he says briefly that 
 laws, duties, virtues, and fixed rights and 
 wrongs are apt to become obsolete and dead 
 and so very harmful to the living organism. 
 In Philosophy and Religion he says : 
 
 " The idea that that only which is bad needs to be 
 reformed, superseded, or done away with, is perhaps 
 the greatest hindrance to our progress. We must 
 learn to see that everything, the good and necessary, 
 just as much as any other, requires to be reformed 
 and superseded by the opposite when it has had 
 its day." 
 
 Hinton realised that there is not, there 
 cannot be, an absolute morality binding on 
 all and for ever. He points us again and 
 again to Nature, where we find no fixed 
 thing, always a giving place. Nature is 
 always destroying and rebuilding, and Hinton 
 believes morality must be akin to this same 
 process. We must keep clean, clear, and 
 courageous minds, in order to be true and 
 wholesome, knowing that what has once 
 been good and useful may later be a 
 
 5
 
 64 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 hindrance. The insincerity and cowardice 
 of holding to a good thing which has be- 
 come bad for us is always a bar to the new 
 and necessary vision. Hinton said once to 
 his wife : " If my ideas are false, then the 
 truth must be something better, and I am 
 glad." He was always ready for the newer 
 and better stage, even at the expense of his 
 consistency. 
 
 In a short study it is impossible to give 
 even a superficial idea of what a great 
 thinker suggests to us, but it is imperative 
 to take briefly a few points in Hinton 's 
 life and philosophy which, at any rate, may 
 help to clear up some of the mistaken ideas 
 most people have of the man and his 
 teaching. 
 
 Nature to Hinton was no step-mother. 
 From her breasts he believed we could 
 safely take our life and so grow strong to 
 understand how to live. In 1851, even 
 before his marriage, he wrote, " I never yet 
 laid my hand with a resolute heart upon any
 
 HINTON'S ETHICS 65 
 
 portion of God's universe that I could reach 
 that did not turn to gold beneath my grasp " ; 
 and this is the attitude of Hinton to Nature. 
 His Life in Nature makes one feel that 
 the true law of Nature should combine abso- 
 lute Tightness with perfect delight. We 
 have only to be sincere with ourselves to 
 realise that some of our laws certainly rob us 
 of this combination of perfect delight and 
 absolute Tightness, and so they cheat us of 
 our goodly heritage. Impulses should move 
 in the direction of right, and right to Hinton 
 in these matters was a splendid combination 
 of the liberty and unselfconsciousness of the 
 animal with the educated conscience and 
 consciousness of the man or the over-man. 
 Nature, to Hinton, is God carrying out His 
 ideal, the passion of the Supreme Artist for 
 expression, and he grows impatient with the 
 conventional dauber who thinks he knows 
 how to paint better than God. 
 
 " Nature," he says in his Philosophy and Religion, 
 " has no secrets which she hides from him who
 
 66 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 knows that she is holiness, no love that she withholds 
 from him who loves the holy." " All our mental 
 life," he says in the same book, " comes from obser- 
 vation of Nature." 
 
 Hinton realised that people are just as 
 afraid of following Nature as they are afraid 
 of looking straight into their own souls. He 
 tells us there is nothing to be afraid of in 
 Nature, nothing to be afraid of in our own 
 hearts or in the hearts of others. The thing 
 to fear is Cant, which hides the deep thing. 
 It is surely better to be a natural devil than 
 an artificial saint. Nature will cut the 
 devilish traces away from us later if we are 
 true to ourselves. Kipling's Satan might 
 well refuse his good hell coal to burn us if 
 we consciously recede from a big ideal for a 
 worldly advantage or a love of being com- 
 fortable. 
 
 In his Art of Thinking, Hinton says : 
 
 " Instead of believing that we are in two worlds, 
 as all religious men affirm, we shall think we are in 
 a world apprehended by two faculties. The physical 
 world will become to our regard no more a distinct
 
 HINTONS ETHICS 67 
 
 existence opposed to the spiritual, but that spiritual 
 itself." 
 
 In The Lawbreaker he is very definite. 
 
 " If the Holy Ghost in Christ's mouth meant 
 Nature, the unpardonable sin is clear. . . . ' It does 
 not matter how you regard Me or what you say of 
 Me, 1 says Christ. ' I shall not mind. You will be 
 forgiven. But if you contradict and will not be 
 guided by her, how can good come to you ? There 
 is never any forgiveness for that. Who can forgive 
 you ? Can you get to a mountain's top by walking 
 down it?'" 
 
 What was it, Hinton asks, that showed 
 Christ that the true law was not a law of 
 things, and so must be from the heart ? It 
 was in Nature that he saw it. It was the 
 feeling of her selfless freedom. He saw God 
 made the sun to rise on the evil and on the 
 good, and so he did not condemn the sinner. 
 " Man is not above nature," Hinton says, 
 "but below her as yet." In The Law- 
 breaker he emphatically declares that 
 
 " man is to be one with Nature, which is simply to 
 take her law. It is all ready. We have misappre-
 
 68 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 hended what being one with Nature is. It does not 
 need any change of our condition. It is a thing now 
 for us to choose. 11 
 
 " I perceive, 11 he says, " that one thing I propose 
 to do is to match the Fatherhood of God with the 
 Motherhood of Nature, and, as in a child's earliest 
 years the mother's part is the most important, may 
 it not be that as yet it is also for man, and that 
 he would have done well to have thought relatively 
 more about his mother ? He has had too much to 
 imagine his Father. 11 
 
 Hinton declares that the true channels of 
 man's life are blocked up. We are suffering 
 under the effects of that throughout. And 
 one chief remedy is to open them, according 
 to God and Nature. Then the effects of the 
 stoppage will cease and the course is clear. 
 Wrong within makes evil what is good, and 
 then life is blocked. Hinton tells us clearly- 
 enough that the material read in its true 
 significance is the spiritual, and we may go 
 to our Mother Nature without fear. 
 
 " The simplicity of Nature's working is too pro- 
 found for man's imagination to fathom, and is
 
 HINTON'S ETHICS 69 
 
 revealed only to humble seeking and steadfast self- 
 control," says Hinton. 
 
 He asks a pertinent enough question in 
 one of his manuscripts : 
 
 " May not very many, or even most of what are 
 called sins, be not really sins at all, but merely 
 confused expressions of Nature's claims for a truer 
 order ? " 
 
 James Hinton's attitude to pain is a very 
 usual one to-day, but was not much under- 
 stood when he wrote his little book called 
 The Mystery of Pain. The whole idea — as 
 indeed it is Carpenter's idea and Nietzsche's, 
 too — is that many things that may seem 
 to be very bad may truly be very good, and 
 may be among the best things that can pos- 
 sibly be. It is the attitude of a man who 
 believes that misery and sorrow should be 
 borne, not by each one only for himself, but 
 by each for another as serving others in 
 some unseen way. When Dante's Beatrice 
 went to her high heaven, Dante only then
 
 70 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 began to be of service to the world. His 
 personal loss was just so much gain to the 
 world. 
 
 In The Art of Thinking, he says on this 
 point : 
 
 "There are materials, then, evidently within us 
 for an entire change of our thoughts respecting pain. 
 The world in this respect, we might almost feel, 
 seems to tremble in the balance. A touch might 
 transform it wholly. One flash of light from the 
 Unseen, one word spoken by God, might suffice to 
 make the dark places bright, and wrap the sorrow- 
 stricken heart of man in the wonder of an unutterable 
 glory. If all pain might be seen in the light of 
 martyrdom, if the least and lowest in man's puny 
 life, or shall we say rather in God^ great universe, 
 might be interpreted by its best and highest, were 
 not the work done? It is done, for the light has 
 shone, the word is spoken."" 
 
 The good that is being worked out in 
 man is not within our view, according to 
 Hinton. The regeneration of our nature 
 involves the loss of much that seems very- 
 good to us, much that could satisfy us.
 
 HINTON'S ETHICS 71 
 
 We have to bear suffering by faith, but 
 
 with such a good hope that sooner or later 
 
 we accept it as we accept the sufferings of 
 
 love, joyfully and understandingly. The 
 
 great secret is not to try even to get rid 
 
 of suffering, but to hold to it while we get 
 
 rid of that in it which makes it bad. In his 
 
 Life in Nature, he says : 
 
 " All storing up of force is a nutrition, all 
 liberation of it is the effecting of a function. For 
 it is not in the material alone that this law has its 
 place. It extends as widely and soars as high as 
 life. It is the key above all to our own. All strife 
 and failure, all subjection, baffling, wrong, these 
 are nutrition ; they are instruments of life, the 
 prophecies of its perfect ends. They store up the 
 power, they make the organisation, and where these 
 are, the function shall not fail. Life is in that which 
 we call failure, which we feel as loss, which throws 
 us back upon ourselves in anguish, which crushes us 
 with despair. It is in aspirations baffled, hopes 
 destroyed, efforts that win no goal. It is in the 
 cross taken up. The silent flowers, the lilies of the 
 field, teach us the lesson too. Nature takes up her 
 cross, loses her life to gain it. The fertilised seed 
 grows as it decays."
 
 72 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Hinton knew there was no failure any- 
 where ; if it is anywhere, it is in not striving. 
 The failure, as he says again and again, is 
 phenomenon, not fact ; simply that which 
 we feel because we feel wrongly and know 
 not that which is. While we go mourning, 
 the heavens clap their hands and earth 
 rejoices, Nature palpitates through every 
 nerve with infinite joy. To know is to be 
 glad. In Man and his Dwelling-Place he 
 says : 
 
 " There is not a physical world and a spiritual 
 world besides, but the spiritual world which alone is, 
 is physical to man ; the physical being the mode by 
 which man in his defectiveness sees the spiritual. 
 We feel a physical world could be, but that which 
 is, is the spiritual world." 
 
 Hinton declares that to be death which 
 makes man fear suffering more than sin- 
 ning. In Man and his Dwelling-Placc, he 
 says again : 
 
 " It is not the things we have to bear that crush 
 and ruin us : it is our necessity to get, our want of
 
 HINTONS ETHICS 73 
 
 something for ourselves, our constant craving. That 
 is our perdition. Our hearts are taken captive 
 utterly by love. The terrors that have haunted us, 
 the evils we have shunned, were but dark shadows 
 from the blackness in ourselves. We look abroad 
 again, and the light of heaven flows unchequered over 
 all. Our fears are gone. If there be no evil but 
 that which love makes necessary, then there is no 
 evil. If no pain but pain borne for man's life, then 
 is pain utterly transformed. The one love, that is 
 in and through all things, by which all things are, 
 the love that is the only joy, smiles also through the 
 tears of sorrow. Life stands confessed beneath the 
 mask of death." 
 
 It is not possible to give even a brief 
 sketch of Hinton's philosophy without 
 touching upon those questions he was most 
 interested in during the last five years of his 
 life and on which he has left such perplexing 
 and yet interesting material. 
 
 Hinton once rashly said of himself that 
 he was a born polygamist. The stupid 
 people who heard him say this ran off to 
 chatter it over with the snakes, sheep, and 
 parrots who are ever in our midst. If
 
 74 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Hinton was a born polygamist he believed 
 in monogamy, but not a monogamy which 
 is a disguised polygamy. I have it upon 
 the sacred word of both the living and the 
 dead that James Hinton was, in the only 
 real sense of the word, a monogamist. 
 Whether this is a consolation or a mere 
 puzzle to his misinterpreters I have not as 
 yet been able to determine. INI any of us 
 enjoy giving a dog a bad name, but we get 
 considerably worried when the bad dog is 
 proved to be only a good watch-dog after 
 all, and a defender of our most valued 
 possessions. Hinton got a bad name, chiefly 
 because he was a very honest and a very 
 good man misunderstood by the common- 
 place and traditionalised people by whom 
 he was surrounded. He was a man who 
 loved his wife first, last, and best of all 
 women. But he was an analyst, a scientist, 
 a prober into very subtle needs, a lover of 
 and a believer in women. He was a man 
 whose incontinence of speech led him into
 
 HINTONS ETHICS 75 
 
 many difficulties of action, and whose 
 chivalrous nature made him take the 
 burdens of others on his shoulders when 
 often he had had no part in the making 
 of them. 
 
 Why his name is associated with 
 " dangerous " problems in sex matters is 
 because he declares that anything is better, 
 in these things, than " those vile laws that 
 make man a beast and crush woman to 
 hell." Hinton never wished to get rid of 
 monogamy. He knew, well enough, it 
 would be time to talk about getting rid of 
 monogamy when we have got it, not as a 
 lip morality but as an actual fact. Most of 
 us want monogamy, but a few of us do not 
 want the sham thing any more. Many 
 good people mistake this demand for a 
 real monogamy in place of legalised licence 
 as a plea for excess and laxity, the two 
 deadliest and dullest things in all the 
 world. 
 
 Love, as Hinton viewed it, that is, a love
 
 76 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 of the body and the spirit, is the highest 
 thing we know of yet. We are so absorbed 
 in sifting moralities and crudities in this 
 matter that the mysticism is ignored. We 
 too often leave this trinity of body, soul, and 
 spirit, which all true love is, to be hurt by 
 the harlot and the commercialist, while we 
 are intent on seeking God outside the very 
 lines He has marked for us to dwell within 
 while we are in the world. Hinton could 
 have answered his enemies as a great 
 preacher answered the indignant person who 
 said to him, " What ! do you mean to say I 
 may live as I like ? " The preacher answered, 
 " Would to God I could live as I like, for 
 then I would live holily." The world says, 
 " You may live for yourself according to the 
 prescribed methods, but there are certain 
 things you may not do." Hinton says, 
 " You may not live for yourself, but there 
 are no things you may not do if love 
 and the service of your fellows command 
 them." " Liberty is your heritage," he
 
 HINTON'S ETHICS 77 
 
 says to man. " Then be such that you 
 can claim it." 
 
 Asceticism puts unnecessary restraints on 
 natural passion beyond the needs of the 
 person or the community. Excess swamps 
 the mystic vision in all true passion and 
 love. Hinton would free natural joy if it 
 holds the law of service, and by service he 
 means the love which cannot injure. 
 
 " Nature has linked together pleasure and service," 
 he says. " The self dissociates them, and in trying 
 to follow either alone it assures its own destruction 
 in the end. No goodness that is not happy is good 
 enough for God. Man offers Hirn his difficult 
 virtues, his mortified body and stifled affections as an 
 acceptable sacrifice ; but God answers, ' Who hath 
 required this at your hand ? 1 It is the restraint in 
 the heart and not the external law that matters." 
 
 What we want is love instead of lust, 
 temperance instead of gluttony, and above 
 all we want courage to carry out the ideal 
 we really know. Hinton asserted emphati- 
 cally that self- righteousness inevitably means 
 making right consist in things and purity a
 
 78 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 matter of the flesh. In The Art of Thinking 
 he said: 
 
 " The spiritual and the sensuous parts are not 
 engaged merely in strife, the best issue of which is 
 the victory of the higher over the lower. They are 
 joint factors in a common work to which each 
 contributes an essential element. For the absence 
 of a true regard makes the sensuous evil, when with 
 the desire fixed on good it is not evil. And thus 
 the wrong state of the soul expresses itself inevitably 
 in a strife to put away the sensuous, and the very 
 failure of its effort constitutes the means by which, 
 in the larger life of the race, the false desires are 
 made true." 
 
 People are always asking, he declares, 
 what good thing they shall do. But it is 
 as Christ seems to say, " Do not do at all ; 
 have a feeling." 
 
 The mystery of pleasure was to Hinton a 
 thing to be faced and understood as much 
 as the mystery of pain. 
 
 " The true religious teachers and deliverers," he 
 says, "have been simply those to whom it was an 
 axiom that God could not be truly served in that 
 which hurt His creatures."
 
 HINTON'S ETHICS 79 
 
 That was enough. To put our not- 
 pleasure instead of another's good was 
 mocking instead of serving God. What 
 is wanted is to see that the cruel things 
 which we identify with religion and purity 
 and have always so identified and still feel 
 sacred are the same as the cruel things 
 which our forefathers identified with religion 
 and felt towards in the same way, and 
 which we see quite easily to have been evil 
 and false. 
 
 Always with Hinton a cardinal sin was 
 setting goodness against pleasure. 
 
 "The ascetics gratified their souls but crushed 
 their bodies," he says. " Now we gratify our bodies 
 but crush our souls. Life is to gratify both soul and 
 body. That is, for there to be no reason for the soul 
 to restrain the body, but to be able to let Nature's 
 demand lead us wholly, and so each to be more 
 perfectly gratified, for neither is wholly gratified 
 without the other. It is but a baulking, pretended, 
 half-accomplished thing. Did the ascetics truly 
 gratify their souls ? And how far do we truly attain 
 our sense gratifications ? Much as is sacrificed in 
 each case, is the thing sought truly gained ? What 
 
 6
 
 80 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 man has not firmly to control his impulses or to reap 
 fruits of chagrin and emptiness in licence. 1 ' 
 
 Be slaves to pleasure, and you must put 
 it away. Know how to use it, and it is 
 absolutely free. 
 
 " This is the proclamation," says Hinton ; " good 
 has nothing to do with putting away pleasure. 
 Come in, therefore, you pleasure-led people and claim 
 goodness as your possession. If there is any reason 
 in a man's putting away pleasure in order to be good, 
 that means evil in him : let him repent. Let^ him 
 repent and become a new creature."" 
 
 No wonder Hinton was misunderstood. 
 This doctrine of pleasure scared the anaemic 
 spiritualist and the vicious sensualist alike, 
 and the scream of the Puritan and the 
 Pharisee has continued to this hour. 
 
 Not to pursue pleasure nor to put it 
 away, not to deny passion but to deny self, 
 is how Hinton approaches the difficult pro- 
 blems of marriage and prostitution. His 
 great word on the mystery of pleasure is, 
 " Do not get rid of pleasure, but hold that,
 
 HINTON'S ETHICS 81 
 
 and get rid of that in it which makes it 
 bad." This "thing" is evil, we say. Not so, 
 but let it be different. If many bewildered 
 and complex people could realise Hinton's 
 assertion that there are two roads to doing 
 right, one consisting in putting away wrong- 
 ness, the other in diverting it, we should 
 not have to put our saints in monasteries 
 and nunneries, or our Oscar Wildes in 
 prison ; but saints and sinners would use 
 their powers for service and joy, and not 
 for selfishness only, or for self-indulgence 
 only. 
 
 " The evil," says Hinton, " is not in indulging 
 passion, but in not following good ; not in putting 
 away indulgence, but in having no reason to put 
 it away." 
 
 It is the absence of the desire for good, 
 and then indulging passion, which is the 
 misery, just as gluttony is eating food for 
 mere pleasure instead of with pleasure, in 
 order to make the body strong for service. 
 Hinton declares you cannot restrain passion
 
 82 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 any more than you can hold up your feet 
 with your arms without other support. You 
 can only divert it and use it, not only for 
 self but for others. In a letter to Miss 
 Haddon, he says truly : 
 
 " Woman's relation to man has been mixed up 
 with the problem of pleasure: she has been sacrificed 
 for that. So long as man either pursues or refuses 
 pleasure, he does, and must, muddle his relations 
 with women, and cannot get them right ; that is, 
 true to service. We do not ask even what woman 
 needs, but what suits us," he says. " Those who 
 love and honour her most are even most intent upon 
 treating her with that utter disregard and practical 
 cruelty (for it is so), intenser, more exquisite, than 
 can be conceived." 
 
 To Hinton the whole question was one 
 of dynamics. It was a matter of so much 
 force which could be turned from one channel 
 into another at the will of the holder. 
 
 Hinton had much of the inner vision of 
 the true lover : 
 
 " My heart burns," he says, " with indignation 
 when I hear people talk of the folly and blindness
 
 HINTON'S ETHICS 83 
 
 and exaggeration of love. In truth, all except those 
 who are in love are ignorant. It is a telescope given 
 us, just for once, by God, to reveal to us wonders 
 and glories hidden indeed from the unaided eye, but 
 none the less real and glorious for that. 1 ' 1 
 
 In 1871 he wrote: 
 
 " Love in most minds is another word for greed. 
 It does not know how to accept, it murders whom 
 it would sustain, it degrades whom it would raise.' 1 
 
 It was just this feudalistic tyranny in pos- 
 sessive and absorbing love and the gluttony 
 implied in lust which made Hinton a warrior 
 for a new ideal in these matters. He saw 
 clearly that a false restraint implies a false 
 indulgence, and that a rule of true service 
 will make fine morals automatic. He be- 
 lieved that man, individually and collectively, 
 having passed through licence to restraint, 
 must pass beyond restraint, where there is a 
 finer liberty than either licence or restraint, 
 wherein a man or woman might possibly 
 break a conventional letter of an obsolete 
 law, but would and could thereby fulfil a
 
 84 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 higher law of the body and the soul. " I 
 know how to take care of myself," said a 
 virtuous young man to this observant doctor. 
 Hinton replied from the higher law of service 
 he believed in, " Say rather, I know how to 
 take care of the weakest woman who comes 
 in my path." 
 
 When passion has become a " balance oi 
 desire," man's sufferings in these matters 
 will diminish, because he will have realised 
 that a passion for service is very different 
 from a passion for mere pleasure. 
 
 " Whatever comes as service,' 1 says Hinton, " let 
 there be no question whether you do it. The law 
 is, have no law, and this is expressed and made 
 intelligent merely by that physical condition, a 
 constant change. Hold to nothing. Be ready for 
 anything. Let right change as nature changes, but 
 have absolute regard to claims." 
 
 As Miss Haddon says in The Larger Life, 
 " He only who has refused all pleasure that 
 service forbids can accept all that service 
 enjoins/'
 
 HINTONS ETHICS 85 
 
 Why Hinton's morality may seem so be- 
 wildering is that it contains two apparent 
 contradictions, which, in fact, are harmo- 
 nious. He wanted to abolish the idea that 
 a thing is better not to be if there is pleasure 
 in it, and yet he declares again and again 
 that "there can be no true having except 
 in giving up." 
 
 This philosophy aims a blow at distorted 
 asceticism and distorted indulgence. His 
 great cry is, " Love, and do what you like." 
 Do not restrain your impulses, but be 
 able to obey them. Do not abstain from 
 sensuality, but do not make things sensual. 
 
 " If I am to be remembered at all, 11 he said, " this 
 is what I would rather be remembered by, that I 
 was the man who said. ' Man is made that he can 
 rise above the sexual passion and subordinate it to 
 use. All helping without taking the burden, all 
 serving that is not heroism, all giving that has not 
 absolute losing in it, I cannot but have a revulsion 
 from, a feeling as if I feared its success. 1 " 
 
 He knew well enough that it is impossible 
 to destroy sensuality by letting it impulsively
 
 86 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 run its own way, and trust that it may pick 
 up an ideal of service on the road. 
 
 Duty and passion to-day are at war, and 
 to strengthen one is to inflict a fatal blow 
 on the other. Hinton made an attempt to 
 reconcile them to the right ordering of lives. 
 A social science that deals only with the 
 external relations of men and women to each 
 other was to him a mere quackery. From 
 within were to flow the waters of healing. 
 Hinton, at any rate, fulfilled his own ideal 
 of service. He did not commit suicide, but 
 he gave his life for the many, for he died 
 as much from a broken heart as an injured 
 brain. He was overworked, misrepresented, 
 torn and tortured with his own speculations, 
 which, in theory, seemed to him good, and 
 yet in practice would bring, as he knew, 
 martyrdom on the pioneers of his gospel. 
 He was a pure and a good man ; but in 
 accepting his doctrines, Nietzsche's tonic 
 philosophy of self-control, and Carpenter's 
 quiet wisdom of unhastiness should be
 
 HINTON'S ETHICS 87 
 
 taken as tonics and sedatives. To dare to 
 be free, one must indeed be bound. To 
 dare to take, one must be willing to give. 
 To ignore law safely, one must have ceased 
 to be lawless. Love is indeed the fulfilling 
 of a great law which is outside all cruelty, 
 commercialism, and selfish absorption. Its 
 very nature demands absolute mutuality, 
 perfect freedom, and a trinity of body, soul, 
 and spirit. One must have learnt to love 
 in this true sense to be without fear in all 
 these great things. No false thing can 
 long endure if the true thing continually 
 confronts it. " Love and do what you like," 
 as St. Augustine realised long before Hinton, 
 is not a motto for the weak and sensual, but 
 for the strong of head and the pure in heart, 
 who, in this way, literally see their God.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 
 
 Pain biologically a guardian angel of the body — 
 Also the guardian angel of the soul— Examples in 
 life—" Forward ends " of pain. 
 
 From a biological point of view pain is the 
 guardian angel of the body. But for pain 
 animal life would soon be extinguished. 
 Pain and life are as much intertwined in the 
 animal economy as hunger and life. H unger 
 is an imperative need. Pain is an impera- 
 tive warning, and so an education. Life 
 and growth would cease in the first stage of 
 evolution but for pain. The child cuts its 
 ringer ; it is in pain, so it learns to avoid 
 the dangerous plaything. The cat warms 
 itself on the table by the lamp ; it singes its 
 fur, and, through pain, it avoids the lamp
 
 92 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 for the future. The boy over-eats ; he gets 
 pain, and so learns avoidance of that which 
 causes pain. 
 
 Unconscious lessons in hygiene, and hints 
 of taking what is best and leaving what 
 is worst in evironment, are quickly learnt 
 by primitive man, and also by animals. 
 The latter, it is true, cannot analyse, trans- 
 mute, and change the character of pain and 
 so make it, in one sense, cease to exist as 
 irrational torture ; but the animal and the 
 savage unconsciously accept pain's warning 
 and so prevent future mistakes and extinc- 
 tion. Pain, then, to the savage and the 
 animal, is a physical guardian angel. 
 
 Pain comes to all of us at some time or 
 another as certainly as death comes, and 
 to some of us its meaning is as unseen 
 as death's meaning. The usual attitude to 
 both pleasure and pain is the attitude of 
 the child towards punishment and reward. 
 Most of us, even if we are learning to bear 
 pain with courage, rather resent it than
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 93 
 
 welcome it. We certainly never seek it for 
 a given end as we seek pleasure, Few of us 
 believe with Nietzsche that it is the father 
 of pleasure, or that it is the most educative 
 and valuable of gifts. 
 
 When Hinton wrote his little book on 
 The Mystery of Pain, people were even more 
 in the dark about its inner significance than 
 they are to-day. Hinton saw very clearly 
 what he calls the " forward ends " of pain. 
 To him pain, far from being an evil, is an 
 essential element of the highest good, felt 
 only as evil by us because of our want of 
 knowledge and want of love. Even Oscar 
 Wilde, in his Soul of Man under Socialism, 
 which of course was written long before 
 his true understanding of acute suffering, 
 says: 
 
 " Pain is not the ultimate mode of perfection. It 
 is merely provisional and a protest. It has reference 
 to wrong, unjust, and unhealthy surroundings. When 
 the wrong, the disease, and the injustice are removed, 
 it will have no further place. Its sphere lessens 
 every day. 11
 
 94 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Hinton believed that the true idea of the 
 mystery of pain will be born out of the 
 death of the false idea of pain. He realised 
 very clearly that the pain we suffer is often 
 suffering we make for ourselves, because we 
 do not like the idea of giving. We all 
 know, if we have suffered acutely, that when 
 we go through any great crisis, bodily or 
 spiritual, we are giving to others through 
 the things we learn and the way we de- 
 velop. We are being ground by God's 
 wheel of necessity, not only for our own 
 good, but for the good of others, so that 
 ultimately we can see, even here on earth, 
 that every pain we bear and conquer has had 
 " forward ends." 
 
 Hinton looked upon pain as nutrition, 
 and the service and human love which 
 ought always to be a result of that as 
 function. It is not pain itself, according to 
 Hinton, which is evil, but pain seen by 
 itself, as the discord in music seems a jar 
 until it melts into a harmony. Here, once
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 95 
 
 more, we find that it is not the thing itself, 
 but the way we approach and use it that is 
 of vital importance. 
 
 Hinton, all through his philosophy, 
 emphasises the fact that we must not 
 confound eternal truth with the limita- 
 tion of our perception with regard to 
 truth. When we are in the midst of 
 our sufferings we are necessarily swamped 
 more or less in our limitations, and so lose 
 sight, for the time, of the great meaning 
 behind the experience. This meaning is 
 that something is accomplished in our 
 experience which is unseen by us, and so 
 makes conscious or unconscious sacrifice 
 a good. 
 
 By sacrifice Hinton means love willingly 
 or unconsciously shown towards others. 
 This unseen work that is done indirectly 
 through us is something done directly for 
 others. Science, our own experience, and 
 certainly all true mysticism, teach us that 
 " things are not what they seem." Hinton, 
 
 7
 
 96 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 in his Mystery of Pain, makes this very- 
 clear. He says : 
 
 " It is evident that all the effects of the events 
 with which we are concerned are not, and could 
 not possibly be, perceived by us. We see and feel 
 things, alike the great ones and the small ones, as 
 we esteem them, only as they affect our senses : that 
 is, only in small part and for a short time. They 
 soon pass beyond our sight, and while they are 
 within it they never show us all they are, often those 
 which are the greatest seeming to us the least. How 
 little we are able, often, to calculate the influence 
 even upon our own future of events or actions of 
 which we seem to have the most perfect knowledge 
 at the time, and of the effects of these events on 
 others, which must go on, so far as we can estimate, 
 without any end ; only the smallest fragment is 
 within our view. It is one of the first lessons taught 
 to men by experience, not to judge of events by 
 what they seem alone, but to remember that there 
 may be much more involved in them than appears. 
 To judge of our life, therefore, merely by that which 
 is seen of it, is to commit ourselves to certain error." 
 
 So that the thought Hinton emphasised, 
 that in all our experience there is some 
 unseen relation to spiritual things, to a
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 97 
 
 spiritual work in man, makes on us no new 
 demand. It is but the carrying out to their 
 legitimate, and surely to their natural result, 
 principles which experience has established. 
 We shall certainly be thinking and feeling 
 falsely respecting our life if we cannot 
 recognise some unseen bearing of it. For 
 we do not, we know we cannot, see the 
 whole. 
 
 And this principle is established not only 
 by moral experience. It is the lesson which, 
 almost more than any other, science teaches 
 us also. In exploring the material world, 
 we soon find that, in order to understand 
 any part of it aright, we must recognise 
 things which are unseen, and have regard to 
 conditions which do not come within our 
 direct perception. It is enough, as Hinton 
 points out, to instance the pressure of the 
 air, of which we have no consciousness ; the 
 motion of the earth, equally unperceivable 
 by us ; the hidden force lurking in unseen 
 atoms ; of chemical affinity or electricity ;
 
 98 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 the vibrations which traverse the universal 
 ether ; and, in fine, that invisible unity 
 whereby (holding to the unseen) man has 
 traced out in nature a perfect order amid 
 all confusion. 
 
 Hinton concludes, in every summing-up 
 in his books respecting the mysterious work- 
 ings of pain, that it has ends far beyond 
 the interests of the person who bears it, 
 and for these secret ends we must look 
 beyond ourselves. All must realise, on 
 looking back over their lives, that their 
 deepest miseries, their intolerable anguish, 
 and their so-called " losses " had " forward 
 ends," not only for themselves but for 
 others. Most of us have paid, what seemed 
 at the time, a terrible price for the increase 
 in our humanity and the decrease in our 
 personal vanity, or the uprooting of our 
 jealousy and the intensity of our powers 
 of loving. The people who tell us that 
 pain should be got out of the world would 
 also tell us that no harmony in music can
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 99 
 
 contain a discord. How many of us in this 
 mortal life can trace the " forward ends " of 
 our personal pain ? It becomes easier once 
 one believes, what Hinton truly believed, 
 that the " forward ends " justify the painful 
 means. Take any example of suffering. 
 If you have had a lonely and misunder- 
 stood childhood, perhaps even real cruelty 
 and physical disablement as a result of that 
 cruelty, which may last you all your life, 
 what has that done for you ? Every little 
 child you touch and make happy can 
 answer the question for you. 
 
 What if, at the very height of your 
 idealism and romance, you failed to marry 
 the man or woman who seemed the only 
 person in the world who could help you 
 to obtain your ideal and fulfil yourself? 
 What if, instead of living side by side with 
 what you imagined to be your mate, you 
 had to have three hundred and sixty-five 
 breakfasts, dinners, and teas a year with 
 one who chiefly made demands on you, and
 
 100 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 rarely gave you the spiritual and emotional 
 food you craved, but drew from you all 
 you had to give ? Are there no " forward 
 ends " there ? Perhaps only your children 
 and grand-children can answer that question. 
 One recalls what John said in The Choi?' 
 Invisible, in the one love-letter he ever 
 penned to his Jessica, the woman whom he 
 missed marrying, though she was his affinity, 
 a woman who lifted every action of his life 
 out of the commonplace. When he sends 
 her his son, as a youth about his own age 
 when he first met her, he writes : 
 
 " I may not boast with the Apostle that I have 
 fought a good fight, but I can say that I have 
 fought a hard one. The fight will always be hard 
 for any man who undertakes to conquer life with 
 the few and simple weapons I have used and who 
 will accept victory only upon such terms as I have 
 demanded. For, be my success small or great, it 
 has been won without wilful wrong of a single 
 human being and without inner compromise or 
 other form of self-abasement. No man can look 
 me in the eyes and say I ever wronged him for
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 101 
 
 my own profit ; none may charge that I have smiled 
 on him in order to use him, or called him my 
 friend that I might make him do for me the work 
 of a servant. Do not imagine I fail to realise 
 that I have added my full share to the general 
 evil of the world ; in part unconsciously, in part 
 against my conscious will. It is the knowledge of 
 this influence of imperfection for ever flowing from 
 myself to all others, that has taught me charity 
 with all the wrongs that flow from others toward 
 me. As I have clung to myself despite the evil, 
 so I have clung to the world despite all the evil 
 that is in the world. To lose faith in men, not in 
 humanity ; to see justice go down and not believe 
 in the triumph of injustice ; for every wrong that 
 you weakly deal another or another deals you, to 
 love more and more the fairness and beauty of what 
 is right ; and so to turn with ever-increasing love 
 from the imperfection that is in us all to the per- 
 fection that is above us all — the Perfection that is 
 God, — this is one of the ideals of actual duty that 
 you once said were to be as candles in my hand. 
 Many a time this candle has gone out ; but as quickly 
 as I could snatch any torch, with your sacred name 
 on my lips, it has been relighted." 
 
 This was the kind of " forward end " 
 Hinton had in his mind when he wrote
 
 102 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 his Mystery of Pain. Every man, every 
 woman, who has lost the personal and made 
 the apparent loss serve such a " forward 
 end " as this is at peace, not only about his 
 own destiny, but about the general upshot 
 of things. 
 
 Certainly there are worse things than 
 mere loss by separation. Suppose a man 
 or woman you loved betrayed you, as the 
 world calls betrayal, mocked and scorned 
 you secretly, misunderstood you, derided 
 you even. Well ? Have you not again 
 and again given a tenderness and help to 
 some tight-mouthed, embittered woman or 
 man which she or he would never have 
 gained by their mere personal absorption 
 in another ? It has probably only been a 
 means of understanding another sufferer, 
 for those who mock and betray are in 
 some form of terror or pain. If, again, 
 you have loved with both the mystic and 
 the human in you, witli all the body, soul, 
 and spirit of you, and death, Nature's
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 103 
 
 mother, took that very soul of your soul 
 out of your reach when you imagined that 
 it was most vital to you here and now — 
 what then ? Only those who have had to 
 face utter and complete loneliness of body, 
 soul, and spirit by the bedside of what 
 looks so terribly like the end can realise 
 how difficult it is, just then, to believe 
 that this pain of separation has greater 
 " forward ends " than any other. Hinton 
 knew, Dante knew, all true lovers who have 
 lost and found again after the great change 
 of death know, that pain is first nutrition 
 and then function. 
 
 There is but one condition for peace. 
 It is not an easy one, but it is a certain 
 one. It is to be true to what we know 
 and then remain receptive. Pain in this 
 way merges, by the law of its nature, into 
 happiness, a happiness which not only 
 affects a single person, but a multitude. 
 Some know that death is often the only 
 way to the very truth and the life we
 
 104 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 hungered for even in the midst of what 
 seemed a perfect love here. It may have 
 been the only way to the greater love 
 which sweeps us beyond the merely per- 
 sonal into that region of service and love 
 which Hinton believed in with all his heart 
 and soul. 
 
 It is strange how we go on dreading 
 pain when it leads us to the open road of 
 understanding and love again and again ! 
 How many people do you know who have 
 been truly helped in the big, broad, human 
 sense except by those who have suffered ? 
 Even physical suffering, whether acute pain 
 or illnesses lengthened out to months and 
 years, teach us how to rest and to gain the 
 inner vision which all physical rest should 
 bring in the intervals of pain. It is only 
 the resentment against suffering, the un- 
 willingness to accept it as a lesson in 
 some unseen service, which causes its real 
 anguish. In the midst of suffering we 
 cannot realise what a gift pain is, but some
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 105 
 
 of us have come to the time when we can 
 say honestly, and from our very hearts, that 
 we would gladly, not grudgingly and of 
 necessity, but gladly suffer all over again, 
 if another soul could see, as our soul sees, 
 the " forward ends." 
 
 Hinton knew the great secret of the 
 other, clearer side of things when he said, 
 " Never be afraid of giving up your best, 
 and God will give you His better." He 
 did not, of course, mean this in the selfish 
 spirit of thanksgiving for selfish ends, or in 
 the expectation of more good to follow, but 
 in the spirit of love which says, " I would 
 bear this for my neighbour, even if I have 
 to be damned for it." Hinton knew, as 
 Christ knew, that giving up is the one 
 condition of having a better thing. When 
 we give up our jealousy, for instance, we 
 get a true realisation of love. "He that 
 loseth his life shall find it," was not the 
 sorry jest of a carpenter's son, but the latest 
 discovery of science and philosophy by those
 
 106 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 who know more than they dare at present 
 reveal. 
 
 " Giving," says Hinton, " is an absolute good : 
 that innocent loss and pain, even the unconscious 
 like the willing loss, is really giving, and, further, 
 this good (of giving) is always ready to be the boon 
 of every loser, however long delayed, as soon as ever 
 he accepts his pain and is glad for its good's sake 
 that he bore it. Pain is giving, and giving is good. 
 In giving pain to man, then, God is giving him the 
 best thing. Perhaps this is the only world in the 
 universe where giving is pain. 11 
 
 As we get the newer vision we shall be 
 less agitated as to what comes to us, and 
 more anxious as to how we bear what 
 comes. It is not what we get which matters, 
 but what we are ; not what we lose, but 
 what we gain. It is how we receive pain, 
 what experience we gain for ourselves and 
 others through our individual suffering, that 
 is the main thing. Hinton would have us 
 always stop to consider, in the questions 
 of pain and pleasure alike, not so much 
 how pain and pleasure may affect us in-
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 107 
 
 dividually, but how they, through the 
 absorption of them into character and 
 actions, affect others. Having freely re- 
 ceived, either from pleasure or pain, it is our 
 part to transmute both into a blessedness 
 with which each and any human being near 
 us can enrich himself, and so hand on the 
 same good to others. " I will scatter myself 
 among men and women as I go," was not 
 only the privilege of the big, human- 
 hearted Walt Whitman, but of every man 
 and woman who has suffered enough and 
 loved enough to dare to give of what they 
 have received. The bondage of both plea- 
 sure and pain, according to James Hinton, 
 is the bondage we make out of our insistence 
 on self-seeking. 
 
 " That hurts me," we say ; " this satisfies 
 me"; and out of that conception we get 
 much less development or even happiness 
 than from the cry, "Out of these depths my 
 very so-called enemy can get the joy I have 
 had to miss."' When man can truly say of
 
 108 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 pain, " Yes, this hurts me so that I can give 
 the result on to you," and of pleasure, " This 
 takes possession of me so that I can fling 
 the joy on to you, whether you are my 
 friend or my slanderer," then we are nearer 
 the meaning of Hinton, much nearer, than 
 when we approach both pleasure and pain 
 either as things to be avoided or things 
 to be sought in and for themselves alone. 
 
 Man has learnt much, but he has infinitely 
 more to learn, even in this world, for he has 
 not as yet been able to rid himself of sorrow 
 as an evil thing. It is possible that in this 
 world we may never get rid of sorrow and 
 suffering, but we can all transform them and 
 transmute them into an ardour for service 
 which has an exquisiteness of its own as great 
 as pleasure itself, perhaps greater. " The 
 seeming of our life," says Hinton, " is not 
 the truth of it." The great secret is not 
 to seek either suffering or pleasure, but to 
 accept them when they come as inspirations, 
 or, in other words, as means to a definite
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 109 
 
 end. When once one has learnt this, in 
 ever so small a degree, the whole of life is 
 altered. It is as if we had pierced the veil. 
 We have all to learn, though we do not see 
 the end, to trust the end, and out of trust a 
 curious insight comes, and a distinct know- 
 ledge. Once the conscious and sub-conscious 
 selves meet in a harmony of understanding 
 of spiritual " forward ends " then the fret 
 and jar and doubt are for ever laid to rest. 
 
 " By giving, 11 says Hinton, " to our pains a place 
 of use and necessity, not central in ourselves but ex- 
 tending to others, and indeed affecting others chiefly 
 as existing for and essential to God's great work in 
 the world, by giving to our painful experience this 
 place, the whole aspect of pain would be changed. 
 A Christ, a mother, a martyr, and a lover have 
 this vision, and the nearer we are to their point of 
 view the less we worry about the sordidness of pain, 
 because we are concerned with its mystery and 
 beauty. The mental understanding of what suffer- 
 ing indicates alters the actual suffering.'" 
 
 Pain, if it could be recognised as develop- 
 ment, and in a sense as joy, would be as
 
 110 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 much welcomed as pleasure is now. We 
 have distorted our conceptions of both 
 pleasure and pain. We are afraid of both, 
 instead of recognising them as two parts of 
 the development of the soul. They are the 
 male and female of the spiritual life ; neither 
 are good alone but as a completion the one 
 of the other. As Hinton so well puts it : 
 
 " The reason we are made, or seem to be as if we 
 were made, for pain, is that we are made for love. I 
 don't mean grudging, unhappy sacrifice, but love, 
 which, having freely received, freely gives and suffers 
 gladly, if need be, so that pain is swallowed up 
 in love and turns thereby into joy.'" 
 
 We may well pray to be delivered from 
 pain as it is usually understood. When we 
 are delivered from pain as we now under- 
 stand it, that is the bondage of pain, into 
 the understanding of pain as freedom and 
 education, then, and then only, can we 
 rightly understand pleasure. What makes 
 pain to us what it appears to be is that 
 man is constantly aiming at ends which do
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 111 
 
 not involve any giving up. When these 
 ends are denied him he suffers, and he 
 will always suffer, in a way unnecessarily, 
 till he accepts once and for ever the great 
 truth that a man only finds when he gives 
 up, that is, when he has ceased to clutch 
 or even demand or expect for himself, but 
 takes pleasure and pain as they come and 
 gives of the good he has received, as chance 
 offers. It is the very pith of all the deepest 
 and yet simplest philosophies of the world. 
 It is, probably, the one key we have to the 
 other side of things where giving may pos- 
 sibly be as certain a law as the law of 
 gravitation is here. 
 
 In these days people are saying very 
 contradictory things about pain. One 
 school says it is a very good thing and 
 should be sought, and another says it is 
 a very bad thing and should be shunned. 
 Those who say it is a good thing are right, 
 and those who say it is a bad thing are 
 right ; but they each hold only half of 
 
 8
 
 112 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 the truth. If the people who say pain is 
 a good thing mean that it is good as a 
 means to an end, then so far they are right ; 
 but if they say it is good for and in itself, 
 and as an end in itself, then they are wrong. 
 If those who say pain is bad mean that all 
 senseless suffering is bad, they are right so 
 far, but they must say a little more. The 
 great rule here, as in many other matters, is 
 not to seek, but to accept what comes in a 
 new spirit. 
 
 Pain once seen as a means to an end, a 
 discipline, an education, then the old vin- 
 dictive idea of it as an atonement or a sense- 
 less punishment goes the way of all childish 
 and cruel things, in the face of a bigger 
 vision. When the unseen ends for which 
 pain has moulded us are understood, then 
 we are out of the bondage of a very present 
 death. Hinton realised, as very few have 
 realised, that the " true affinities of sacrifice 
 are with pleasure, with rapture even." Every- 
 one who has willingly given up the lesser
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 113 
 
 for the greater, the personal for the uni- 
 versal, an appetite for a passion of service, 
 knows this to be true. 
 
 This newer conception of pain as a good 
 or necessary thing must, of course, not 
 induce us to seek pain for itself, or in any 
 way to undervalue joy. This is exactly 
 where many good, true, devout, and limited 
 people make a great mistake. Men have 
 always recognised a goodness in things that 
 are painful, even without analysing or un- 
 derstanding their feelings about it. They 
 have recognised the goodness in things ap- 
 parently evil, and certainly painful, but they 
 have mistaken where the goodness comes 
 in. They have confounded the goodness 
 which belongs to sacrifice or love with the 
 goodness which is in pain itself, as a mere 
 cleanser or restorer. They have mistaken 
 the means for the end, hence asceticism. 
 This seeking pain as a good in itself, and 
 not as a means to good, and cultivating 
 self-denial as an end, and not as a way to
 
 114 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 an end, is just where religious and well- 
 meaning people put stumbling-blocks in the 
 way of weaker brethren. 
 
 The mystery of pain is a prelude to the 
 mystery of pleasure. It is the apparent 
 discord melting into the true harmony. The 
 spiritual law is that the mystery of pain 
 merges by degrees into the mystery of 
 pleasure. Pain is the very root of pleasure. 
 " Only that painful thing is good which has 
 in it the root of pleasure/' says Hinton, in 
 his Mystery of Pain, and he is right, for 
 this it is alone which serves others' good. 
 Therefore no arbitrary, self-chosen sacrifice 
 is good. There is no source of joy in it. It 
 fails of its very first condition, spontaneous 
 love. The merest feeling of vanity or 
 hope of salvation for self alters the whole 
 character of giving up for others. Only that 
 sacrifice is good, according to Hinton, which 
 we accept for another's sake, or that which 
 serves as an end unseen by us. For, seen 
 or unseen service and joyous sacrifice is
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 115 
 
 good, but only when it is for service ; and 
 by service Hinton always implies love. 
 
 According to Hinton, we must look upon 
 our pain as our contribution to the redemp- 
 tion of the world. In this way, he says, 
 we link our weakness with omnipotence, 
 our blindness with omniscience. Hinton 's 
 conclusion to The Mystery of Pain leads us 
 to realise that he believed that it is as good 
 to be sacrificed, to be poor and wretched, 
 halt, maimed, and bruised, heart-broken, 
 spiritless, incapable, and apparently lost, as 
 to be happy and prosperous ; if not for our 
 sakes, it is for some one else's good that this 
 is so. Torquemada may have contributed 
 as much to your development and mine as 
 Joan of Arc has. 
 
 Vindictive condemnation, without under- 
 standing of what we condemn, may possibly 
 bring a retribution for the condemner he 
 least expects. Hardness of heart, self- 
 sufficiency, mere intellectual vainglory, and 
 cut and dried morality need all the suffering
 
 116 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 the great Spirit can send to enable a man 
 and woman to come out into the region of 
 forgiveness and loving-kindness. 
 
 We are all, whether we know it or not, 
 helped by invisible helpers, and the greater 
 the need the stronger the help. If pain 
 teaches us what we refuse to learn without 
 it ; if it helps us to strengthen others and 
 control ourselves as we could not have done 
 if we had not learnt our own lesson with 
 tears and misgivings ; if it tends in a small 
 degree towards the redemption of the world, 
 as it is meant to be redeemed, — let us cease 
 croaking and groaning over our sufferings, 
 and cry with Browning, as he passed into 
 the clearer paths he was assured of : 
 
 " Now, at noonday, in the bustle of man's work time, 
 Greet the unseen with a cheer ! 
 Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
 * Strive and thrive ! ' Cry, ' Speed, fight on, 
 for ever there as here. 1 " 
 
 George Fox's description of his spiritual 
 awakening might be repeated by some of
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 117 
 
 us when we first realise the inner meaning 
 of the mystery of pain : 
 
 " Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming 
 sword into the paradise of God. All things were 
 new, and all the creation gave another smell unto 
 me than before, beyond what words can utter. 1 "' 
 
 Hinton — hit and hurt as he was by those 
 who ought to have been wise enough to 
 understand his message, misunderstood as 
 he was by the crowd, scarcely realising the 
 might of his own vision — guessed, at any 
 rate, that the joy of heaven is the joy of 
 giving up, of saving others out of our 
 own lessons in sin and pain. The nearer 
 we approach to this spirit, not grudgingly 
 or of a necessity for personal salvation, but 
 in the lover's mood of lavish exaltation of 
 longing to rob himself in order to bless 
 what he loves, just in proportion as we 
 approach this newer view of love shall we 
 realise what the mystery of pain really 
 means. 
 
 When we know that perfect joy is perfect
 
 118 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 giving, then we are near the kingdom of 
 divine things ; and divine things are not 
 dull things, but have in them the fulness we 
 dimly realise when we love, when we hear 
 music, when, in fact, we are as little chil- 
 dren, and so in the mood to catch the 
 undertone in natural, mystical things. 
 
 Love in service— that is, a giving up 
 readily for another's need, no matter how 
 degraded or wretched we may assume that 
 person to be who needs our help — love in 
 service is to the soul what healthy exercise 
 is to the body, according to Hinton. When 
 we are in feeble spiritual health we begrudge 
 the giving, and so concentrate our power on 
 ourselves alone, as in disease our thoughts 
 are on our physical inconveniences, and our 
 very muscles refuse their work as our physical 
 vigour is impaired. 
 
 Let us realise then, quite simply and 
 bravely, that as man rises, he often suffers 
 more, not less. He ought to complain less, 
 it is true, as he understands more, for the
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 119 
 
 meaning of his pain becomes evident to 
 him. " Before the eyes can see they must 
 be incapable of tears," says Mabel Collins 
 in The Light on the Path. As Mr. Binns 
 points out in his Life of Walt Whitman : 
 
 " The wise soul uses the excellence of things, 
 and so things hurt it not at all. Live your life, 
 then, in faith not in fear, such is the word of the 
 Mystic. 11 
 
 To sum up, pain is the guardian angel 
 of the spiritual man as well as of the beast 
 and the primitive man. From a biological, 
 mental, and spiritual standpoint pain is the 
 thing as yet we can least dispense with, and, 
 when joined to its twin, love, can wash us 
 cleaner and heal us more certainly than any- 
 thing else in the world. Those who suffer 
 learn ; those who love know. Those who 
 have learnt through the knowledge suffering 
 and love can alone bring dare to be fools 
 as the world counts foolishness, dare to be 
 despised and rejected of men and acquainted 
 with grief because their vision makes them
 
 120 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 free. They take, in all its literalness, one of 
 the sayings of Jesus only lately discovered : 
 
 " Let not him who seeks cease until he finds, and 
 when he finds he shall be astonished. Astonished he 
 shall reach the Kingdom, and, having reached the 
 Kingdom, he shall rest. 11
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PLEASURE
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 
 
 False conception of pleasure — Hinton's view of it 
 as lover of nature and mystic— The ascetic and 
 sensualist foes to right understanding of pleasure 
 — Pleasure a right in itself— Restraint alone not 
 enough — Sexual love as a sacrament -Nature 
 makes goodness and pleasure one in the marriage 
 relation— Relationship between man and woman 
 a mystical one. 
 
 To the average Anglo-Saxon mind, pleasure 
 does not suggest a magnet for drawing souls 
 to heaven. Pain, some of us argue, is justi- 
 fied in the scheme of things through its very 
 evident results in nations and persons ; but 
 pleasure, the sheer joy of a thing for itself, 
 smacks of immorality or impulsive and 
 youthful licence. 
 
 Pleasure, to many people, often implies a 
 worse pain than pain itself, because of the
 
 124 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 false conception we have of an imperative 
 need in our nature, a craving as urgent as 
 hunger or thirst, the need for legitimate and 
 delicious joy. It will take some of us a long 
 time to get rid of the monastic system, as 
 Hinton so well describes our unnatural re- 
 straints to be. In nothing do we need a 
 way of escape more than in our slavery to 
 traditions about this matter of pleasure. 
 
 If we wish to be artists in life, Hinton 
 maintained, we must follow what he con- 
 sidered to be the painter's methods in de- 
 velopment, and work from sheer impulse, 
 through restraint and detail, to a deeper 
 and simpler expression. In this question of 
 pleasure we have not even begun to under- 
 stand the impulse behind pleasure, though 
 we are grappling with elaborate detailed 
 restraint in the matter, in a ferocious moral 
 anxiety lest we should be damned before we 
 have co-ordinated our system of personal 
 torture in order to effect personal salvation. 
 The larger freedom, which implies neither
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 125 
 
 restraint nor asceticism, is not as yet within 
 the range of vision of the majority of people. 
 Before analysing Hinton's wise and unwise 
 views of this mystery of pleasure, it may be 
 well to imagine that our preconceived con- 
 ceptions of pleasure do not exist. 
 
 Let us look at the matter from a natural 
 standard and a mystic standard, not from 
 the standard of the sensualist and the 
 ascetic. This is very difficult, as no question 
 is so bound up with terrifying inanities and 
 ugly misconceptions as this one of pleasure. 
 From a biological point of view, pleasure is 
 a guardian angel of the body as much as 
 pain is. One impels the animal to choose 
 the pleasing thing in function which will 
 intensify the vitality of the race, as the other 
 defends the animal from the thing which 
 will injure or extinguish physical life. If 
 we start with the assertion that the condition 
 for taking pleasure is freedom from self and 
 at the same time is a true expression of self, 
 we shall, in following out this apparently
 
 126 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 contradictory statement, realise that what 
 Hinton believed is true, that whatever is 
 most pleasure will be found to be the true 
 order in the end. Whatever gives the most 
 freedom to real love, whatever gives the 
 most passionateness of joy to passion, will 
 be the nearest to service and not the furthest 
 away from it. 
 
 Because we make war on pleasures that 
 are against service we ought not therefore 
 to make war on pleasures that are for service, 
 or we shall divert the great force of true 
 pleasure to false issues and so divide power 
 against itself. 
 
 Hinton saw the force of this as perhaps 
 no modern moralist has. When people 
 speak of pleasure, they are more often than 
 not confounding pleasure with impurity, 
 laxity, or excess. It is as if we declared 
 that the cough of a consumptive is the man 
 himself. We have to face the mystery 
 of pleasure, not as we imagined it, but as 
 it ought to be. The change of attitude
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 127 
 
 which is bound to come in this matter is 
 a spiritual one more than a physical change. 
 The kind of purity and restraint the average 
 person advocates is the kind of purity 
 disease or mutilation might bring, not the 
 joy and throb of a healthy organism re- 
 sponding to and attracting all things that 
 make for life and not death, for sanity and 
 not excess. 
 
 Hinton gives a very good instance in his 
 private manuscripts of the pitiful inversion 
 the natural joy in natural things can 
 undergo. 
 
 A man came to him once in great distress 
 because he thought he had hurt the purity 
 of mind of his wife by persuading her to 
 have a bath with her baby in his presence. 
 They had all enjoyed it like children, till 
 the false idea came to the man, the idea of 
 impurity. He could not see, even when 
 Hinton pointed it out to him, that the only 
 demoralising thing in the situation was his 
 feeling of demoralisation. It was as if a 
 
 9
 
 128 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 flower felt it a sin to shake in the wind or 
 open to the sun. A father and mother and 
 child being joyously and intimately one, a 
 sin ! It makes one wonder what sort of 
 training in purity ought to follow these 
 stuffy misconceptions of the degradation of 
 the sweet, clean senses ! The pathetic thing 
 was that the man seemed to despise his wife 
 for what he had asked her to do. This so 
 often happens under our false conceptions 
 of purity and pleasure, where mock modesty 
 and insincerity on a woman's part and 
 conscious scheming on the man's part take 
 the place of natural impulses and mystic 
 forces. Our righteousness, in these matters, 
 must not be as filthy rags. As the author 
 of The Modern Mystic's Way says truly, 
 " Love and worship body and soul with 
 soul and body and you may do what you 
 like and love body as passionately as soul." 
 In other words, we are to make ourselves 
 such within, that goodness shall not lead to 
 evil results.
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 129 
 
 Hinton realised, quite as much as 
 Nietzsche did, that it is not only our 
 badness that is bad, but our goodness in 
 these matters. Hinton emphatically de- 
 clares that the wisdom which scorns sense 
 is folly, and the purity which puts sense 
 aside and wants to dwell above it is not 
 purity, but impurity. The great secret is 
 surely not to want to live above any one 
 beautiful function or feeling we have, but 
 in unity with it and with the larger self, 
 which is, or should be, at one with the 
 smaller self. It is not less life and joy and 
 pleasure we want, but more ; and we must 
 try to dissolve our discords into harmonies 
 with respect to these matters. It is not an 
 increase in the pitiable army of the underfed, 
 anaemic, miscalled spiritual men and women 
 we need, but an increase in the well- 
 nourished, clean, robust, mystic, and joyous 
 lovers of the world who are no more afraid 
 of their healthy bodily functions than of 
 the pain and loss and development which
 
 130 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 precede and follow all the great growths of 
 the heart and soul. 
 
 Many people think that there is no choice 
 between badness in pleasure and goodness 
 in restraint. Everything depends on the 
 point of view. 
 
 " Suppose," says Hinton, " because they are so 
 delicious to eat, that pineapples were forbidden to 
 be seen except in pictures, and even in them there 
 was a sort of doubtful feeling. Suppose no one 
 might have a sight of pineapples unless he were 
 rich enough to buy one for his own particular eating. 
 The sight and the eating being so joined together, 
 should we not have made life in respect to pine- 
 apples, and our gluttony about them, as impure and 
 wretched as it is now about women and pleasure? 
 Suppose some one awoke to the fallacy about pine- 
 apples. What then ? Should we go on submitting 
 to the idiotic feeling ? No. We should not get 
 rid of pineapples, but we should change our feeling 
 about them." 
 
 Hinton says that, just in the same way, 
 when women have faced some things they 
 must be brave enough to realise what it 
 is that wants taking away ; not the reality,
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 131 
 
 but the pretence. Women, he says, must 
 get rid of the feeling which makes them 
 say, " Let any hypocrisy and mischief be, 
 but no shock or effort must come to me." 
 Men also must get cleaner hearts and 
 renewed spirits before either men or women 
 can dream truly or act truly about those 
 passionate mystic pleasures which are able 
 to cleanse and strengthen and ought never 
 to degrade or weaken our souls. As 
 Hinton truly declares, nothing can give us 
 a true heaven again but this giving of a 
 true earth to us again, and this giving of 
 earth to us, in the sense he means, is 
 not the restraint of impure pleasures and 
 passions, or an excess of sensuality, but a 
 new vision of the purity of pure passions 
 and pure pleasures. 
 
 Hinton recognises what so many moralists 
 fail to see, that no pleasure can possibly 
 degrade a man not already degraded by 
 acting for himself. This acting for self 
 is what Hinton condemns all through his
 
 132 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 philosophy. He believes that it is at the 
 root of all our distorted virtues and false 
 sins. In a right, he says, there cannot be 
 a wrong. The wrong is in us, in our 
 attitude. All pleasure taken merely for 
 self degrades. It is the taking for self 
 that degrades it, not the thing taken. 
 
 Absolute absorption in anything is in- 
 harmonious and so wrong. It is a mistake 
 to think that goodness consists in putting 
 away pleasure. Pleasure is not only not 
 wrong in itself, but a right in itself; yet a 
 man centring his life wholly round pleasure 
 is wrong, as even work is wrong if it 
 absorbs all the faculties and thoughts of a 
 man. The casting out of self, to Hinton, 
 means, not a sinking of individuality and 
 the cultivation of mock heroism, but a 
 defining of real individuality and a realisa- 
 tion of others' needs so that impulses move 
 in the direction of service, not only for 
 others but for self. 
 
 This is a very important point in Hinton's
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 133 
 
 ethics. Hinton would say, Love your 
 neighbour as yourself, because you realise 
 through your own needs and development 
 what are your neighbour's needs. Neither 
 a thwarted, crushed self nor a thwarted, 
 crushed neighbour is a fulfilling of the law 
 of service, as Hinton understood service 
 or love. In these matters we are not to 
 cast out self in a mock heroism or forced 
 sacrifice, any more than in service or love 
 we are to cast out sense. We are to 
 fulfil the demands of a real self and a sane 
 service in order to get rid of a false self 
 and an artificial service. 
 
 It is the having self alone, apart from 
 service, which is the stupid thing, because 
 then the self is false, even to itself. It 
 is always to be the self for and in with 
 others from the first. Not pleasure first, 
 but service and good first, and then all the 
 pleasure it is possible to have. Self-virtue 
 is bound to bring self-pleasure in its train. 
 This is what people cannot and will not
 
 134 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 see. The only good is to desire good ; and 
 good thoughts, as Hinton again and again 
 puts it, are thoughts for service. 
 
 The putting away pleasure, he saw clearly, 
 is a necessary result of pursuing pleasure. 
 Do not pursue pleasure, says Hinton. Do 
 not put it away either. Keep the law of love 
 or service in your heart, and the servants 
 of true pleasure, joy and purity, will come 
 along unbidden. Pleasure is only a tyrant 
 when it is pursued. Be its slave, and it 
 debases you. Be free of it and yet welcome 
 it when it comes, and you know the true 
 joy of living. To insist, says this seer, on 
 refusing good because it is pleasure binds 
 most cruelly, most fatally, most deeply, and 
 with hardest pangs to be loosed, this yoke 
 of pleasure on the soul. It is the utmost 
 depth of bondage to it. But get rid of the 
 search for pleasure, and in fact the search 
 for anything, and then take all joy as it 
 comes along. When we have once realised 
 that goodness and pleasure are not foes but
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 135 
 
 allies, we are on the way to understanding, 
 not only Hinton's meaning, but earth's 
 meaning. 
 
 " Man," says Hinton, " cannot hear the voice of 
 good when it calls in the tone of pleasure. His ears 
 are deafened to that sound, and though service play 
 to him upon an instrument of joy, with ever such 
 charms, his dull feet will not move.'" 
 
 There are two ways, according to Hinton, 
 in which pleasure may be treated. Let 
 all pleasures be counted evil unless some- 
 thing makes them good, or let all be 
 counted good unless something makes them 
 evil. Pleasure is good if made good, bad 
 if made bad ; but pleasure in itself is not 
 an evil, but a good thing. 
 
 There are two deliverances in this matter 
 of pleasure — deliverance from the rule of self 
 and deliverance from fear. We must in- 
 dividually face this question of pleasure by 
 marching up to it, looking it in the face in 
 order to know the difference between realities 
 and conventions, and then simply set about
 
 136 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 our work with courage and simplicity. In- 
 sight soon comes to us if we are true and 
 fearless. However traditionalised we are, 
 sooner or later we must face this question 
 of pleasure. Is not heaven itself supposed 
 to be pleasure ? If we are to enter there, 
 even according to dogmatic belief, we must 
 surely learn here not to be afraid of pleasure, 
 or we may, when we reach the other side, 
 find ourselves like cripples in a dancing-hall, 
 a little out of place. Was not that a wise 
 man, demands Hintoi), who asked, " Why 
 should the devil have all the best tunes ? " 
 and he gave to God's service all the best 
 music he could find. 
 
 Pleasure is good, but only utterly good 
 when it is merged in love or service ; and we 
 must always bear in mind that service cannot 
 rule over pleasure if we make it second to 
 anything. Make love, real love, rule and 
 follow any pleasure you like, because then 
 you cannot make human beings a mere 
 means to your private pleasure or end, but
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 137 
 
 must first allow them to be ends in them- 
 selves, as Kant so simply sums up these 
 intricate ethics for us. Service must rule 
 first. If not, we have thrown away our 
 safeguard, as Hinton says, and given our 
 foes dominion over us. We must be slaves 
 to no one, and to nothing, and servants of 
 nothing but service ; and by service Hinton 
 always means love in its best and sanest 
 sense, as Christ and Buddha interpret love. 
 
 Nothing else can give the passion, the 
 courage, the vitality we need for daily in- 
 spiration and usefulness. Service or love is 
 the only power pleasure will obey. That 
 is, nothing else can make the giving up of 
 pleasure itself a pleasure. Pain and pleasure 
 alike are but incidents ; they are both not 
 causes, but effects. Pleasure is not a thing, 
 not any action or process even. It is the 
 gratifying of a tendency or impulse. Any 
 tendency made strong enough to be a passion 
 gives pleasure. That is the natural law. 
 The passion or tendency arises from a need,
 
 138 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 the good of that need arises from the fact 
 that the need itself is, or should be, for 
 service. So pleasure is an incident, not an 
 end. The tendencies express the needs, and 
 the fulfilling of the needs is pleasure. As 
 Hinton says : 
 
 " We cannot even eat our dinners rightly, cannot 
 have our relations right to mere dead flesh of beast 
 and bird and roots of the earth, till our thoughts 
 are off pleasure as a first cause. 1, 
 
 Hinton knew a great secret. It is not 
 enough to restrain passion. The passion 
 itself must be right. It is a mistake to 
 imagine that in any world restraint of 
 passion would suffice for virtue. The 
 people who would spiritualise passion must 
 first humanise it. The best-meaning people 
 often make a mistake in this matter, and it 
 is from this wrong conception that they 
 inculcate into young healthy creatures a code 
 of morality that both their natural and 
 mystic intuitions repudiate. The child is 
 often nearer the seer than the rigid moralist
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 139 
 
 in these matters. Not restraint, then, but 
 the condition in which restraint is no more 
 called for, is the only true good. 
 
 " Let pleasure," says Hinton, " be no more a power 
 to ruin and destroy. Learn to be able to use it and 
 not to be crushed by it ; to be able to stand up erect 
 as men even in face of it, and so be able to pursue 
 service in the midst of pleasure." 
 
 " What right have we ? " asks Hinton, 
 " to assume that a pleasure is not a duty ? " 
 It is sad to realise how much needless 
 suffering and needless sense of sin come 
 about through a wrong conception of plea- 
 sure. Nowhere is this seen more pitiably 
 than in the relations of the sexes ; and this 
 is what Hinton realised towards the end of 
 his life more than almost anything else. 
 
 Sexual love, to Hinton, was a sacrament, 
 which it was a sin to withhold and a sin 
 to profane. Sexual love implies, to many 
 minds, a mere physical relationship, and so 
 confusion naturally arises between the ideas 
 of a man like Hinton and the interpretation
 
 140 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 of these same ideas by one who has the 
 average conception of love and morality. 
 The over-emphatic and therefore untrue 
 emphasis of the physical, insisted upon by 
 sexual gluttons, was to Hinton a shocking 
 and stupid way of approaching what was, 
 to him, the most beautiful and mystical 
 thing with which we have to reckon — 
 the absolute need of a man for a woman 
 for his complement of body and soul ; 
 and the woman's equally imperative need, 
 her need of man's need of her, as Heine 
 puts it. To treat this great spiritual fact 
 only from the bodily side was, Hinton 
 declared, as if, in listening to Sarasate play- 
 ing the violin, we were always thinking 
 about the cat's bowels and horses' tails 
 used to produce the instrument. Modern 
 science has to be thanked for knowledge 
 of actual physical facts in these matters 
 of sex, for all facts are important enough 
 in this question, around which are more 
 traditions and muddle-headedness than in
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 141 
 
 anything else. Science, however, has also 
 unfortunately helped a little in the attitude 
 many still retain, the attitude of too much 
 emphasis on the mere bodily function in- 
 stead of on its mystical inwardness. 
 
 Hinton's attitude, when facing this dif- 
 ficult problem, is the attitude of one seeing 
 and believing in the mysticism, the purity, 
 the beauty, and the force for good in sex, as 
 Nature and the great Spirit in and beyond 
 Nature mean sex to be. Neither Nature 
 nor Nature's God means it to be the dull, 
 stuffy, gluttonous, absorbing, jealous, and 
 ugly thing it is to many people. " The 
 embracing of a woman is the most spiritual 
 of all things," said Hinton ; and he literally 
 meant what he said. To the man who has 
 never had that utter mystic bewilderment 
 and abandonment, to be found only by the 
 very law of its nature in clean livers and 
 true lovers, the statement made by Hinton 
 only represents an orgy of intemperate 
 gluttony and mere bodily sensation.
 
 142 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Love's laws are tragically made to work out 
 their cause and effect. In this, as in other 
 regions, one cannot gather figs from thistles, 
 nor serenity, peace, and beauty from debauch. 
 Sowing and reaping in this love question 
 are one. The means to a great spiritual 
 fulfilment through a physical function has 
 passed beyond the primitive needs of an 
 ape or a tiger, and we are on the threshold 
 of the greatest revolution the world has 
 ever seen — the revolution of love. Love 
 was once as far away from its own kingdom 
 of beauty as a stage-coach from wireless 
 telegraphy. Wonders are ahead of us in 
 these matters, and, though we may eagerly 
 absorb the newer ideal, we must apply 
 Edward Carpenter's words in earnest, " Do 
 not hurry ; have faith." 
 
 The fact that pleasure is, or should be, an 
 essential part of love, confuses the tradition- 
 alised mind, which cannot rid itself of the 
 association of ascetic ideals or licentious ex- 
 cess in this matter of love and joy. Love,
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 143 
 
 real love, can dispense with both restraint 
 and excess, because in a true love and a full 
 freedom temperance and joy are necessary 
 parts. The true lover is neither covetous 
 of what he loves nor afraid of his own 
 feelings. It was a plea for this joy and 
 temperance in love that Hinton always 
 put forward. He saw plainly that " lust 
 is that distortion of one or some desires 
 that comes by absence of desires that ought 
 to be present." He wanted people to 
 realise that joy is not of necessity a greedy 
 absorption, and that pleasure, rightly under- 
 stood, here and now, is one of the means 
 towards understanding eternal truths. 
 
 It is no use waiting for the mere accident 
 of death to become pure. We may be very 
 certain that the other side of the opaque 
 veil will not remodel us at a bound. It is 
 we who have to remodel ourselves here, 
 and as soon as we realise what remodelling 
 means we must have the courage to begin. 
 What we have failed to learn here we shall 
 
 10
 
 144 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 certainly have to learn there. It will not 
 do to skip pages in one life, thinking we 
 can understand the following chapter in 
 the next. They hang together. We shall 
 continue struggling, whether it is this side 
 or the other, till we have attained. The 
 lesson we moderns have to learn about love 
 is to get rid of both the leering thought 
 of mere pleasure in and for itself and also 
 to get rid of an angry, incensed repulsion 
 about the physical side of love, both attitudes 
 proving the same thing — that our thought is 
 on mere pleasure for its own sake, and not 
 on pleasure as it is wedded to service. 
 
 Brutal bestiality is often the offspring of 
 mock goodness, and all the meanness and 
 absorption of possession in persons, in or out 
 of legal bonds, must go, as feudalism has 
 gone. It is out of hell into paradise we are 
 to get in this matter, and only true lovers 
 can lead the way. Nature has made good 
 and pleasure one in the marriage relation, 
 but it is only a type of all her being ; it is
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 145 
 
 but the chief and culminating instance, and 
 so evidently the one in which her chief work 
 is done. Nature asks the question, which 
 shall goodness mean to you ? Refusing 
 pleasure and so thinking of yourself, or ful- 
 filling absolutely the condition of it so that 
 you need think of others only ? Fulfilling 
 the conditions is an inside thing, a thing of 
 the heart. The using any law, a law of 
 Nature, against service is the abusing of it. 
 The question of gluttony and food illus- 
 trates this matter. Pleasure in eating food 
 aids digestion, is natural and right, and 
 should be almost unconscious. The con- 
 scious element in eating should be as to 
 what is nourishing in order to make the 
 human being strong and fit for work and 
 service for self and others. 
 
 As Hinton points out, there is no eating 
 perfectly for service except by letting pleasure 
 guide the eating. In this, as in sexual love, 
 instead of pleasure being a thing to get rid 
 of, it should be a guide. We confound mere
 
 146 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 pleasant sensations with pleasure. Pleasure 
 is the play of passion, and varies constantly. 
 Let the passion be for service and what 
 harm can the pleasure do ? That is the 
 nature harmony in the matter of eating. 
 The moment the mind is on the mere 
 sensation of tickling the palate, and good 
 wholesome food is felt to be insipid, and 
 only spicy, stimulating and costly food is 
 craved, the appetite has gone from service 
 lines to gluttony lines, and the real evil 
 in this matter has crept in. Hunger is 
 good, pleasure in satisfying hunger is good ; 
 gluttony is dull and inharmonious. 
 
 Now, what the whole world more or less 
 recognises about eating, Hinton vividly 
 realised about the sexual appetite. Sex, 
 Hinton declares, is the gluttony region of 
 our life, and so creates artificial needs and 
 artificial rules. What to him was horrid 
 and filthy was letting the thought of mere 
 selfishness come in at all in this matter. 
 He saw how we degrade this sex hunger
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 147 
 
 by lust and selfishness. To Hinton, as to 
 all real lovers, this mystieal love is a thing 
 nobler than poetry, lovelier than flowers, 
 even more ravishing than music. The 
 purest woman I have ever known said 
 once to me, " Ah ! surely ! love is like 
 music, it vibrates, satisfies, and uplifts just 
 as Beethoven does." Hinton, the pure 
 man, said : 
 
 " The person who thinks embracing a woman 
 more low and sensual than music has made it 
 brutal. Nothing can degrade save what is in the 
 soul." 
 
 Hinton, the mystic, knew that the dew 
 of heaven is not a purer thing in its essence 
 than this love that, once twisted round self, 
 becomes a pollution. The corruption, if 
 any there be, is in us and not in it. All 
 other things, as he says, will bear being 
 twisted round self with less pollution than 
 will this, which is, in its essence, the purest 
 of them all. To Hinton, sexual love meant 
 woman's good, her life, and to him this is
 
 148 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 just what made it pure. He realised that 
 it was a means to her health of body, 
 sanity of mind, the intensest devotion and 
 sacrifice, the very fullest development of her 
 life, with all the pleasure to her of giving, 
 both to her lover and again to her child. 
 The means towards that which should call 
 forth the highest elements alike in her and 
 in man, this, Hinton could not, as doctor 
 and mystic, find degrading. He could only 
 see the wonder and glory of it, and his heart 
 was torn as he realised more and more what 
 a mockery of the reality our little trite, 
 traditionalised domestic relationships often 
 are at their very best. 
 
 " Is it more shame or wonder, 11 he asks, " that of 
 all the thoughts man has had respecting his passion 
 for woman and joy in her, he has never had the 
 thought of its good for her ? " 
 
 Instead of looking on this sexual love 
 as a mere means to his pleasure and 
 enjoyment, he ought to look at it as 
 the means of her utmost good, her
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 149 
 
 fulfilment. Hinton saw that the taint of 
 man's ordinary attitude to women and to 
 pleasure pollutes our very piety, for con- 
 scious hypocrisy and sexual selfishness may 
 be greater sins against the Holy Spirit than 
 many others put to that account. When a 
 man is only thinking of his own sexual 
 sensations while he imagines that he is 
 loving a woman, it is, as Hinton points out, 
 as if a person were called to another in his 
 utmost need in sickness and could think of 
 nothing but the pleasure of the journey 
 there. 
 
 According to Hinton, women must be 
 literally worshipped in spirit before the 
 bodily enjoyment can be true to service. 
 Their body is the precious instrument for 
 producing the best results for the race. 
 Our sweet, natural wants are Nature's har- 
 monies, but our excessive, stimulated needs 
 are our own, and are often discords. Hunger 
 is a natural need ; gluttony an unnatural 
 excess of the need. Drinking is another
 
 150 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 real need ; drunkenness the debauch of that 
 need. Physical love is a righteous need ; 
 lust its dull slave. Unnatural restraint 
 follows unnatural desire. What remedy is 
 there for restraint, according to Hinton ? 
 Only one. That a man should not need 
 restraint, because his senses are clean and 
 sweet, and so will easily follow his needs, 
 and not his excesses. The necessity of 
 putting away pleasure, then, is merely the 
 result of pursuing it. 
 
 " When the question of his bodily pleasure, 11 says 
 Hinton, "has been made to determine everything, 
 how should man's thoughts go to anything but the 
 question of his bodily pleasure ? r 
 
 Hinton always proves in these matters 
 how the letter killeth. Self-righteousness 
 and putting purity as a thing of the flesh 
 he knew to be nearly always one. 
 
 A man who declared again and again, as 
 Hinton did, that sexual pleasure, rightly 
 understood, is the most spiritual thing, 
 sublimer, purer, more noble and ennobling
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 151 
 
 than any prayer that ever was or ever will 
 be uttered, should be listened to in this 
 matter. Perhaps his statement was an ex- 
 aggeration, but the exaggeration is better on 
 the cleaner side than the fouler one. The 
 struggle between woman's needs and the 
 self in man would soon be at an end if man 
 could once realise that if his pleasure is his 
 first thought he is far away, not only from 
 the kingdom of heaven, but from the 
 realisation of woman. Her need is truly 
 man's need of her, but no woman gives 
 herself unreservedly except to one who 
 loves her beyond herself and himself. She 
 cannot, because of the nature of the re- 
 lationship. This is the true lover's secret, 
 and also the solution of this vexed question 
 of the mystery of pleasure in sexual rela- 
 tionships. 
 
 Sex, in the sense Hinton realised it, is 
 not a question of the senses only, but a 
 matter of affinity which neither this world 
 nor thousands of worlds can impair or
 
 152 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 destroy, if lovers are true to their vision and 
 to the inner laws of mystical marriage. 
 
 It is, as Hinton implies again and again, 
 no use fighting a spiritual power as if it 
 were a mere thing of the flesh. We might 
 as well try to bind the wind with chains. 
 Not to have love was the only damnation 
 to Hinton. Attain purity of heart, was his 
 cry, then you will see, not only woman as 
 God sees her, but woman as God meant her 
 to be. When purity is attained it is a 
 stable condition, not capable of being 
 affected by external conditions. " Be such 
 a one that you will be able to obey your 
 impulses," he repeats again and again. 
 
 Many of us follow St. Paul in these 
 matters, and St. Paul had indeed a thorn 
 in his flesh and in his soul, and he vented 
 his pain in many caustic sayings against 
 the deliciousness of sex. His followers are 
 many, and the followers of Christ few. 
 He, gentle to little children, loving the 
 Magdalene, not as a pitiable outcast, but as
 
 MYSTERY OF PLEASURE 153 
 
 one realising His conception of love as a 
 giving up of all things, said (and let all good 
 people note this well) "I am come that they 
 might have life, and that they might have it 
 more abundantly." 
 
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 James Hinton. Man and his Dwe/ling-Place. 1869. 
 
 New editions in 1861 and 1872. 
 „ „ Life in Nature. 1862. 
 
 „ „ The Mystery of Pain. 1866. 
 
 „ ,, The Place of the Physician. 1876. 
 
 ,, ,, Chapters on the Art of Thinking, and 
 
 other Essays. Edited by C. H. Hinton. 
 
 1879. 
 „ ,, Philosophy and Religion. Selections 
 
 from Manuscripts. Edited by Caroline 
 
 H addon. 1881. 
 „ „ The Lawbreaker. Edited by Margaret 
 
 Hinton, with an Introduction by 
 
 Havelock Ellis. 1884. 
 Ellice Hopkins. Life and Letters of James Hinton. 1878. 
 Caroline Haddon. The Larger Life. Studies in Hinton's 
 
 Ethics. 1886.
 
 ru 
 
 Jr/4 J\l U^Zihit
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 
 
 Nietzsche a breaker of standard moral values— Mere 
 morality valueless— Individuality the first thing 
 to attain— Nietzsche a tonic— Views on sin and 
 suffering— Antagonism to sympathy — Nietzsche's 
 views on women- His attitude to Christianity. 
 
 Nietzsche, as he himself expresses it, is a 
 breaker of standard values. He seeks to 
 draw people from the herd. This is to 
 court misinterpretation and crucifixion. 
 The good, the just, and the orthodox make 
 a hue-and-cry when a prophet has a new 
 word for the same old religion and morality ; 
 but when he asks the good, the just, and the 
 moral to re-value their own virtues, when 
 he calls on them to re-value their values 
 and to weigh their bad goodness in the 
 balance with their good badness, as it were, 
 they naturally rub their eyes. Neither 
 
 157
 
 158 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Christianity nor paganism fits this man's 
 philosophy, and it always seems dangerous 
 to the crowd to accept nameless ideals. 
 
 What does Nietzsche offer as a solution to 
 some of the problems which beset thinking 
 people ? So much of his writing is obscure 
 and apparently contradictory that it is very 
 difficult to find out what his fundamental 
 aim is. An orthodox Christian, a narrow 
 moralist, indeed even a free thinker, reading 
 his books may well be puzzled and some- 
 what terrified by what they find ; but, 
 whatever else may have happened to them 
 before they finish his pages, they will have 
 been made to think and to weigh their 
 virtues and their vices in a new balance. 
 
 " Man," says Nietzsche, " is a connecting rope 
 between the animal and the over-man, a rope over 
 an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a 
 bridge and not a goal ; what can be loved in man is 
 that he is a transit and an exit." 
 
 Here is the key to some of his meaning. 
 When he mocks, it is at the crawling under-
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 159 
 
 man. When he incites, it is to spur the 
 man to hasten the coming of the over-man. 
 As monkey is to man, so is man to the over- 
 man, and all Nietzsche's commandments are 
 to further the advent of this new creation or 
 evolution. In doing this, he breaks down 
 the idols of traditional Christianity and of 
 morals ruthlessly. In The Dawn of Day he 
 says that — 
 
 " man has connected all things in existence with 
 morals, and dressed up the world in a garb of ethical 
 significance. The day will come when all this will be 
 utterly valueless, as is already, in our days, the belief 
 in the masculinity or femininity of the sun." 
 
 Looking upon morality as a mere obedi- 
 ence to customs, he feels it is intrinsically, 
 on that very account, valueless. The great 
 thing of value, he implies, is the absolute 
 reality of a man's personal vision, whether it 
 be moral, Christian, pagan, or even vicious. 
 Morality always declares that the individual 
 must sacrifice himself to the commandment 
 of the current order of virtue. Nietzsche 
 
 11
 
 160 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 would sacrifice the current morality to the 
 inner vision of the man wise, sane, and single 
 enough to have a vision. According to him, 
 the free man is often called immoral, simply 
 because he is determined in everything to 
 depend upon this inner vision and not upon 
 observance. 
 
 In The Dawn of Day, Nietzsche says 
 truly : 
 
 "It is incalculable how much suffering just the rarer, 
 choicer, and more original minds must have under- 
 gone in the course of history, owing to their ever 
 being looked upon, nay, and their looking upon 
 themselves, as evil and dangerous. Originality of 
 every kind has acquired a bad conscience under the 
 supreme rule of the morality of custom, and up to 
 this very moment the heaven of the best, for the same 
 reason, appears gloomier than it needs be." 
 
 Nietzsche ridicules the fear man has of his 
 own individuality or of his sweetest and 
 quietest visions. This fear, he feels, often 
 makes a man, in order to escape from the 
 subtle demands of his deepest self, rush into 
 a restless mania of work, which Nietzsche
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 161 
 
 calls "machinal activity." From this he gets 
 a " minute joy." Incessant activity, under 
 the name of work, is what this strong, virile 
 intellectualist considers a mere device to 
 prevent dreams and reflection. In Human, 
 all too Human, he says : 
 
 "It is the misfortune of the active that their activity 
 is almost always somewhat senseless. The active roll 
 like a stone in accordance with the stupidity of 
 mechanics. All men are still divided, as they have 
 ever been, into bond and free. Whoever has not 
 two-thirds of the day to himself is a slave, no matter 
 what he may be otherwise — statesman, merchant, 
 official, or scholar." 11 
 
 Nietzsche is dubious about the " blessings 
 of labour," unless, like asceticism, it is under- 
 taken for a very definite end. 
 
 " Against any kind of affliction,"" he says, in T7ie 
 Daion of Day, " or mental misery, we ought to try 
 first of all a change of diet and hard manual 
 labour." 
 
 "The greatest events," he says in Zarathustra, 
 " are not our loudest, but our stillest hours. The 
 world doth not revolve round the inventors of new 
 noises, but round the inventors of new values."
 
 162 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Nietzsche's cry to us is still to re-value. 
 He calls on us to face our strenuousness as 
 well as our sins, to find out the true worth of 
 all our endeavours, to introspect and decide 
 what we are, what we are aiming at, and 
 what goal we have before us. He declares 
 that six things have been spoilt through 
 their misuse by the Church. First asce- 
 ticism, then fasting, the cloister, the festival 
 or orgy, our spontaneous self, and death. If 
 we truthfully take those points one by one 
 and wrestle with Nietzsche's meaning with 
 regard to them, we shall be nearer an under- 
 standing of this apparently stern iconoclast, 
 and certainly nearer to a comprehension of 
 our own souls. 
 
 The mere moralist and sentimentalist 
 will put down much of Nietzsche's teaching 
 as dangerous or insane. To assert that 
 Nietzsche actually went mad, is, of course, a 
 cheap way of refuting his doctrines. About 
 his insanity one is inclined to believe his own 
 words in The Dawn of Day, where he says
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 163 
 
 that in olden days, when insanity appeared, 
 a grain of genius and wisdom, something 
 "divine," as they whispered into each other's 
 ears, was to be found. If Nietzsche's visions 
 and thoughts were too much for the poor 
 human brain which carried them, let us 
 beware how we judge him, and only pray 
 for a mental digestion strong enough to 
 choose the good and reject the evil of the 
 message he has left us. 
 
 Nietzsche did not go mad because he 
 wrote philosophy, or even because he wrote 
 against Christianity, any more than Maupas- 
 sant went mad because he wrote novels. 
 We have still to understand insanity before 
 we can judge it. All with which we have 
 to concern ourselves is to see to it that we 
 do not drive our rarer and more sensitive 
 brothers to the edge of it when they come 
 with a new message. Crucifixion is not the 
 only method of disposing of those who are 
 pure in heart. 
 
 According to Nietzsche's philosophy a
 
 164 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 man must never sacrifice the greater for 
 the less, an eternal verity, a great human 
 instinct, for a mere code, however noble that 
 code may be. Had Domini, in Hichens's 
 novel, The Garden of Allah, been a follower 
 of Nietzsche, she would not have crushed 
 in herself feelings more eternal than all 
 mere moralities, and sent back the man she 
 loved to live a lie in his living death. His 
 monkhood, after a glance at the eternal 
 verities with Domini, could have been only 
 a tasteless offering to his God. But, given 
 the belief in a rigid code of morality, neither 
 Domini nor her lover could have acted 
 differently. 
 
 It is, however, against such slavery to 
 duties so called, to conventions and to re- 
 ligious and moral brutalities, which crucify 
 natural and mystical instincts, that Nietzsche 
 wages war. No over-man, he seems to 
 argue, can evolve from a hypnotised or 
 shackled under-man. Where goodness pro- 
 ceeds from an exuberance of self, and not
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 165 
 
 from a repression of self, he believes in it, 
 but he is very hard on the weaklings who 
 think themselves good because they have 
 lame paws. He says in Zarathustra : 
 
 " Thou shalt strive after the virtue of the pillar. 
 It ever getteth more beautiful and tender, but inside 
 ever harder and more able to bear the load the 
 higher it ariseth." 
 
 His cry to us is to get rid of fear, to 
 face evil, to re-value it, and to re-value 
 goodness. To do this we must get rid of 
 cowardice and of half-gods. It is a big 
 call, and few dare respond. It means 
 high flying and courage, for, to use his 
 own words, "the higher a man flies, the 
 smaller he appears to the crowd beneath," 
 and we all know that the crowd beneath 
 have almost superhuman powers to arrest 
 flight. 
 
 In declaring that Nietzsche commands 
 a man to follow his own inner vision it 
 must not be imagined that he implies laxity. 
 Nietzsche, virile thinker as he is, is in a
 
 166 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 very real sense ascetic ; his work abounds 
 with calls to temperance and hardness. 
 Asceticism to him does not mean a slaying 
 of instincts and happiness. He takes the 
 word in its literal Greek sense, which 
 means to exercise oneself, to combat, so 
 that in this sense an ascetic means an 
 athlete. 
 
 This fact must always be borne in mind 
 when reading Nietzsche, because, in the 
 ordinary sense, asceticism means a hair-shirt 
 and actual repression. Nietzsche defines 
 chastity, for instance, as the economy of 
 the artist. He would also call asceticism 
 the athleticism of the strong man ; and 
 strong means always to Nietzsche the con- 
 trolled and, therefore, the great man. In 
 his Genealogy of Morals he says : 
 
 " My highest respect to the ascetic ideal in so 
 far as it is honest, so long as it believes in itself 
 and cuts no capers for us. I do not like the whited 
 sepulchres which mimic life, agitators dressed up as 
 heroes and who are at bottom tragic clowns only."
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 167 
 
 He resents the " enormous forgery in 
 ideals, these best-distilled waters of the 
 spirit," but towards the trained athlete in 
 control and endurance, who is simple and 
 single in his endeavours to live a hard, 
 forcible, and sincere life his sympathy goes 
 out. He feels that the true ascetic does 
 not suffer senselessly. He wills to suffer 
 and even seeks for suffering, because he 
 knows the significance behind it. Nietzsche 
 feels that, though asceticism has so far only 
 brought suffering into the perspective of 
 guilt, still, that point of view, crude as it 
 is, has redeemed it from its senselessness 
 and apparent cruelty. To suffer as an 
 atonement is a higher view of the order 
 of things than the conception of a jealous 
 and angry God torturing mankind with no 
 definite end in view. 
 
 Nietzsche is a tonic like quinine. There 
 is no sedative quality in him. He braces 
 and fortifies. As a protest against mere 
 philanthropy and sentimental, theoretic love
 
 168 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 of one's neighbour, his philosophy has its 
 value in an age somewhat given over to 
 forced sacrifices for others as a liberation 
 of one's own soul. " To many a man it is 
 not right to give thy hand, but only thy 
 paw, and I want thy paws to have claws," 
 is quite wholesome advice to those who, 
 again to use his own words, are not on 
 their " guard against the assaults of their 
 love. The lonesome one stretches out his 
 hand too readily to him whom he en- 
 counters." 
 
 His clear call to men and women, then, 
 is a very individualistic one. In fact, it 
 is supreme individualism that Nietzsche 
 preaches with unflinching sincerity, a sin- 
 cerity which spares no person and no point 
 of view, ancient or modern. His demand 
 for a total re-adjustment of moral values 
 is for the individual to apply to his own 
 life. His cry to men and women to make 
 themselves as shining lights or precious 
 jewels by building up and beautifying their
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 169 
 
 own characters is a healthy demand, if a 
 one-sided one. In these days of universal 
 panaceas for right living it is a sane voice 
 which cries, " Begin reform on yourself — 
 it is the only means of converting your 
 neighbour." 
 
 His gospel may seem hard and almost 
 unduly intellectual to a mere ethical senti- 
 mentalist who finds it easier to expound 
 a gospel than to attempt to live it. In 
 these days of mystic gropings and socialistic 
 materialisms it is good to listen to the 
 dictates of an egoist who cries : 
 
 " Be hard, learn to suffer with hardness, ignore 
 mere sacrifices, and evolve yourself. By so doing 
 you will help your neighbour better than by offering 
 to carry his pack on your shoulders." 
 
 This gospel of hardness and apparent 
 selfishness must, of course, be approached 
 with a realisation of the fact that Nietzsche 
 is one of those whose cry of warning is 
 chiefly against himself.
 
 170 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Nietzsche, from all the evidence, was a 
 man of very sensitive and tender nature, 
 and his dread of where this might lead him 
 accounts for an over- vigorous protest against 
 a softness and sweetness of heart and soul 
 for which the casual student of his hard 
 sayings would scarcely credit him. Nietzsche 
 is not a prophet of the soul at all. One 
 must not expect the deepest word from him. 
 Not merely is he devoid of what George Eliot 
 called " other- worldliness," but it seems to 
 me that he is without the higher wisdom. 
 The essential wisdom which is childlike 
 in faith and womanly in sympathy is lack- 
 ing. He is a man of large intellectual 
 ideals and courageous aims, a virile warrior 
 of the intellect, a high-priest of culture 
 and self-control. To this man knowledge, 
 to use his own words in his Gay Science, 
 is not — 
 
 " a couch of repose, or the way to a couch of 
 repose, or an entertainment, or an idling. For me, 11 
 he says, "it is a world of perils and triumphs,: in
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 171 
 
 which the heroic sentiments also have their arena 
 and dancing-ground. Life as a means to knowledge ! 
 With this principle in one's heart one not only 
 can be brave, but can even live joyfully and laugh 
 joyfully. And who could understand how to laugh 
 well and live well who did not first of all understand 
 war and triumph well ? " 
 
 In his Will to Power he says : 
 
 " It is no small advantage to have a hundred 
 swords of Damocles hanging over one ; that way 
 one learns to dance, and so one achieves freedom of 
 movement. " 
 
 This is a fine trumpet-call with which 
 to take up life with more than Emersonian 
 courage, for Emerson has a warmer word 
 of sure comfort for us. Nietzsche's demand 
 relies on the heroic quality inherent in a 
 man simply because he is a man. He 
 never calls on us to subdue our flesh or 
 expand our spirit for the mere sake of 
 virtue. He is not sure that moralists have 
 not been smothering their morality with 
 their own maxims. It is this he wants
 
 172 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 A^each one of us to find out by being quite 
 true to our inner vision. 
 
 To study Nietzsche carefully is to get a 
 virile, intellectual, masterful record of a 
 distinctly modern individuality. He has 
 dared to face what morals are worth, not 
 because he feels they are worthless, but 
 because some of the people who believe 
 in them and act up to their lights show 
 a heaviness of heart and a lethargy of 
 action which contrasts feebly with the daz- 
 zling swiftness and energy of the followers 
 of sin. When the followers of morality 
 have a shine and shimmer of joy in their 
 deeds, and are gay under their accepted 
 burdens, and take suffering and illness and 
 death as their goodly heritage, there will 
 be no need for a second Nietzsche to arisef 
 to ask us to weigh our Christianity and 
 morality in the balance. The drab, pesti- 
 lential self-sufficiency of many so-called good 
 people is one of the stumbling-blocks to 
 the weaker brethren. They halt lest they
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 173 
 
 also should become as grim as these heavy 
 ones are. 
 
 As a tonic, a necessary tonic, Nietzsche's 
 philosophy is very valuable. As a gospel 
 it is, for some of us, quite inadequate. It 
 is a mere weapon, not a whole armour. 
 It is not warm or rich enough to subdue 
 the hearts of women and nerve the souls 
 of men, except in their fleeting moods. He 
 is great as an incentive towards a fuller 
 wisdom, of which he has perhaps suggested 
 one or two keynotes, and he is a corrective 
 of much which is flabby in our sentimental, 
 humanitarian morality. He has certainly 
 given us an unusual view of suffering, which 
 harmonises with the view of it Hinton 
 and Carpenter expound. . 
 
 Nietzsche protests against suffering as a' 
 punishment or as an atonement. He looks ^sN- 
 upon it as the most valuable and educative 
 event which can come to us, a true gift of 
 the gods, like love or death. And by pain 
 he means not self-sought suffering, but the
 
 174 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 inevitable agony accompanying the great 
 growths of each individual life. To shun 
 suffering, according to Nietzsche, is to shun 
 development, and so the shorter way to the 
 over- man. He looks upon pain as a tool or 
 implement, also as the father of pleasure. 
 At the end of his satirical tirade about 
 marriage and love, in which the best he 
 can say for love is that at its height it is 
 only an enraptured similitude and a dolorous 
 glow, he adds : 
 
 "It is a torch to light you to loftier paths. You 
 are to love beyond yourselves some day. Then 
 learn first of all to love ; you had to drink the 
 bitter cup of love on that account. There is bitter- 
 ness even in the cup of the best love. It thus 
 produces aspiration towards the over-man : it thus 
 produces thirst in thee, the creating one." 
 
 Happiness, he seems to argue, mere per- 
 sonal happiness, is not a thing to be sought 
 for its own sake, and s uffe ring should be 
 more joyously received than happiness. " It 
 seems to me," he says, " who am favour-
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 175 
 
 ably inclined to life, that butterflies, soap- 
 bubbles, and whatever is of a similar 
 kind among human beings, enjoy most 
 happiness." In his Beyond Good and Evil 
 he says : 
 
 " You want, if possible — and there is not a more 
 foolish ' if possible 1 — to do away with suffering. And 
 we ? It really seems that we would rather have it 
 increased and made worse than it has ever been 
 before. Well-being, as you understand it, is certainly 
 not a goal ; it seems to us an end, a condition, which 
 at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible and 
 makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of 
 suffering, of great suffering, know ye not that it is 
 only this discipline that has produced all the eleva- 
 tions of humanity hitherto ? The tension of soul 
 in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, 
 its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventive- 
 ness and bravery in steadfastly enduring, interpret- 
 ing, and exploiting misfortune and whatever depth, 
 mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has 
 been bestowed upon the soul, has it not been bestowed 
 through suffering, through the discipline of great 
 suffering ? 
 
 " In man, creature and creator are united. In 
 man there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, 
 
 12 

 
 176 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 mire, folly, chaos, but there is also the creator, the 
 sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divinity 
 of the spectator and the seventh day. Do you 
 understand this contrast ? And that your sympathy 
 for ' the creature in man ' applies to that which has 
 to be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, roasted, 
 annealed, refined, to that which must necessarily 
 suffer and is meant to suffer ? And our sympathy ? 
 Do ye not understand what our converse sympathy 
 applies to, when it resists your sympathy as the 
 worst of all pampering and enervation ?" 
 
 Sympathy for others means to him " try- 
 ing to smooth away every sharp edge and 
 corner in life, and so turning mankind into 
 small, soft, round, infinite sand." His work 
 abounds with such sentences as these : 
 " What does not kill me strengthens 
 me " ; and again, " It is great affliction 
 only that is the ultimate emancipation of 
 the mind." 
 
 Nietzsche's attitude towards evil is as 
 original as his attitude towards suffering. 
 " All good things," he says, " were at one 
 time bad things ; every original sin has
 
 } 
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 177 
 
 developed into an original virtue." This is 
 again a plea not to miss the virtue — to ven- 
 ture on a paradox — of evil. To understand 
 evil, even to have had it as a circumstance 
 in one's own life, is one of the best ways of 
 understanding its other and better self — 
 good. 
 
 " In the twilight of the gods," he says, " all passions 
 have a time when they are fatal only, when, with 
 the weight of their folly, they drag their victim 
 down ; and they have a later, a very much later, 
 period, when they wed with spirit, when they are 
 ' spiritualised.' To wage war against passion itself 
 is folly, as great a folly as it was for the old 
 dentist to pull out teeth because they gave pain. 
 Deadly hostility against sensuality is always a 
 critical symptom : one is thereby justified in making 
 conjectures with regard to the general condition 
 of such an extremist. Moreover, that hostility, 
 that hatred, only reaches its height when such 
 natures no longer possess sufficient strength for a 
 radical cure.'" 
 
 Nietzsche is always waging war against 
 x the anti-naturalness of current morality.
 
 178 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 One of his most beautiful and characteristic 
 passages on this is in Zarathustra. 
 
 " Once thou hadst passions and calledst them 
 evil. But now thou hast only thy virtues ; they grew 
 out of thy passions. Thou enlistedst those passions 
 on behalf of thy highest aim ; they then became 
 thy virtues and joys. 
 
 "And though thou mightest be of the race of 
 the hot-tempered, or of the voluptuous, or of the 
 fanatical, or of the revengeful, 
 
 " All thy passions in the end became virtues and 
 all thy devils angels. Once thou hadst wild dogs in 
 thy cellar ; but in the end they changed to birds 
 and charming songstresses. 
 
 " Out of thy poisons thou hast brewed balsam for 
 thyself; thou hast milked thy cow, affliction, and 
 now thou drinkest the sweet milk of her udder. 
 
 " And henceforth nothing evil grows in thee any 
 longer, unless it be the evil that arises out of the 
 conflict of thy virtues. 11 
 
 " If man would no longer think himself 
 wicked he would cease to be so," he says in 
 The Dawn of Day. 
 
 To look upon suffering and evil as forces 
 to help on towards the over-man, is perhaps
 
 / 
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 179 
 
 the keynote of Nietzsche's moral philosophy. 
 " In nearly all crimes," he says, " some 
 qualities are expressed which ought not to 
 be absent in a man." To turn all so-called 
 evil and deep suffering into forces for power 
 and development, to have no waste of this 
 vigorous raw material, is to advance, accord- 
 ing to Nietzsche. His counsel with regard to 
 the treatment of our enemies is almost the 
 finest in his work, and has a distinctly new 
 note in it. 
 
 " When ye have an enemy,' 1 he says in Zarathustra, 
 " do not return him good for evil, for that would 
 make him ashamed. But prove that he has done 
 something good to you. And rather, even, be angry 
 than make a person ashamed. And when ye are 
 cursed, it is not my pleasure that ye should desire 
 to bless. Better curse a little also." 
 
 His horror of self-righteousness, or of a 
 magnanimity which savours of proving 
 one's own virtue, is very healthy and re- 
 freshing. " We can only raise men we do 
 not treat with contempt," he says. " Moral 
 contempt is worse than any crime."
 
 180 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Cant of any kind is, to Nietzsche, the evil 
 of evils, and sincerity of vision the great 
 good. One of his ideas in The Dawn of 
 Day might be compared with Edward 
 Carpenter's philosophy, and it indicates a 
 deeper wisdom than mere intellectual in- 
 sight. 
 
 " You would like," he says, " to pose as discerners 
 of men, but you shall not pass as such. Do you 
 fancy that we do not notice that you pretend to 
 be more experienced, deeper, more passionate, more 
 perfect than you really are, as decidedly as we 
 notice in yon painter a presumptuousness even in the 
 way of using his brush ; in yon musician, by the way 
 he introduces his theme, a desire to set it off' for 
 higher than it really is ? Have you ever experi- 
 enced in yourselves a history, wild commotions, 
 earthquakes, deep, long sadness, fleeting happiness ? 
 Have you been foolish with great and little fools ? 
 Have you really borne the weal and woe of good 
 people, and also the woe and peculiar happiness 
 of the most evil ? Then speak of morality, but not 
 otherwise." 
 
 He declares that the three things most 
 hated and feared by the virtuous — voluptu-
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 181 
 
 ousness, thirst of power, and selfishness — 
 have in them the kernels of the great virtues. 
 Of voluptuousness he says : 
 
 " It is a sweet poison unto the withered only, but 
 the great in vi go ration of the heart, and the rever- 
 ently spared wine of wines for those who have the 
 will of a lion. Voluptuousness ! but I will have 
 railings round my thoughts, and even round my 
 words, that swine and enthusiasts may not break into 
 my gardens ! " 
 
 His will to power, and his antagonism 
 to sympathy, which he considers weakness, 
 make selfishness, hardness, and love of power 
 virtues in his eyes. " Help thyself," he says, 
 " then every one else helps thee." His con- 
 ception of the four highest virtues is very 
 characteristic of the man. First of all we 
 -are to be perfectly honest towards ourselves, 
 and to all who are friendly to us ; valiant 
 in face of our enemy ; generous to the van- 
 quished ; and polite, always, and in all cases. 
 He advocates politeness as a defence against 
 intrusion and petty inquisitions. " I am
 
 182 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 polite unto them as I am to all small 
 annoyances. To be bristly towards what 
 is small, seemeth unto me to be a wisdom 
 for hedgehogs." Force and lightness are 
 the two things he admires. He says in the 
 Wagner book that the first proposition of 
 his {esthetics is that " everything divine 
 runs with light feet," and all through his 
 work we find the dancer spoken of sym- 
 bolically in the most enthusiastic language. 
 
 Nietzsche has little to say of women. He 
 is curiously reticent about them. In his 
 philosophy there is evidently to be no 
 over-woman. He says that it is only to men 
 one should speak of women, and all through 
 his work one finds the under-man, and not 
 the over-man, judging women. " Every- 
 thing in woman is a riddle," he says, " and 
 ». everything in woman has one solution — 
 pregnancy." Bernard Shaw has perhaps 
 helped us to understand Nietzsche's gospel 
 on women in his Man and Superman. " Man 
 is for woman a means : the purpose is always
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 183 
 
 the child. But what is woman for man ? " 
 Nietzsche asks this question, and leaves it 
 wisely unanswered. 
 
 " The true man," says Nietzsche, " wants 
 two different things — danger and diversion. 
 He therefore wants a woman as the most 
 dangerous plaything." The best women are 
 a little weary of this point of view. To be a 
 toy or a danger, or both, is growing mono- 
 tonous. Were woman not a consummate 
 actress, and very kind-hearted, she would 
 have dropped the role long ago. " In the 
 true man," he says, " there is a child hidden : 
 it wants to play. Up, then, ye women, dis- 
 cover, I pray you, the child in man." This 
 is her mission, then, according to Nietzsche. 
 It is an old-world one, and one far from con- 
 temptible — to bear children and to amuse. 
 One is surprised to find, however, that 
 Nietzsche expects from women — who are 
 still cats and birds, he thinks, and the best 
 of us cows — the greatest thing of all. " Let 
 your hope be, ' May I bear the over-man,' "
 
 184 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 he says. In his Wagner book he puts 
 women in a strange category. "In the 
 theatre," he declares, " one becomes mob, 
 herd, woman, Pharisee, voting animal, patron, 
 idiot, Wagnerian.'' " As yet," he says, in 
 Zaratkustra, " women are incapable of 
 friendship." His definition of friendship 
 being as high as that of Thoreau, it is 
 possible that when a woman attains it she 
 may be worthy to bear the over-man. 
 " Art thou pure air and solitude and medicine 
 to thy friend ? " asks Thoreau. 
 
 " In a woman's love," Nietzsche says, " there is 
 unfairness and blindness to all she does not love. 
 And even in woman's enlightened love there are still 
 outbreaks and lightnings, and night along with the 
 light. 11 In his Wagner essay he declares, " Woman 
 would like to believe that love can do all. It is 
 a superstition peculiar to herself. Alas ! he who 
 knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pre- 
 tentious, and liable to error even the best, the deepest 
 love is ; how it rather destroys than saves. 11 In the 
 same essay he says, " Man is cowardly before all that 
 is eternally feminine ; women know it. In many 
 cases of feminine love (perhaps precisely in the most
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 185 
 
 celebrated cases), love is only a more refined para- 
 sitism, a nesting in a strange soul, sometimes even 
 in a strange body. Ah ! at what expense always 
 to 'the host 1 !" One wonders if the old woman in 
 Zarathustra gave the subtlest advice a woman can 
 give a man about her sex. " Thou goest to women ? " 
 she asks. " Do not forget the whip ! " 
 
 " Women always intrigue in secret against the 
 higher souls of their husbands ; they seek to cheat 
 them out of the future for the sake of a painless and 
 comfortable present." " We think woman deep. 
 Why? Because we never find any depth in her. 
 Woman is not even shallow." 
 
 These reflections on woman are worth 
 quoting, because, as I have said before, 
 Nietzsche is a tonic, and wise women read 
 him with an open mind, though, possibly, 
 with the suspicion of a smile. 
 
 We must always approach Nietzsche with 
 no fear of our own belief, or semi-belief, 
 but with this open mind. We must re- 
 member his own words : 
 
 " The longing for a strong belief is not evidence of 
 a strong belief; rather the contrary. When one has 
 this belief one may allow one's self the choice luxury
 
 186 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 of scepticism ; one is sufficiently sure, sufficiently 
 resolute, and sufficiently bound for doing so." 
 
 Nietzsche declares that we refute a thing 
 best by laying it respectfully on ice. But 
 his attitude towards Christianity is the 
 attitude of a man with a red-hot poker in 
 his hand. He dares to ask the question, 
 " Is man only a mistake of God, or God 
 only a mistake of man ? " He demands of 
 philosophers that they take up their position 
 beyond good and evil, and he asks them to 
 become superior to the illusion of moral 
 sentiment, which belongs, in his mind, as 
 religious sentiment does, to a stage of 
 ignorance. Few of us, as he says, have 
 the courage for what we really know, and 
 Nietzsche is unspeakably valuable to any 
 reader of his who learns through him to 
 re-value all he values most. We need have 
 no fear. Wisdom and truth are not soap- 
 bubbles ; they do not burst by being ex- 
 amined. To re-value is always a painful 
 process, and means loss as well as gain. The
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 187 
 
 advantage of doing it is that what is left is 
 one's very own, bought often at a great 
 price, but a treasure which no man can take 
 away. Nietzsche's attitude to religion and 
 morals is in this way a very necessary 
 and helpful one. " If there were no 
 graves," he says, " there would be no 
 resurrections." 
 
 Perhaps Nietzsche's attitude to life and 
 morals is well summed up in one of the 
 finest passages in Zarathustra : 
 
 " He who is emancipated in spirit has still to 
 purify himself. Many traces of the prison and the 
 mould still remain in him ; his eye has yet to be- 
 come pure. Yea, I know thy danger. But by my 
 love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away thy 
 love and thy hope ! 
 
 " Thou still feelest thyself noble, and the others 
 also still feel thee noble who bear thee a grudge and 
 cast evil looks. Know this, that to every one a 
 noble one stands in the way. 
 
 " A noble one stands also in the way of the good ; 
 and, even when they call him good, they want there- 
 by to thrust him aside. 
 
 "The noble one wants to create something new,
 
 188 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 he wants to make a new virtue. The good man 
 wants what is old, he wants the old to be retained. 
 But the danger of the noble one is not lest he be- 
 come a good man, but lest he become a bully, a 
 scoffer, a destroyer. 
 
 " Ah ! I have known noble ones who lost their 
 highest hope. And then they disparaged all high 
 hopes. They then lived unabashed, gratifying tem- 
 porary pleasures, and seldom laid out plans for more 
 than a day. 
 
 " ' Spirit is voluptuousness ! , they said. Then the 
 wings of their spirit broke, and now it creeps about, 
 befouling where it gnaws. 
 
 " Once they thought of becoming heroes ; now 
 they are sensualists. The hero is a trouble and a 
 terror to them. 
 
 " But by my love and hope I conjure thee : cast 
 not away the hero in thy soul ! Maintain holy thy 
 highest hope ! 
 
 " I do not exhort you to work, but to fight. I do 
 not exhort you to peace, but to victory. Let your 
 work be a battle, let your peace be a victory. 11 
 
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Fhiedrich Nietzsche. The Complete Works, in eighteen 
 volumes (now in course of publi- 
 cation under the editorship of 
 Dr. Oscar Levy).
 
 NIETZSCHE AND MORALS 189 
 
 M. A. Mugge. Nietzsche : His Life and Work 
 
 1908. Contains a full Biblio- 
 graphy. 
 
 Havki.ock Ellis. " Frederick Nietzsche," Affirmations. 
 
 1898. 
 
 A. R. Orage. Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of 
 
 the Aye. 1906. 
 
 Thomas Cojhaion. Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet, 
 
 and Prophet. Selections from his 
 Works. 1901.

 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 EDWARD CARPENTER'S MESSAGE TO HIS AGE 
 
 13
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 EDWARD CARPENTER'S MESSAGE TO HIS AGE 
 
 Carpenter's personal serenity — Reason for this— His 
 attitude to the problems of the moment— His 
 conception of true democracy — His attitude to 
 love, death, and failure— Real life from within— 
 Faith and its result. 
 
 Edward Carpenter, to use his own words, 
 is one of those — 
 
 " who dream the impossible dream, and it comes 
 true ; who hear the silent prayers ; who accept the 
 trampling millions, as the earth, dreaming, accepts 
 the interminable feet of her children ; who dream 
 the dream which all men always declare futile ; who 
 dream the hour which is not yet on earth, and, lo ! 
 it strikes. 11 
 
 In these days of storm and stress, not 
 only in politics, but in morals and personal 
 faith, it is refreshing to study the works of 
 a man who is at peace with himself. Neither 
 
 198
 
 194 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Hinton nor Nietzsche had reached personal 
 serenity. There is nothing so certain to 
 confound the tangible as the intangible. 
 The true idealist is the mover of men and 
 communities. When God whispers him in 
 the ear, as Browning puts it, there and then 
 the newer thought, the wider plan in the 
 progress of human affairs, is a certainty. 
 When a man joins on to the expression of 
 his vision the simple expression of himself, 
 and walks in and out among his fellows, 
 content to ignore mere culture and intel- 
 lectualism, but not content to ignore a 
 single phase of suffering, we have a subtle, 
 far-reaching influence which confounds the 
 worldly wise, and helps the strugglers of 
 this world towards a newer vision. 
 
 Edward Carpenter is such a driving force. 
 Probably no man of the age has just the 
 same all-round message for the vital needs 
 of the age as this man. His philosophy 
 has a subtle suggestiveness for every-day 
 use in politics, economics, morals, domes-
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 195 
 
 ticity, and all the complexities of modern 
 civilisation. His practical aims and sugges- 
 tions are worth what they are because, to 
 Carpenter, first and foremost, the things of 
 the spirit are essential. It is the mystic in 
 him which drives him to the socialist's 
 working ground, where the aim among the 
 true modern workers is to give to every 
 man and every woman on earth an equal 
 opportunity with every other man and 
 every other woman. Their perfectly just 
 cry for equality, and the plea of the masses 
 to gain the rights which the classes monopo- 
 lise, in many mouths merely means that 
 there should be a turning of tables ; that the 
 labourer should step into the dull shoes of 
 the tyrant, whose god may possibly not be 
 his belly, but often seems to be his banking 
 account. A transference from the classes 
 to the masses of materialistic well-being is 
 no solution of the social evil. 
 
 It is the seer in Carpenter which makes 
 him take the part of his fur-coated and four-
 
 196 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 footed brothers against the vivisectionist 
 and the slaughter-house torturer. To him 
 nothing is low or mean, and our brothers 
 the animals come in for his love and mercy 
 as much as the outcast, and even the self- 
 righteous. 
 
 He is not merely a vegetarian, a socialist, 
 an anarchist. Fads are, indeed, his abhor- 
 rence. He is a seer in the only real sense of 
 that word, for he is one who sees and loves 
 beyond himself. His message is the message 
 of one who sees clearly, who thinks sanely, 
 and who lives uncompromisingly. "Ask no 
 questions," he says ; "all that you have, for 
 love's sake, spend." It is the visionary 
 which makes him do any bit of practical 
 scavenging, so to speak, to clear the world 
 of lust and hypocrisy, disguised under the 
 names of love and expediency. 
 
 Carpenter is not the practical man with 
 a glimpse of his vision. He is the man of 
 vision, who as a consequence, an imperative 
 outcome of his vision, demands a practical
 
 CARPENTERS MESSAGE 197 
 
 output for his ideals. The prophet in him 
 lays a stress upon simplification of life, not 
 because he believes it to be an end in itself, 
 but because it is a means to an end. 
 
 . Few of us, even the poorest, have actually 
 put in practice the true conditions of the 
 simplicity of life, for nothing is so elaborate 
 and involved and wasteful as the way the 
 poor live. They have no knowledge of the 
 simplest digestible cooking, and the domestic 
 method and cleanliness in their homes, if it 
 exists, is obtained at an expenditure of 
 energy and nerve-strain which is pitiable. 
 Many tiny homes could be rendered beau- 
 tiful to-day, and many faces made bright 
 and cheery, in spite of bad wages, if the 
 owners of the homes understood true sim- 
 plicity of living. 
 
 In all his work, as in his life, Carpenter 
 makes no compromise with the practical 
 difficulties of the moment. Here and now, 
 he declares, the rich and the poor alike can 
 begin to live beautifully and simply. Life
 
 198 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 can be reduced to terms of sense and beauty 
 as apart from extravagance and show. His 
 followers mistake him when they consider 
 that his ideal of simplification — his sandal- 
 wearing and his vegetarianism — are the main 
 outcome of the great message he has for his 
 age. They are mere details of his social 
 solution towards the equality of opportunity 
 involved in any rational socialistic or even 
 Christian teaching, for socialism is a mere 
 detail in a much wider scheme of reform. 
 
 Carpenter's emphasis, again, on a mini- 
 mum of clothing is not a plea for a return 
 to savagery, but the demand of Nature's 
 child that there should be as few wrappings 
 as possible between the temple of the body 
 and the Holy Ghost encompassing it. He 
 insists on a vote for women, not because 
 the vote in itself is an essential to the true 
 life of either a man or a woman, but because 
 justice is, and what is just for the man in 
 this question is just for the woman. He 
 would induce men to become vegetarians,
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 199 
 
 not because the eating of flesh is an accursed 
 thing, but because cruelty and hardness of 
 heart, which as yet are bound up with the 
 killing of animals, are accursed things. He 
 would strive to alter the prison system, not 
 because he fails to perceive that suffering 
 and discipline are necessary for reform, but 
 because he realises that the mental attitude 
 of the judge towards the offender is often 
 to-day as anti-social and anti-Christian as 
 the attitude of the offender towards society. 
 Carpenter's value as a reformer is, that his 
 message or philosophy can be applied equally 
 to the right making of a pudding or the fine 
 framing of new national laws, and yet the 
 very pith of his message has to do with the 
 things which are not temporal, but eternal. 
 People who consider themselves practical 
 and hard-headed say, " Yes, idealism is all 
 very well, but I want something tangible." 
 Let them realise, then, that they can have 
 it in Carpenter's message. A thought pro- 
 duced the steam-engine ; and the Christ
 
 200 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 whom we slay every hour and worship every 
 Sunday only gave us thoughts to mould into 
 action. 
 
 Twenty years ago it was quite a usual 
 thing to hear Edward Carpenter spoken of 
 as a madman, an impossible eccentric, and 
 a teacher of dangerous doctrines. The 
 forerunner, then, was disowned by the 
 crowd. It is usual enough now to hear this 
 same man spoken of as a divine messenger, 
 a prophet, a seer. 
 
 The transition from condemnation to 
 recognition in the case of this particular 
 teacher has been curiously swift. 1 Why is 
 this ? Simply because the man himself and 
 his message are really expressions of what is 
 actually round about us. Edward Carpenter, 
 even as a personality, is not so rare a 
 manifestation of individual harmony as he 
 was twenty years ago, for the simple reason 
 
 1 It is interesting' to note that, like so many prophets, 
 Carpenter's recognition has come first from abroad. In 
 Germany his books have long been known, and have passed 
 through many editions in translation.
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 201 
 
 that sincerity, singleness, and simplicity are 
 contagious, and are even becoming fashion- 
 able. Edward Carpenter is now only one 
 of many teachers of democratic mysti- 
 cism, though on some matters he still 
 remains curiously alone. Perhaps his own 
 words in the beginning of Towards De- 
 mocracy express this : 
 
 " I am the poet of hitherto unuttered joy. 
 
 A little bird told me the secret in the night, 
 and henceforth I go about seeking to whom to 
 whisper it. 
 
 I see the heavens laughing, I discern the half- 
 hidden faces of the gods wherever I go, I see the 
 transparent-opaque veil in which they hide them- 
 selves, yet I dare not say what I see, lest I should 
 be locked up ! 
 
 Children go with me, and rude people are my 
 companions. I trust them, and they me. Day and 
 night we are together and are content. 
 
 To them what I would say is near ; yet is it 
 in nothing that can be named, or in the giving or 
 taking of any one thing ; but rather in all things." 
 
 Carpenter has found out what he believes 
 in and he is living it, and is perfectly and
 
 202 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 serenely happy, as a man or woman only 
 can be happy when the inner and outer 
 life harmonise. He has deliberately cast 
 aside all pretences of living in order to live 
 in reality. This perhaps is what makes his 
 great practical value for us, as out of this 
 has grown the inner light in the man which 
 is so strangely beautiful. He is a man of 
 wisdom more than of mere knowledge — the 
 wisdom which is childlike, saintlike, and in 
 him distinctly pagan too. 
 
 Carpenter's development was a gradual 
 one, from the Broad Church point of view 
 to the sanest conclusions of a spiritual 
 democrat. He was once a curate under 
 Frederick Maurice. He slowly but surely 
 began to realise that he could not go on 
 preaching under limited conditions, so he 
 left the Church. 
 
 He was a Cambridge lecturer, and during 
 his Extension work in different towns he 
 began to look into the lives of the poor, the 
 criminal, the chanceless, and the despised.
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 203 
 
 This brought him nearer to socialism, and 
 so he abandoned talking and began to 
 think. He was not actually poor, and so 
 had leisure to come to conclusions, but he 
 soon left the " undesirable mansions," with 
 their conventions, and came to his own. 
 His discovery of Walt Whitman was the 
 means to this end ; and it is extremely 
 interesting to the student of both men to 
 note their apparent likeness and their funda- 
 mental differences. 
 
 Carpenter found himself through Walt 
 Whitman ; but the temperaments of the two 
 men, and, in consequence, their messages 
 are both individual and valuable in different 
 ways. Carpenter began to realise that no 
 cleric, no middle-class idler, no conventional 
 philanthropist, no mere self-seeker or maxim- 
 maker, and no insincere person can radically 
 alter institutions till they have altered them- 
 selves. It is always a painful process to 
 re-adjust life on a new basis. Carpenter 
 has never regretted doing this, though to the
 
 204 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 casual observer he seemed to have nothing 
 left. He abandoned office, position, social 
 fussiness and entanglements, and lived a 
 simple life in a cottage. He had found 
 peace and had delivered himself from all 
 shams of every sort and kind. 
 
 To the believer in luxuries, to the dweller 
 in cities, to the bewildered but strenuous 
 philanthropist, it could not seem anything 
 but the act of a madman that Carpenter 
 should live the life of a simple workman 
 and refuse to compete with or enslave his 
 fellow men or to eat animals. That he 
 could reduce life to simplicity without mak- 
 ing himself inefficient or miserable seemed 
 to many impossible. To dream dreams and 
 to see new spiritual visions as a sequel to 
 hard work seemed too absurd a solution of 
 a social problem. Happily the marriage 
 of ideas between the East and the West 
 has begun to teach us that a man's real 
 life does not, cannot, exist in externals, nor 
 does it wholly consist in strenuous action,
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 205 
 
 but in the possession of one's own soul and 
 its peace. 
 
 " Do not be discouraged by the tiny in- 
 solences of people," says Carpenter ; " for 
 yourself, be only careful that you are true." 
 To this man it appears that it is not so much 
 what happens that matters, for life is a very 
 tiny stage in a very long journey, according 
 to him. The happy man is not the one who 
 has possessions, but who has himself in 
 possession. This socialist seems to say that 
 it is not what we gain, but what we are 
 that matters. His democracy does not 
 demand only that a man shall return to 
 the community an equivalent of what he 
 takes from it, but it demands also that he 
 should " walk in and out among his fellows 
 accepted," returning to them some of his 
 own inner vision. 
 
 Edward Carpenter is a prophet of the 
 soul and of the body. He proclaims the 
 emancipation of the soul through the com- 
 pletion of its relation to the body. In his
 
 206 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 gospel paganism and Christianity are not 
 at war, but are allies. All our faculties, all 
 our instincts, and even all our weaknesses, 
 are so much raw material to aid the life 
 of the soul. To over-emphasise the body is 
 to hide the soul. 
 
 " The body," he declares, " is a root of 
 the soul." To despise the body, as the 
 ascetic, is as stupid as to despise the soul. 
 To despise the soul is to miss the subtleties 
 and sweetnesses of all the wonderful func- 
 tions of the body. 
 
 " The soul invading," makes the body 
 its temple, according to Carpenter, and its 
 desires thus become educative and righteous 
 when they are understood. Perhaps one of 
 the most beautiful things Edward Carpenter 
 has interpreted for us is the way the real 
 self enters into relationship with the body. 
 In The Art of Creation he says — 
 
 " that the individual should conceive and know 
 himself, not as a toy and chance product of his own 
 bodily heredity, but as identified and continuous
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 207 
 
 with the Eternal Self, of which his body is a 
 manifestation : this is indeed to begin a new 
 life and to enter a hitherto undreamed world of 
 possibilities." 
 
 "Beware," he says elsewhere, "lest it (the body) 
 become thy grave and thy prison instead of thy 
 winged abode and palace of joy. 
 
 For (over and over again) there is nothing that is 
 evil except because a man has not mastery over it ; 
 and there is no good thing that is not evil, if it have 
 mastery over a man ; 
 
 And there is no passion or power, or pleasure or 
 pain, or created thing whatsoever, which is not ulti- 
 mately for man and for his use — or which he need be 
 afraid of, or ashamed at. 
 
 The ascetics and the self-indulgent divide things 
 into good and evil— as it were to throw away the 
 evil ; 
 
 But things cannot be divided into good and evil, 
 but all are good so soon as they are brought into 
 subjection." 
 
 This idea, that "the soul's slow dis- 
 entanglement " is dependent on the way 
 we use, not crush, the powers of the body 
 now, is startling in its truth. His very 
 insistence on the body's claim makes us 
 
 14
 
 208 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 feel as we read him that he knows the 
 soul is ultimately all. 
 
 " In the antechambers of the body, beautiful 
 as they are, you shall look in vain for the Master. 
 In the antechamber of the intellect, important as 
 it is, it is vain to tarry. In the antechambers 
 of art and morality you shall not tarry overlong. 
 All conventions left aside, all limitations passed, 
 all shackles dropped, the husks and sheaths of 
 ages falling off, at length the wanderer returns to 
 Heaven ." 
 
 And again : 
 
 " When the ideal has once alighted, when it has 
 looked forth from the windows, with ever so passing 
 a glance upon the earth, then we may go in to supper, 
 you and I, and take our ease ; the rest will be 
 seen to." 
 
 This optimist, and materialist too if you 
 like, but above all mystic and spiritualist, 
 tells us calmly that there must be no less 
 scrubbing of doorsteps for us (if that happens 
 to be our work) because of this new vision of 
 welded souls and bodies making for immor-
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 209 
 
 tality. The stimulating fact in Carpenter's 
 philosophy is, that out of the humanising 
 of any instinct from the animalism primarily 
 involved in it, comes the true spiritualisation 
 of it. First the root, the human ; then the 
 flower, the spiritual. 
 
 " The main thing is," he says, " that the messenger 
 is perhaps even now at your door, and to see that 
 you are ready for his arrival. 
 
 A little child, a breath of air, an old man hob- 
 bling on crutches, a bee lighting on the page of your 
 book, who knows whom he may send ? 
 
 Some one diseased or dying, some friendless, out- 
 cast, criminal — one whom it shall ruin your reputa- 
 tion to be seen with — yet see that you are ready for 
 his arrival." 
 
 " The stones," he says, for his temple " are 
 anywhere and everywhere ; the temple-roof is the 
 sky. 
 
 The materials are the kettle boiling on the fire, 
 the bread in the oven, the washing-dolly, the axe, 
 the gavelock — the product is God. 
 
 And the little kitchen where you live, the shelves, 
 the pewter, the nightly lamp, the fingers and faces of 
 your children — a finished and beautiful Transparency 
 of your own Body."
 
 210 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 There is no shirking of everyday 
 duties, no lethargy or swoon of the 
 spirit, no indecent haste to save one's own 
 soul and let the bodies of men suffer for 
 need of our helping hands. " If I am not 
 level with the lowest, I am nothing," 
 says this man. Only " from yourself to 
 yourself I can deliver you, and from the 
 bonds of action " — never from action itself, 
 only from hurry, self-importance, husks 
 and empty masks of worldly wisdom, fear, 
 self-interest, and cruelty. From these he 
 would have us absolutely disentangle our- 
 selves. 
 
 In his work, as in his life, Carpenter 
 makes no compromise with the practical 
 difficulties of the moment. Here and now, 
 he says, each individual can begin to realise 
 and to do the highest he knows. Demo- 
 cratic in the real sense, he tells us plainly 
 how the true democracy can be evolved, 
 though Carpenter does not place enough 
 insistence on beauty as not only not harm-
 
 CARPENTERS MESSAGE 211 
 
 ful, but absolutely essential to any condition 
 of true living. 1 
 
 So many people think, if they have an 
 ill-fitting dress, eat a badly cooked dinner, 
 and have no ravishment in the clean, sweet 
 uses of the senses, they are leading a moral 
 life. It is a profound depth of immorality 
 to be able to live without beauty, and per- 
 haps the most tragic thing in our social 
 system is, that, while one class has a surfeit 
 of luxury and show, which they mistake 
 for beauty, another class is deprived of 
 beauty altogether. It is more beauty we 
 want and less luxury. The moment capi- 
 talists or millionaires become imbued with 
 Carpenter's spirit, they will be content to 
 die possessed of one pound and fourpence- 
 halfpenny, as Cardinal Manning died, be- 
 cause they would have distributed all they 
 had to those who were handicapped in the 
 
 1 Eveu in Angela' Wings, a volume of essays dealing mainly 
 with art, he is chiefly concerned with moral and social 
 questions,
 
 212 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 race of life. This is not an insane idea. It 
 is only the Christianity we preach and forget 
 to live. 
 
 But, though the man imbued with Car- 
 penter's message would only care to die 
 poor, he should see to it during his life that 
 every useful thing about him was beautiful, 
 because then it would not only give adequate 
 payment to the makers, but give them sheer 
 joy in their work. The very curse of 
 modern civilisation is the rush and hurry to 
 make shoddy things, which do not spiritually 
 benefit the one who makes them or the one 
 who uses them. 
 
 Most of us who believe in the other side of 
 things at all, believe that there, at any rate, 
 will be an increase in beauty. The best pre- 
 paration for that is to get as much loveliness 
 as we can out of the raw material we have 
 on earth, and to see to it, above all, that every 
 other man and woman gets it too. The lack 
 of beauty is as demoralising as the lack of food. 
 
 To feed souls and bodies should be the
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 213 
 
 aim of any nation calling itself, not only 
 righteous, but sane and practical. Some 
 form of labour ought to become the daily 
 portion of all of us, so that we allow men 
 and women, as far as possible, to be ends 
 in themselves, and not mere means to the 
 private ends of another. Edward Carpenter, 
 the practical seer, declares that it is mainly 
 in doing these necessary things that the 
 spiritual insight comes. 
 
 To rid life of snobbery and class prejudice 
 tends towards the understanding of the 
 criminal and the sufferer, apart from all 
 questions of philanthropy and expediency. 
 The vice of separateness is to Carpenter 
 the veritable sin against the Holy Ghost. 
 Perhaps it is this attitude of democratic 
 solidarity, combined with visionary mysti- 
 cism, which places him in the forefront of 
 modern teachers. 
 
 We may read Carpenter's gospel and 
 honestly declare that it is too hard for us, 
 but the peace beyond all mere moralities
 
 214 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 or intellectualisms breathes from it. Of 
 course his religion is mainly of the spirit, 
 and to many, as yet, the work of the soul 
 seems unreal and without apparent result 
 in politics, commerce, and the daily struggle 
 of life. For these, the mystic Carpenter 
 has a practical demand. Leave soul alone 
 then, he seems to say, and don't batten 
 on bodies, either human or brute, and the 
 rest will be seen to. This man, who some- 
 times appears to be almost sentimentally 
 lenient to the sinner, can thunder out in- 
 vectives against the " philanthropic chatter- 
 boxes " and the hinderers of real life. In 
 the beginning of his Towards Democracy 
 his sledge-hammer eloquence leaves us no 
 doubt of his views about social parasitism. 
 Carpenter, however, being the seer and not 
 the mere social democrat, knows there is a 
 great hope, a big reality of living, behind 
 these conventional contortions. 
 
 " Apart from all evil," he says, " from all that 
 seems to you evil, your soul, my friend, that towards
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 215 
 
 which you aspire, your true Self, rides above your 
 phantasmal self continually. If there were chance 
 it were evil, but there is not. The soul surrounds 
 chance and takes it captive." 
 
 It is this phantasmal self, with its masks 
 and antics, he would have us understand 
 and gradually slip away from to our real 
 self, and this demand is at the root of 
 Carpenter's philosophy. 
 
 " To be Yourself, to have measureless trust, to 
 enjoy all, to possess nothing. To entertain no 
 possible fear or doubt about the upshot of things. 
 To be Yourself, to have measureless Trust. Perhaps 
 that is best of all ? " This knowledge he expresses 
 in almost a sentence : " Deep as the universe is my 
 life, and I know it ; nothing can dislodge the know- 
 ledge of it ; nothing can destroy, nothing can harm 
 me." 
 
 This is the secret of all this man's peace ; 
 his belief in the ultimate upshot of things 
 and his readiness to accept the small and the 
 great demands which direction, not chance, 
 bring to his hand. From this combina- 
 tion of belief and action he finds what are
 
 216 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 the real inner meanings of freedom and 
 joy, love and death, about which we all 
 ponder and agonise when the masks are 
 laid aside and our real selves are face to 
 face with our phantasmal selves. He is 
 single, and so his weaknesses have ceased 
 to be hypocrisies and his virtues are not 
 grim and heavy. He is too much of a 
 humorist to be a mere ethical leader. He 
 is too much of a woman to be completely 
 and dogmatically logical ; and he is so much 
 a child that he has neared the beginnings 
 of essential wisdom. The man who could 
 write Squinancy Wort and the Baby Song 
 could never be anything but a large, human- 
 hearted seer of the sweetnesses and mysti- 
 cisms of what is very small and very large. 
 
 " Freedom," says Carpenter, " has to be 
 won afresh every morning" — the freedom 
 of the spirit, wherein joy dwells, and doubt 
 and fear are cast aside. The forming of 
 the wings of man beneath the outer husk 
 is a slow process, and almost, according to
 
 CARPENTERS MESSAGE 217 
 
 his views, a matter of habit. " Freedom 
 must be won afresh every morning." Along- 
 side this command, all through his work, 
 there is a refrain which seems at one with 
 Nature, " Do not hurry ; have faith." Always 
 in his philosophy we find dualities. Here 
 we have activity and resignation. We are 
 to act, but not to be caught in the bonds 
 of the act. We are to aid in getting 
 towards the upshot of things, but never 
 to be concerned at apparent failure, disaster, 
 or loss. With the calm assurance of one 
 who knows, he tells us that sorrow is a gift 
 of gifts, the revealer of joy, and that death, 
 wrongly called the arch-fiend, is the way 
 to freedom and joy and expansion. Death, 
 to him, is indeed a mere "passing along." 
 " Death shall change as the light in the 
 morning changes ; death shall change as 
 the light 'twixt moonset and dawn." And 
 again : 
 
 " Oh, blessed is he that has passed away ! 
 Blessed, alive or dead, whom the bitter taunts ot
 
 218 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 existence reach not — nor betrayals protruded from 
 dear faces, nor weariness, nor cold, nor pain — dwell- 
 ing in heaven, and looking forth in peace upon the 
 world. 
 
 Blessed, thrice blessed, by day, by night ! Blessed 
 who sleeps with him,, blessed who eats, walks, talks, 
 blessed who labours in the field beside him ; blessed 
 whoever, though he be dead, shall know him to be 
 eternally near." 
 
 In his poem, " To One who is Where the 
 Eternal are," we have the more personal note, 
 and at the end we get the simple wisdom of 
 one who has lost and then found, and for 
 whom the " noiseless wing " has no more 
 terrors. " Man has to learn to die, quite 
 simply and naturally, as the child has to 
 learn to walk," he says. 
 
 It is not only towards death itself that 
 Carpenter presents a new conception of 
 values, so to speak. He has comfort for 
 those who find a death in life through being 
 denied just those things which seem to 
 be advantages and passports to social help, 
 friendly relationships, and lovely joys.
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 219 
 
 " What if your prayers had been granted ? What 
 if you had become exceptional, and had secured for 
 yourself a place with the strong and the gifted and 
 the beautiful ? What if, when you arrived, the eyes 
 of all had been turned upon you : and when you 
 passed by — one by one — sad, thoughtful, depressed, 
 the weak more conscious of his or her weakness, the 
 stupid more conscious of stupidity, the deformed 
 more painfully conscious of his or her deformity, to 
 their solitary chambers, they had gone apart and 
 prayed they had never been born ? 
 
 What if you had taken advantage of the weak 
 and defenceless and oppressed of the whole earth, and 
 had bartered away belief in the soul standing omni- 
 potent in the most despised things ? What if you 
 had gladly disguised and covered your own defect, 
 allowing thus the ignorant ridicule of the world to 
 fall more heavily on those who could not or would 
 not act a lie ? 
 
 What if you had been a rank deserter, a 
 cowardly slave, taking refuge always with the 
 stronger side ? Ah ! what if to one weary traveller 
 in the world, in the steep path painfully mounting, 
 you making it steeper still had added the final stone 
 of stumbling and despair? 
 
 Better to be effaced, crazy, criminal, deformed, 
 degraded. Better, instead of the steep, to be the 
 most dull, flat, and commonplace road.
 
 220 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Better to go clean underfoot of all weak and des- 
 pised persons, so that they shall not even notice that 
 you are there ; 
 
 None so rude and uneducated but you shall 
 go underfoot of them; none so criminal but you shall, 
 when the occasion serves, go underfoot of them ; none 
 so outcast but they shall pass along you and not even 
 notice that you are there." 
 
 In Carpenter's philosophy, " far around 
 and beyond whatever is exceptional and 
 illustrious in human life stretches that which 
 is average and unperceived." His love of 
 humanity is not the posing, half-hearted 
 philanthropy of gentlefolk, but an under- 
 standing of the pains of human growth, and 
 a loving acceptance of all limitations of the 
 body and soul by one who is seer enough to 
 know the end. 
 
 Of love, death's twin, Carpenter has much 
 to say. Here the forerunner is indeed in 
 evidence, for he holds the secret how to 
 " make thyself fit for the perfect love which 
 awaits, and which can alone satisfy thee." 
 His interpretation of love is far enough
 
 CARPENTERS MESSAGE 221 
 
 removed from the conventional idea of 
 absorption, possession, almost feudalistic 
 tyranny. It is the love of the real lover 
 who only wants to bless and not to hold 
 to give and not to take. To realise ever 
 so little Carpenter's idea of love is to 
 approach the time when there will be no 
 chains and no vulgarity in love, no divorce 
 courts, no revenge, no social inquisition 
 for the reform of personal emotions, no 
 unselfish selfishness, for there will be only 
 love in its rare loveliness, which makes for 
 life and breadth and joy and unity, and 
 which cannot hinder or injure, simply 
 because it is love. 
 
 Carpenter has realised that self-absorbed, 
 possessive love, however apparently unselfish, 
 is death, and chains the one who gives and 
 the one who takes. 
 
 " Who loves the mortal creature, ending there, is 
 no more free. He has given himself away to death. 
 
 For him the slimy black form lies in wait at 
 every turn, befouling the universe ;
 
 222 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 Yet he who loves must love the mortal, and he 
 who would love perfectly must be free : 
 
 (Love — glorious though it be — is a disease as long 
 as it destroys or even impairs the freedom of the 
 soul.) 
 
 Therefore, if thou wouldest love, withdraw thyself 
 from love. 
 
 Make it thy slave, and all the miracles of nature 
 shall lie in the palm of thy hand." 
 
 " Return into thyself, content to give, but asking 
 no one, asking nothing ; 
 
 In the calm light of His splendour who fills all the 
 universe, the imperishable, indestructible of ages, 
 dwell thou, as thou canst dwell, contented. 1 ' 
 
 Here, again, on this matter of love, is 
 the apparent contradiction, the plea for 
 the personal, which is right and good 
 and sweet, and the denial or subjection 
 of it. 
 
 " Now understand me well : 
 
 There is no desire or indulgence that is forbidden ; 
 there is not one good and another evil. All are 
 alike in this respect. In place all are to be used. 
 
 Yet, in using, be not entangled in them ; for then 
 already they are bad, and will cause thee suffering.
 
 CARPENTERS MESSAGE 223 
 
 When thy body, as needs must happen at times, is 
 carried along on the wind of passion, say not thou, 
 ' I desire this or that.' 
 
 For the ' I , neither desires nor fears anything, but 
 is free and in everlasting glory, dwelling in heaven 
 and pouring out joy like the sun on all sides. Let 
 not that precious thing by any confusion be drawn 
 down and entangled in the world of opposites, and 
 of death and suffering. 
 
 For as a lighthouse beam sweeps with incredible 
 speed over sea and land, yet the lamp itself moves 
 not at all, 
 
 So, while thy body of desire is (and must be by 
 the law of its nature) incessantly in motion in the 
 world of suffering, the ' 1 1 high up above is fixed in 
 heaven. 
 
 Therefore, I say, let no confusion cloud thy mind 
 about this matter ; 
 
 But ever when desire knocks at thy door, 
 
 Though thou grant it admission and entreat it 
 hospitably, as in duty bound — 
 
 Fence it yet gently off from thy true self, 
 
 Lest it should tear and rend thee." 
 
 " Seek not the end of love in this act or in that 
 act, lest indeed it become the end ; 
 
 But seek this act and that act and thousands of 
 acts whose end is love. 
 
 15
 
 224 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 So shalt thou at last create that which thou now 
 desirest ; and then, when these are all past and gone, 
 there shall remain to thee a great and immortal 
 possession, which no man can take away." 
 
 All the way through Carpenter's books, 
 what he makes us feel is, that nothing and 
 no one can rob us of our real life, which is 
 from within, and which can only gradually 
 develop through pain and loss and disen- 
 tanglement, not seen as these, but as sheaths 
 covering the new life of the soul. 
 
 " Not," he says, " by running out of yourself after 
 it conies the love which lasts a thousand years. 
 
 If to gain another's love you are untrue to your- 
 self, then you are also untrue to the person whose 
 love you would gain. 
 
 Him or her whom you seek will you never find 
 that way, and what pleasure you have with them 
 will haply only end in pain. 
 
 Remain steadfast, knowing that each prisoner 
 has to endure in patience till the season of his 
 liberation. When the love comes which is for 
 you, it will turn the lock easily and loose your 
 chains — 
 
 Being no longer whirled about nor tormented
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 225 
 
 by winds of uncertainty, but part of the organic 
 
 growth of God himself in time — 
 
 Another column in the temple of immensity — 
 Two voices added to the eternal choir. 1 '' 
 
 Edward Carpenter is indeed a forerunner, 
 not only of a robust and sane democracy, 
 but of a sincere spirituality, a spirituality 
 which cannot be content to preach or to 
 merely be preached to, but must manifest 
 itself in love. Where this man's great value 
 lies is in his absolute belief in and reverence 
 for, not only Nature and humanity, but that 
 unnamable something behind all material 
 manifestations which makes the whole 
 scheme of things logical and trustworthy. 
 To be at one in faith with this is to have 
 won that peace which passes all intellectual 
 understanding ; and Carpenter has realised 
 very clearly just the few ways in which 
 it can be revealed. In Carpenter, though 
 you find the spiritual food which satisfies, 
 you also find the necessary warning to 
 retain common sense and sanity by his
 
 226 THREE MODERN SEERS 
 
 plea for definite democratic action in this 
 world. 
 
 Like Whitman, he believes that social 
 regeneration will come through a robust 
 democracy. He would say to a believer : 
 " Just because you have faith in these inner 
 things do your practical work as a true man 
 or woman. Shun nothing, despise no one, 
 and do the thing at your hand as perfectly 
 as it is possible for you to do it. The deli- 
 cate perceptions, the great inner knowledge, 
 are not hindered, but strengthened in this 
 way." 
 
 In England's Ideal he gives the note of 
 warning : 
 
 " Anyhow, 11 he says, " courage is better than con- 
 ventionality. Take your stand and let the world 
 come round to you. Do not think you are right and 
 everybody else wrong. If you think you are wrong, 
 then you may be right ; but if you think you are 
 right, then you are certainly wrong. Your deepest 
 highest moral conceptions are only for a time. 
 They have to give place. They are the envelopes 
 of freedom, that eternal freedom which cannot be
 
 CARPENTER'S MESSAGE 227 
 
 represented, that peace which passes understanding. 
 Somewhere here is the invisible vital principle, the 
 seed within the seed. It may be held but not 
 thought, felt but not represented, except by life and 
 history. Every individual, so far as he touches this, 
 stands at the source of social progress." 
 
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Edward Carpenter. Towards Democracy. 1883-1902. 
 „ „ England's Ideal. 1887-1902. 
 
 „ ,, Civilisation: its Cause and Cure. 1889- 
 
 1906. 
 „ ,, Love's Coming of Age. 1896-1906. 
 
 „ „ Angels' Wings. 1895. 
 
 „ „ Adam's Peak to Elephanta. 1892. 
 
 „ „ The Art of Creation. 1904,, 1907. 
 
 „ „ Days with Walt Whitman. 1906. 
 
 ,, ,, Sketches from Life in Town and Country. 
 
 1908. 
 Tom Sm'an. Edward Carpenter: the Man and his 
 
 Message. 
 Ernest Crosby. Edward Carpenter : Poet and Prophet. 
 
 Printed by Ilazell, Watson & Vinty, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
 
 Stanley Paul's 6/- Fiction. 
 
 Young Nick and Old Nick. 
 
 Bardely— The Magnificent. 
 
 A New Full-length Novel by May Wynne 
 
 The Crimson Gate. 
 
 Fear. 
 
 Pretty Barbara. 
 
 That is to say — 
 
 Edward and I and Mrs. Honeybun. 
 
 A Wild Intrigue. 
 
 The .Second Elopement. 
 
 The Feet of the Years. 
 
 Quaker Robins. 
 
 Plumage. 
 
 The Bungalow Under the Lake. 
 
 Love Besieged. 
 
 Angela. 
 
 A Will in a Well. 
 
 A Splendid Heritage. 
 
 The Cheerful Knave. 
 
 Tumult. 
 
 An Empress in Love. 
 
 A Lady of France. 
 
 Love in Armour. 
 
 The Rose of Dauphiny. 
 
 Lying Lips. 
 
 Golden Aphrodite. (Second Edition.) 
 
 The Submarine Girl. 
 
 Tropical Tales. 
 
 The Ohost Pirates. 
 
 Strange Fire. 
 
 The Vortex. 
 
 Shoes of Gold. (Second Edition.) 
 
 Co -Heiresses. 
 
 Love, the Thief. (Fifth Edition.) 
 
 Stolen Honey. (Second Edition.) 
 
 Adventures of a Pretty Woman. 
 
 Troubled Waters. (Second Edition.) 
 
 The Flame Dancer. 
 
 The Bottom of the Well. 
 
 In Calvert's Valley. 
 
 The Trickster. 
 
 Did She Do Right? 
 
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 The Gay Paradines. 
 
 An Adventure in Exile. 
 
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 The Leveller. 
 
 Gay Lawless. (Fourth Edition.) 
 
 Priests of Progress. (Third Edition.) 
 
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 STANLEY PAUL & CO., i Clifford's Inn, Temple Bar, LONDON, E.C.
 
 An Eighteenth Century Marquise. 
 
 Emile du Chatelet and Her Times. 
 
 By FRANK HAMEL, 
 
 Author of " Famous French Salons," " The Dauphines of France," etc. 
 
 In one volume, demy Svo, cloth gilt. With a photo- 
 gravure frontispiece and 1 6 illustrations 
 printed on art paper. 
 
 Among all the famous French women of the eighteenth century 
 none represents more typically certain interesting phases of social 
 and court life than Madame du Chatelet. Born in 1706, her most 
 impressionable years were spent under the Regency. Highly 
 educated, she was preciaise and pedantic, yet womanly and 
 coquettish. She occupied a position in literature and philosophy 
 which, in Saint Beuve's opinion, it was easier for the women of 
 her day to smile at than to dispute. Her marriage was a marriage 
 of convenience, and she allowed her affections to stray elsewhere. 
 Her liaison with Voltaire lasted fifteen years, through storm and 
 stress, passion and friendship, fidelity and betrayal. When she was 
 no longer young, she fell passionately in love with the handsome 
 poet-soldier, St. Lambert. The background of Mme. du Chatelet's 
 life forms a variegated picture. Salons were then a force. The 
 cafes were meeting places of men of letters, dramatists, actors, 
 artists, men of the robe, soldiers, and scientists. 
 
 Masculine in intellect, ultra-feminine in her emotions, pre- 
 eminently passionate, yet highly endowed with reason, the 
 Marquise-mathematician has been over-shadowed by the great 
 poet-philosopher with whom she lived, and has not before been 
 chosen as the central figure of a biography in English. 
 
 STANLEY PAUL & CO., 
 1 Clifford's Inn, London, E.C.
 
 The Dauphines of France. 
 
 By FRANK HAMEL 
 
 Author of " Famous French Salons," etc. 
 
 In one volume, demy Svo, handsome cloth gilt, gilt top, 
 
 with a photogravure frontispiece and 16 full-page 
 
 illustrations on art paper, 16s. net. 
 
 EARL V PRESS OPINIONS. 
 
 " The author is a lively memoir writer who has found in French 
 history an abundant supply of bait wherewith to lure a greedy 
 public. " — Tiines. 
 
 "Mr. Hamel has worked with much discretion, aided by a light 
 hand, a fascinating manner, and an entire ab..ence of pretentiousness. 
 We have not met within the same compass so faithful and complete 
 a revelation of the life of the Royalties and Noblesse. We are 
 told of their delight in pageants aad processions and banquets, of 
 their childish extravagance, of their ceremonial and etiquette. The 
 portraits in this entertaining volume are instructive and admirably 
 reproduced. The frontispiece is charming enough to be removed 
 and framed on its own merits as a picture." — Outlook. 
 
 " Mr. Hamel is the first writer to bring together in one volume 
 the fifteen Dauphines of France. Of each .of the Dauphines Mr. 
 Hamel has given us a brief but finished study." — Daily Chronicle. 
 
 "Mr. Hamel does for French history what Miss Strickland did 
 for the lives of the English queens. An admirable volume." — 
 Morning Leader. 
 
 " Mr. Hamel has the right touch, and treats history in a mood 
 of gay vivacity. The various studies are always animated, well 
 informed, and excellently phrased. Certainly these stories make 
 romantic reading, and Mr. Hamel handles his material with 
 dexterity and force. In his glowing pages he seizes every oppor- 
 tunity for lively and impressive description." — Daily Telegraph. 
 
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 i Clifford's Inn, London, E.C.
 
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