THE
3 novels
Françoise Sagan
A CERTAIN SMILE
'enchanting' (New Statesman)
startling intuition - (Time and Tide)
'Sagan has done it again , (T.L.S.)
she has done it again 1 (Daily Express)
'her accomplishment is extraordinary'
(Sunday Times)
Frank Cauldwell
FIREWALKERS
'astonishingly good ' (Manchester Guardian)
'superb' ' (Sunday Times)
- uncanny readability' (Spectator)
nobody could be bored' ' (Times)
gloriously gay-hearted (Time and Tide)
Julian Fane
MORNING
'remarkable' ' (Lord David Cecil)
'triumphs ,. (Howard Spring)
: a literary artist , (Harold. Nicolson)
'a little masterpiece 9 (Glasgow Herald)
This altogether charming book' ' (Punch)
JOHN MURRAY


The Maestro
Book Society
Available in November
Alternative Choice
by ROBERT KEMP
ARROWS
The Maidencastle Festival of All the Arts is internationally famous and
draws to that old-fashioned Scottish city a diverse throng of
Great
visitors,
some of whom present a considerable enigma to the residents-and none
more .so than the distinguished Panslavonian, Vassili. Gortchakovitch,
whom the committee has designated virtuoso
Tradition
of honour. He composes
enormously long and discordant symphonies which enjoy the official
DESIRE
protection of his government, and it becomes important that his works
Tribute
should receive an enthusiastic welcome in Maidencastle. One feature of
to Dame
Maidencastle Festivals has always been the shameless competition between
Laurentia McLachlan,
WILLIAM GAUNT
hostesses in capturing guests with some publicity value. How Mrs.
It the
Urquhart-Innes, sister ofa famous Scottish Rugger International, succeeds
Abbess of Stanbrook,
is purpose of this study of
in capturing Gortchakovitch, but lives to regret it, is recounted in this
by the Benedictines of
set William Blake Blake in relation and his to world his to
most diverting new novel by the author of The Malacca Cane.
decessors, his own time and pre- his
Stanbrook
Anyone observing any resemblances between the Maidencastle and the
following. Mr. 6 Gaunt is the
Edinburgh Festivals should keep quiet about it.
author of " The Pre-Raphaelite
"This is a profoundly in-
Tragedy and The Aesthetic
Cr. 8vo. 15/- net.
teresting book.
Adventure.
Fully illustrated
21/- net
GERALD DUCKWORTH & CO. LTD.
"The mosti interesting part
of her biography describes
3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON, W.C.2
howt theradiantcharm, abun-
MEMOIRS of a
dant sympathy, and wit, of
an enclosed nun brought her
BOW STREET
the devoted friendship of
RUNNER
Three series that are now running in
6 Extracts from letters
exchanged between Dame
HENRY GODDARD
The London Magazine
Laurentia, G.B.S.and Cock-
This book is of unique interest, for
of special interest to the readers of
erell are extraordinarily in-
itis the only known autobiography
teresting. Thisdazzlingand
ofa Bow Street Runner, and the
THE CORNHILL
strangely assorted trio were
manuscript came to light quite
-inevitably-much con-
recently. It is introduced by
cerned with problems of be-
Patrick Pringle.
18/- net
COMING TO LONDON
lief and unbelief. The dedi-
An already famous series of reminiscences by
cated and disciplined Roman
THE
distinguished literary figures. Contributors this
Catholic nun, the deistic
Autumn include Alan Pryce-Jones, Rose Macaulay
Shaw, and the immutably
Brooke.
DOMINICI
and Jocelyn
sceptical Sydney Cockerell
A WRITER'S PROSPECT
furnish a fascinating series
AFFAIR
of epistolary debates. The
Contributors this Autumn include Aldous Huxley,
book is admirably written
John Wain and John Whiting.
and illustrated.'
JEAN GIONO
THE LIVING DEAD
The Economist.
One of France's greatest novelists
Contributors this Autumn include Philip Toynbee
has written this profoundly horri-
fying study of the personalities
on Gide and Angus Wilson on Shaw.
Illustrated. 26s net
involved in the Drummond mur-
ders and of the trial itself.
JOHN MURRAY
Illustrated
10/6 net
monthly 2/6 monthly
MUSEUM PRESS la


C/P. SNOW
HEFFER'S
Homecomings
m esasen REWEK
: HENTEEEUNNEE EEEETH
A major talent, steadily
expand-
ing and developing . . the best
novel he has ever written
immense technical skill.' Daily
Telegraph.
STORM
A CAMBRIDGE
JAMESON
BOOKSHOP:
THAT IS KNOWN
The Intruder
IN.ALL PARTS
A powerful story with a dramatic
OF THE WORLD
climax played out in the savage
hill-country of Provence.
October 11
W. HEFFER & SONS LTD
Potty Cury, Cambridge
JONES -
An Edwardian
FIGURE STUDIES
Youth
An exclusive and most useful collection
a Sir Lawrence Jones has the gift
of high-grade photographic prints is
of evoking the past without affec-
offered to Artists, Sculptors, Designers,
tation or sentimentality, and 'of
Illustrators, Modellers, and Art
presenting an extraordinary vivid
picture.' Evening
Students, as an aid to figure con-,
Standard.,
struction, composition and design.
ANDREW
The series consists of a very good range
of models of all types and ages, and is
GRAHAM
one of the most comprehensive and
varied collections obtainable. Parti-
culars
Interval in
to applicants stating profession
or age.
Indo-China
€ Acute, imaginative and fresh in
outlook. 7 The Star. 6 Refresh-
ing and extremely readable -
a handsomely printed book.'
Eastern Daily Press. 16 plates.
BCM/PALETTE, Dept. C.H.
* MACMILLAN *.
Monomark House, London, W.C.I


See
tbat's
SUPER
SHELI
YOU CAN BE SURE OF SHELL3


THE CORNHILL
Autumn, 1956
MAGAZINE
PAGE
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
vii
LAURENCE OLIPHANT
(Illustrated) .
by Seton Dearden
SAMSON (A Story) ly
by Francis King 33
ADOLF HITLER'S HOUSE'
by Maurice Rowdon 44
LINA (A Story)
by Peter Matthiessen 53
THE AUCAS AND THE
GRADUATES
by Desmond Stewart 59
JOHN MURRAY, 50 ALBEMARLE STREET, LONDON, W.1


At present the CORNHILL appears quarterly and will publish occasional Supple-
ments containing work of up to 35,000 words in length.
The Editor asks that all contributions should be addressed to him at 5o Albe-
marle Street, London, W.I, and accompanied by a stamped envelope.
Subscriptions for the CORNHILL are available from any bookseller or from
5o Albemarle Street, London, W.I. A subscription for 4 issues costs IIS. 6d.
(overseas IOS. 8d.) and for 8 issues 23S. od. (overseas 2IS. 4d.) including
postage.
The CORNHILL is included in the INTERNATIONAL INDEX [published by
The H. W. Wilson Company of New York]
Printed in Great Britain by Butler &' Tanner Ltd., Frome and London
and published by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.
The first full biography
A CRACKLE
THE LIFE OF
OF THORNS
LAURENCE
Experiences
in the Middle East
OLIPHANT
Sir Alec Seath
Traveller, Diplomat, Mystic
Kirkbride
PHILIP HENDERSON
"Sir Alec has opened up the
Middle East to armchair trav-
A fascinating portrait of that tur-
and in
bulent and erratic personality who
ellers,
doing this has
was a brilliant Times correspondent,
written a book which is a
adventurous diplomat and travel-
delight to read.'-The Times.
writer, author ofthenovel Piccadilly,
other-worldly mystic and unortho-
dox missionary.
Illustrated 21s. net
Illustrated 21/-
JOHN MURRAY
Published October 24th
ROBERT HALE


The Ideal Gift
either for a friend or for yourself
A special Greetings Card, with a wood engraving by Eric
Ravilious, will be sent in your name with the first number.
ORDER FORM
(Please detach)
Please send four/eight numbers of THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE
starting with the current/forthcoming number.
I enclose Cheque/Postal Order for 11s. 6d./23s. which
covers cost and postage. [Overseas Subscriptions remain at 10S. 8d.]
From NAME.
ADDRESS.
Please send this form to your Bookseller or to
so ALBEMARLE STREET, LONDON, W.I


speaks a new
international language.
CPV has invented a powerful new internationallanguage: CPVadvertising.
Itis a language because it is a form of communication between people. The
people who sell and the people who buy. It is international because it is
carried on by CPV and its associates in over 60 countries of the world. (Yes,
over 60 countries). And it is powerful because CPV putsèverythingitknows
into every,advertising job it does. à
If you go to France or Italy, you will see CPV advertising there. If you go
to America or Belgium, Canada or Venezuela, you will see CPV advertising
there, too. All will have one thing in common. Though the product or
service may be vastly dissimilar. Though the words may be Greek or double
Dutch to you. Though the advertisements and posters may look as different
as chalk from cheese. Despite it all, every bit of CPV advertising will
have that powerful selling hallmark, the authentic CPV touch.
Colman, Prentis & VarleyLtd.
34 GROSVENOR - STREET, LONDON


BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
SETON DEARDEN is a specialist in 'Arab affairs at the Foreign Office. He has written
books on Sir Richard Burton and George Borrow and recently edited a new edition of
Curzon's Monasteries of the Levant (Arthur Barker).
MAURICE ROWDEN lives in Italy. His first book, Hellbore the Clown, was published ,
by Chatto and Windus. His most recent books are Of Sins and Winter and Perimeter
West (Heinemann).
FRANCIS KING lives in Greece. Among his most recent books are The Dividing
Stream, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Dark Glasses (Longman).
His new novel, entitled The Widow, is'to be published next year.
DESMOND STEWART has been living in the Arab world and has travelled widely
in Turkey and Persia. This year he produced Edipus Rex in Arabic in Baghdad. His
books include The Memoirs of Alcibiades, Leopard in the Grass, The Unsuitable Englishman.
His latest book is New Babylon, A Portrait of Iraq (Collins). He is now working on a
translation of The Philoctetes and a study of Muhammad.
PETER MATTHIESSEN is a young American writer living in Paris. Hel has written
two novels, Race Rock and The Partisans (Secker and Warburg).


Autumn Books
ROUND THE ISLAND
SARDINIA RE-EXPLORED
H. W. Freeman
With maps, 8 plates and 21 line drawings
21s. net
A fascinating book in which the author of Joseph and his Brethren and,
most recently, The Poor Scholar's Tale records the experiences of two
summers spent bicycling round Sardinia with his wife. They visited
towns and villages usually unknown to tourists, and lived, as near as
foreigners may, the life of the islanders.
THE IDIOM OF
CONTEMPORARY
THOUGHT
A Reinterpretation of some of the Problems
to which it gives rise
Crawford Knox
18s. net
In this book Mr Knox attempts a new interpretation of contemporary
knowledge and thought, and offers a strictly rational solution to some 1,
of the most puzzling and disturbing questions which face the modern
world.
Novels
THE ENGAGEMENT
by Edith de Born
BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
An extremely intelligent and entertaining novel by the author of The
Bidou Inheritance, Daughter of the House and The Imperfect Marriage.
THE BRIGHT BLUE SKY
by John Symonds
A deceptively quiet tale of the death of an old love and the beginning
of a new one. It will appeal to those who found The Lady in the
Tower refreshingly different in atmosphere and treatment from most
novels.-13s. 6d.
CHAPMAN & HALL


Laurence Oliphant
BY SETON DEARDEN
XCEPT for a conventional, formless, and reticent biography of
I Laurence Oliphant, written by his cousin, Mrs. Oliphant the
novelist, three years after his death in 1888, there has been no
attempt to resurrect this Victorian eccentric who had, during
his lifetime, such an odd personal influence on his contemporaries,
yet is now completely forgotten. The Dictionary ofNational Biography
describes him as novelist, war correspondent, and mystic : surely,
it.seems, a promising field for the biographer. Yet when one turns
for the details of his life to his books and correspondence, it becomes
clear why he has been neglected. 'For he is an enigma ; his life is
not one but two lives ; indeed, he seems to be not one man, but two,
each with a separate identity expressing itself in terms of thought
and action. To reconcile these two personalities and make a con-
secutive a story ofthe man is therefore not easy. His very rootlessness
increases the difficulty. For Oliphant, even in the tragic folly of his
mysticism, was essentially superficial. Without the alchemy of that
personal magnetism, of which all his contemporaries speak, he seems
to us a restless, shadowy creature, skating across the bare surface of
the Victorian scene, cutting graceful figures in Society, dashing off
effortlessly on light-hearted adventures, and as suddenly reappearing ;
leaving no real tracè on either the life or thought of his time. The
truth is; of course, that without the undeniable vehicle of this great
charm, the record of his life seems shallow, and 'his books and
correspondence, without coherence or dates, as ephemeral as a last
week's newspaper. Yet, in hisway he was a symbol of his period;
and the student of human behaviour, eschewing the record of his
practical achievements, will find a psychological interest in. seek-
ing for a clue to the contradictions, which make up a complex


Laurence Oliphant
personality. It is in fact his character, rather than his achievements,
which is of interest.
What are these contradictions ? What is this curious dichotomy
in Oliphant's character ? On the one hand we seem to have the man
'of action ; the energetic traveller and journalist, the novelist of
industry and talent, the club-man, the prominent figure of a social
caste whose values were closely defined and whose code ofbehaviour
allowed few lapses. This is the Laurence Oliphant of mid-Victorian
society, the man whose presence was craved by the hostesses of Bel-
gravia, whose exhilarating talk , delighted Queen Victoria, and
whose vivacity gave the Prince of Wales unqualified enjoyment ;
the trusted confidant of the great Delane of The Times, the intrepid
young traveller' 7 of Kinglake, the man who was 6 hand in glove with
half the potentates and conspirators in Europe'; the gay, charming
Lowry' of many books of contemporary reminiscence ; who,
seemingly without effort, made a success of literature, travel, diplo-
macy, politics and even commercial speculation.
On the other hand, what have we ? The man his contemporaries
knew as 6 the mystic in lavender kid gloves,' or the brilliant and
fascinating visionary'; the author of two strange books of pseudo-
mystical theory ; the devoted disciple of a 6 backwoods American
prophet,' to whom he sold his soul for a term of years ; and finally
the founder of a queer colony at Haifa, not much removed from'a
love cult, where sex and perverted mysticism drew a concourse ofpoor
deluded souls, and from which death only rescued him from what
must have become an inevitable collapse into insanity.
This last is, of course, a not unfamiliar theme in life and literature.
Bright spirits before have been dimmed by obsessions or darkened
by madness. But usually the moral disintegration is gradual; pro-
gressive, and complete ; it is the whole man who collapses. What
is unusual in Laurence Oliphant is that almost to the last he was
able to keep these two parts of his nature completely separated; he
could step, as it were, from one personality to the other, or from the
world of unreality to that of reality, at will.
Courage, intelligence, industry, great, charm-Oliphant apparently
has them all ; yet, ifthere is a moral in his story it is that of the pitfalls
which lie in wait for the superficial mind when moved by religious


Seton Dearden
doubt : the danger inherent in spiritual experiments carried out
without the discipline of orthodox belief or a proper grounding in the
humanities. Mysticism is one of the least analysable factors ofhuman
experience. At its best it may be the highest form of apprehensible
religious truth. But, alas, to some it can also be the most dangerous
of emotions. The very elements which make it up-love, and union
with the loved one, and the ecstasy SO obtained, can be SO easily
parodied by the sexual impulse. There is a mysterious border-line
which lies between. It was the tragedy of Laurence Oliphant's S life,
that he crossed this border-line and was lost in a strange, comic,
blasphemous hell of his own creation.
Laurence Oliphant was born in 1829, the son of Sir Anthony
Oliphant, Attorney General in Ceylon, and spent his youth and
early manhood in an atmosphere ofsocial gaiety and constant domestic
unrest mingled with an undercurrent of evangelical piety, imbibed
from his mother. A restless spirit and a facile pen, combined with
great personal charm and good family connections, shaped his future
career for him. Travel, politics, journalism, Victorian society-he
.rapidly made his way to an assured position in all these activities.
At-the age of thirty-six he stood with a very creditable record as a
politician, a political writer and a social star. A succession of light
and successful books lay behind him; Parliament was beckoning, and
in the social world he had reached the limits of Victorian ambition,
and was a welcome guest at Sandringham and Osborne.
And yet a still more potent force was at work in his uneasy spirit.
He was unhappy. Within him was a spiritual conflict. It was as if,
having SO easily made himself master ofhis future in the world of the
flesh, he had found it dross, and was groping towards that of the
spirit.
In 1865 the opening parts ofhis first novel Piccadilly began to appear
in Blackwood's. It was a light but brilliant skit on Victorian upper-
class society life, and its religious pretensions ; and the work at first
appeared anonymously. But the anonymity was not long preserved,
and Oliphant was widely praised for a satire which so cleverly and
so kindly exposed the religious temper of the times. Piccadilly has


Laurence Oliphant
all the ingredients, of the popular Victorian three-decker novel. Its
venue is Victorian upper-class society, its characters are titled people,
the fortune-hunting mother, the delightful but impoverished lord,
the wealthy Indian merchant prepared to make a financial marriage
match. But behind these puppets of convention there was a more
serious note sounded. It marks the emergence of Oliphant's SO far
repressed religious side. It was the.sign that something momentous
had occurred in his life. 'I dare say,' he had written to his publisher,
John Blackwood, as the book had progressed, 6 you will be surprised
at the half-serious, half-mysterious tone of the last parts ; but, after
having attacked the religious world SO sharply, it is necessary to show
that one does not despise religion of the right kind.'
But what was religion of the right kind'? The reader of Piccadilly
was enlightened, but not very clearly. Towards the end of the book
the hero, Lord Vanecourt, exhorts his friend, Broadhem, to 6 live the
life'. 66 Supposing, " he elaborates as the two walk arm in arm under
the gas-lamps of Piccadilly, 66 supposing that you gave up attempting
to steer your own craft any longer, but put the helm into other hands,
and could complacently watch her drive straight on to breakers, and
make a deliberate shipwreck of every ambition in life . . . supposing
you could arrive at the point of being as indifferent to the approval,
as to the censure, ofyour fellow-men - . what a balance that would
be on the credit side."
And here a mysterious stranger appears suddenly beside them,
breaks into their talk, and pours out a torrent of eloquence on the
theme that man has lost his God.
66 Who is that ?" whispers Broadhem. "Inever saw him before."
Vanecourt does not answer the question, and the scene, enough to
arouse the curiosity of any reader, ends with the following apostrophe.
c6 Ah, Piccadilly ! Hallowed recollections may attach to those stones
worn by the feet of the busy idiots in this vast asylum, for one sane
man has trodden them, and I listened to' the words of wisdom as they
dropped from the lips of one SO obscure that his name is still unknown
in the land, but I doubted not who was the greatest man in Piccadilly."
<6 Who is that ?' " asked Broadhem ; and the query was repeated


Seton Dearden
by most of Oliphant's friends during the year 1865. For some time
they had become aware ofthe growth of this more complex side to his
nature. Behind the gaiety and wit there was beginning to emerge at
odd moments a note of compelling seriousness. Perhaps it was this
darker shadow in his temperament that gave an added quality to his
undeniable charm ; was there not an even greater appeal in the witty
tongue suddenly stilled, the roguish eye abruptly darkened and pen-
sive, the mind turned inwards from the listeners ? He was in fact
searching for some outlet for his spiritual unease.
London in the 2 so's and'60's was not without its solace for those
who were uneasy in spirit. Oliphant was himself only a reflection
ofthe spirit ofhis time. The mid-nineteenth century saw the sudden
growth of a sort of material spiritualism among the upper and middle
classes. To the Victorian mind which sought to fly from the rigid
doctrine and spiritual atrophy of the new scientific materialism, an
exciting new world of escape was opened into the agreeable uncer-
tainties ofthe Occult. Spiritualism, table turning, mesmerism, animal
magnetism became the subjects of earnest discussion and experiment
in the London salon and the provincial parlour. Here, the problem
of the after life could be discussed, and indeed confused, with the
properties of the Leyden battery ; the trance motions of the female
medium-were they SO far removed from the more sublime functions
of the magnetic coil ? Mesmerism performed its familiar miracles ;
and in the perfumed darkness of many an aristocratic drawing-room,
the startled materialist, listening to the reverberations of spirits from
Beyond, for thé first time achieved a spiritual experience.
This was an unhealthy climate for one suffering from Oliphant's
chronic spiritual malaise, for, while exciting his emotions and con-
fusing his intelligence, it did nothing to assuage his very real sense of
moral guilt.
It was a strange dual life Oliphant led during this period. He
was to be seen gay, witty, untiringly charming, in the gas-lit salons
of Belgravia. His light liaisons with several women were well
known, but easily forgiven. He seemed tireless in following the
social round, and yet found time to write consistently and brilliantly
on European politics for The Times, for Blackwood's or for his own
magazine The Owl. Yet there were frequent nights also when the tall,


Laurence Oliphant
lean, pensive figure, with the Alowing beard, high forehead and dark
rather wild eyes would sit a rapt listener in some obscure meeting house
or concert hall. For what was he listening ; for what' waiting ?
Only he himself could have answered that. But he did not wait in
vain. Sometime, somewhere in 1859, he found the answer to his
prayers. 66 Who is that ?" Broadhem had asked in Piccadilly, as the
mysterious stranger had joined them. The worldofOliphant's: friends
were now to have the answer.
Sometime in 1859 a new preacher had arrived in England from
America. He came at the invitation ofa group of English new
church liberals, and appeared in London, Manchester and Glasgow
where he had a great emotional success. Tall and with a deep and
eloquent voice, SO musical and SO moving thatit stirred the
phlegmatic
Thackeray to tears when he heard a Bible reading at the Steinway
Hall, a long patriarchal beard, and curiously deep-set magnetic eyes,
with 6 a depth SO spiritual,' as one observer recorded, one might
imagine him in communion with the invisible,' he drew large con-
gregations wherever he went. His preaching and his Bible readings
were orthodox ; but those, stirred to make his closer acquaintance,
were rebuffed: Unapproachable, and served by a few faithful dis-
ciples, he spent most of his time in what seemed a monastic seclusion
either in London lodgings or in a farmhouse in Yorkshire.
His name, perhaps the most plebeian thing about him, was Thomas
Lake Harris, and he came to England from Wassaic in New York,
where he had been known as the wonder preacher.'
It is not known where first Oliphant heard him preach ; nor
whether his belief that here was his guide and his leader on the path
ofmoral regeneration was a sudden one or came slowly. But from
one ofHarris's S sermons he rose and left the building with his mission
defined; ; and he confided the'tremendous truth to a close friend. 'I
consider that from time to time the Divine influence incarnates itself
SO to speak in phenomenal persons. Sakyamuni was such and Christ
was such, and such I consider Mr. Harris to be.'
Inspired by the sermons, incredibly moved by the sensuous verse,
Oliphant tried to meet Harris. But. to approach him was not easy.


Seton Dearden o
He kept himself in strict seclusion,'a and visitors were turned away
by the devoted disciples who kept his door. Oliphant sought the
man who had first invited Harris to England and acted as his host,
a dissenting gentleman named Garth Wilkinson. From him he
begged-an introduction. Garth Wilkinson refused the introduction;
and it seems clear that this hard-headed Scotsman had already had
second thoughts about Harris. Could he have learned something of
the terrific secret which only Harris and a few disciples knew ? Atall
events he refused to help and indeed warned Oliphant of the un-
wisdom of meeting thë preacher. But Oliphant was undeterred.
It is related that, after learning Harris's address, he wandered in per-
plexity and doubt for sometime up and down outside the house.
(Wasith his guardian angel, or the voice ofcommon sense still speaking
to him ?) But at length he summoned up courage and entered.
He saw the preacher, he secured an interview ; he' listéned to him
speak. From that momênt he was cômpletely enslaved ; like Vane-
court in Piccadilly, he 6 put the helm into other hands.' It will be
seen how he was to 6 watch her drive straight on to breakers and
make a deliberate shipwreck of every ambition in life.'
But though he gave Oliphant an interview, and possibly also a
tantalising glimpse of the awful truths about himself that SO far were
hidden from the world, Harris was experienced in the psychology of
faith and he accepted no male convert without a long and arduous
apprenticeship. Oliphant was lectured on his moral condition, and
it was part of Harris's great skill and knowledge of human nature
that he could draw this with great accuracy and force for any sinner ;
he was warned of the thorny path ahead; meanwhile he must
study to purify his heart and obey such instructions as came to him
from time to time from the man who was now his master. Whether
he should learn the ultimate goal had yet to be decided.
And the ultimate goal ? What, then, was the secret of,Thomas
Lake Harris ; what was this strange belief that was slowly to be
unfolded to Laurence Oliphant during the years of waiting-from
1859 to 1864? It was an astounding doctrine, in which as we have
said the tragic, the comic and the blasphemous were closely inter-
twined. To believe in it required an effort of faith, an abandon-
ment of common sense, beyond the capacity of most normal persons ;


Laurence Oliphant
and yet the Brotherhood of the New Life as the new sect was called,.
who strove to carry out its tenets in the wooded valleys of Duchess
County, was a growing and influential community.
Harris believed that the world was now ready fora new,revelation' S
of the Divine will. This revelation could only come thiough a
choseri intermediary between God and man whom he named 6 the
pivotal man.' Harris was convinced that his own mission in life was
to be this € pivotal man,' poised between the forces of Heaven and.
Hell in a 'new age when deeper and more interior truths will be
revealed." Tobecome a 6 pivotal man 2 requiredl long years of seclusion,
mediumistic trances,. prayer and a curious system ofbreathing exercises.
To assist him'in this great struggle Harris formed an internal group
ofrégénerate persons who had to live absolutely under his dominion.
Beyond them was ân external group, who, although allowed to
join the Brotherhood, and partake of its semi-divine blessings, had
not as yet undergone the rigorous tests necessary to become internals.
In the case of men, these tests always entailed long years either of field
labour in exacting conditions or commercial work of benefit to the
Community. In the case of women, it seems, the tests were less
arduous and of a more personal nature. R
It, was ôn such a basis that the first Community ofthe Brotherhood*
of the New Life, "frequently called 6 the Use' was opened at Wassaic.
It was in its early days immensely strengthened by the arrival of a
Miss Jane Lee Waring, a handsome and devoted follower of Harris,
P who brought with her not only great managerial capacity, but a sum
ofnearly a quarter ofa million dollars. She became Harris's assistant,
amanuensis, business agent and personal companion.
Harris's doctrine, as elaborated to his followers, was a mixture of
the theories of Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme. God was bi-sexual,
and since man was made in His image, every man had on earth or in
heaven a female counterpart. Harris had already found his'own
counterpart, and she played"a considerable part in the life of the
Community." She was a spirit lady called Lily Queen, and lived in
a sort of paradise sometimes called Lilistan, and sometimes the electro-
vital. Lily Queen, the subject of many reams of Harris's sensuous
verse, . was able to descend to earth and unite with Harris in what
was known as the counterpartal marriage to
of the
Lily Queen


iin
LAURENCE OLIPHANT
The illustrations for this article are reproduced by kind permission
of Columbia University Press from A Prophet and a Pilgrim by
Herbert W. Schneider and George Lawton.


Fre
THOMAS LAKE HARRIS IN' HIS STUDY


Seton Dearden
'Conjugial.' In effect, she ruled the Community through Harris, a,
and her sudden appearances from the electro-vital and her orders,
which were often'difficult and unpleasant. to obey, caused wonder,
and âlarm throughout the Community. But no one doubted her,
existence or her semi-divinity.
The counterpartal doctrine was an attractive one, especially to
women:; "and these flocked to the Use to meet Harris and hear his' .
theories. Difficulties such as were put in the way of men neophytes
disappeared in the case of women. For them it was not difficult to
join the Use ; and the first interview to a sex-starved sister in Christ
was often, it seems, an earnest of more exciting things.
It was to these doctrines and'to this life that Laurence Oliphantnow
aspired. Dates-are cônfusing, since Oliphant rarely dated a letter'; *
+ - but it's seems that from 1859 when he first met Harris until 1867 when LE
the summons came, he lived his normal life in London, mixing in', ,
society, making his sudden journeys to Europe, writing copiously for
The Times, for Blackwood's; publishing books, in which no sign of the
great spiritual revelation he has undergone appears. It is not clear
exactly when Harris decided to accept Oliphant's plea to be allowed
to join the Use at Amenia, to which, from Wassaic, the Community
had now moved, as an external. It seems that Lady Oliphant, who
already was also a devotee of Harris's, had been allowed, after her
husband's death, to precede him there. Messages and instructions
continued to come from Amenia to Oliphant in London. All were
blindly obeyed. The news that Oliphant had been elected to Parlia-
ment in 1865 had scarcely been published when' Harris sent him
instructions that he was not to speak in the House. Oliphant had in
fact made a promising maiden speech before this message arrived, and + .n
friends prognosticated that with his ability, personality and knowledge
ofworld affairs, he would make a useful contribution to the Chamber.,
To the astonishment and protests of his friends and Party he never
opened his mouth there again. a
By this blind obedience to instructions, carried out over a period of
years, it is probable that Oliphant succeeded +
in convincing Harris of
the genuineness of his conversion. Harris must have clearly realised
that Oliphant was a convert outside the usual run. A brilliant,
popular, influential man of the world, he must have presented to the
VOL. 169-NO. 1009.B


Laurence Oliphant
shrewd Harris a problem in marked contrast to the usual disciples
who asked to be taken into the fold. In Oliphant, intelligent, financi-
ally independent, and well versed in the ways of the world, he might
find someone who could become a grave danger to the Community ;
a possible rival who might not long: remain under the Master's spell.
On the other hand, could he subordinate Oliphant entirely to his
will, what a convert this would prove ! What an ambassador to the
outer world for the 6 pivotal man ;: what an added prestige to the
growing circle of worshippers at Amenia.
Perhaps only gradually did'Harris realise that here was a convert
more completely enslaved than most ; one prepared to believe any-
thing ; to do his bidding in anything ; one, in fact, ready to accept
the semi-divinity of Harris's mission.
It was not until the summer of.1867 that Oliphant at last received - 9
the longed-for instructions to go to-New York and there await final
orders to join the Community. He responded with alacrity ; severed
his contacts, packed his bags, and disappeared.
His disappearance was received with sceptical incredulity by his
friends, and with dismay by his editors, publisher and constituents.
- A universal cry of consternation followed. . - , 9 wrote his cousin,
Mrs. Oliphant, expressed half in regrets for the deluded one (who
was SO little like an ordinary victim of delusion), and half in scorn
of his prophet, the wretched fanatic, the vulgar mystic, who had
got hold ofhim by what wonderful wiles or for what evil purposes,
who could say ?
The Billows closed over him and for three
years he was as though he had never been . . :
And his friend Kinglake wrote sadly to Blackwood : I trust that
-his charm and cleverness will somehow deliver him from the re-
doubtable Harris.'
Oliphant arrived in New York in the autumn of 1867 to find a
messenger from Harris awaiting him, with a final warning that he
should once more. consider the fatal step he was taking, before it was
too late. The road before him was hard, the discipline strict ; should
he wish to retract he must do SO now. But this warning, Oliphant
confessed later, was accompanied by such a searching diagnosis of his


Seton Dearden
own moral condition that it 'served merely to strengthen him in his
determination to link himself with a teacher who' could SO deeply
see into his soul.
Meanwhile he made over his entire fortune, some $100,000, into
the Community fund, from which land was purchased, and sat down
to await further instructions.
These, when they came, were odd. He was prepared for hard-
ships, for penances, for rebuffs; but that the Member for Stirling
Burghs, the author of Piccadilly, should be instructed to sew petticoats
was surely unforeseen. Harris was to show himself a past-master in
the art of humiliation during the years that followed. Yet, nothing
daunted, Oliphant took up the work. I have nearly finished one
petticoat,' he wrote in perfect seriousness to a friend in England.
'I find the greatest benefit from it-it induces a calm, and if not
actively devotional, at all events a contemplative state of mind.'
At length the summons came and in the late autumn of 1867, it
is recorded, the figure of a fashionably dressed Englishman startled
the simple villagers of Amenia by enquiring the way to the Harris
Community.
Here, when he arrived,.1 he found further humiliation indeed. As
a mere € external,' he was not permitted to see Harris or his house-
hold. He was to serve at the most menial tasks and house himself
where he could; butit must be alone. He must hold no communica-
tion with any of the Community until a first period of penance was
over. Above all, he must hold no communication with his own,
mother ; though he frequently saw her. Apart from boarding with
someone, there was in fact nowherel to live in Amenia, which was
a tract of new country dotted with the small huts of the Community,
and one large newly erected comfortable building, suitably hedged
about, in which lived Harris with his personal retinue. Oliphant
had perforce, and without help, to build himself a shack of empty
orange boxes ; and here he began a period ofservice, cleaning stables,
hoeing vineyards ; repairing and cleaning the Community's boots.
His food was brought daily to him by a silent messenger and, according
to his friend Lord Dunraven, € pushed to him at the end of a long
While the externals laboured about the Communitylands,planting


Laurence Oliphant
vines, making wine, trying to bring rough new land under enough
cultivation to support them, a group of' internals,' mostly women,
surrounded Harris and kept him insulated from the world. This was
necessary, for his spirit life was one of constant struggle against the
infernals 9 from the outside world. When not writing his long,
involved books of doctrine or his verse, he spent most of his time
in trances. During these his spirit was particularly susceptible to
what he called spheres' or inimical forces in the outside world,
and 6 states ' or wrong-minded conditions in anyone in the Com-
munity. Spheres , might be caused by anything from a declaration
of war in Brazil to à rise in the price of local wine in New York.
Harris's battles with 6 spheres' could be terrible, and from them he
would einerge looking shaken and worn. But, for the Community,
states' ' were much more menacing. These were caused invariably
by members of the Community afflicted by worldly emotions. The
most common worldly emotion in the Brotherhood was family
affection.
Upon each member of the Community, therefore, lay the heavy
personal burden ofpreventing Father (as Harris was called) from being
afflicted by 6 states '; since such affliction, they were told by his
household, would take the form of physical pains causing Father to
roll on the ground in agony.' Since Harris, though apparently
isolated and remote from his disciples, watched the Community very
closely, he was instantly aware of alliances or affections inimical to
his own interests. A state' ' would result. Then, possibly without,
warning, the sword would fall. An irrevocable edict would be
brought by a messenger, and offending individuals or families were
either separated and punished, or banished into the outer world.
Over all the Community there hung this cloud of fear, uncertainty
and awe. Scattered in their rough huts and communal dwelling
houses, from which they issued to toil long hours at manual work on
the estate, the members of the 6 external ' Use would pass in trepida-
tion and wonder the comfortable house, shrouded in carefully planted
shrubs and trees, in which Father, incommunicable, remote, yet all
seeing, lived. Who knew, behind those walls, what agonies were
being suffered, what battles fought, for their redemption ?
Mostly the great house would be silent, but there were days when,


Seton Dearden
to the startled disciples, there would emerge from the shutterèd
building the unearthly and inharmonious strains of a piano, on which
Father, playing : by sheer influx,' would be calling down Lily Queen
from the electro-vital. - For it was wholly needful that the beloved
Lily herself should absolutely rule every strain and tone, from her
own Lilistan home, without being forced into any artificially deter-
mined forms from the musical culture of the 'world.'
For some three months poor Woodbine (as Oliphant was called
according to the rules of the Use by which each member bore a fairy
name) worked in isolation and considerable squalor. Mrs. Oliphant
wrote that often afterwards he would recall - in a sort of nightmare
the gloomy, silent labour for days and days wheeling barrows of dirt
and rubbish in perfect loneliness.' Towards the end of1867, doubtless
with funds provided from Oliphant's financial renunciation, Harris
made a move long contemplated to a new Community site on the
shores of Lake Erie, at a place called Brocton, near Buffalo. Harris
and his household, consisting of'Dovie' (Jane Lee Waring), Viola' (a
lady called Mrs. Requa), and some serving girls went first ; the rest
of the Community, consisting of some seventy souls (of whom fifty
were women) followed gradually ; among these were about a dozen
Japanese, who found that Harris's strange theories echoed some need
in their own peculiar oriental psychology. Oliphant left Amenia
practically last, having been neither consulted nor even informed of
the move. I have not been able to speak to Faithful, or come into
any kind of rapport with him or Dovie,' he wrote in a letter dated
October 1867. 'I am consoled by feeling that by this separation I
am enabled to fight without drawing life from him or causing anyone
any suffering. . .
Deprived of all human aid, the Divine arm
becomes more and more evident. to one's spiritual senses. .
Meanwhile there was plenty ofwork to do. Harris had taken the :
first farm purchased on the Brocton estate. He virtually rebuilt
the house, making it a place of some thirty rooms, and calling it"
Vinecliff. So that his seclusion should be complete, a public road
which ràn near the house was removed and relaid a good distance
away. Round the house were planted thick clusters of ornamental


Laurence Oliphant
shrubs and fowering trees.. Water was piped from a source neàrly
two miles away to feed an ornamental fishpond, there was a small
deer park laid and a cultivated tract of land in which vine experi-
mentation was carried out by Dovie.'
On this beautiful and inviolable little estate the € prophet' might
be occasionally seen wandering in deep communion with himself,
wrapped in a black cloak and smoking a clay pipe. Occasionally
- Dovie,' also smoking a clay pipe, would be seen accompanying
him. Inside, the house was furnished in the height of luxury ;
tapestries, paintings hung on the walls, and the floors were covered
with Persian rugs. Flowers, for which Harris had a passion, filled
every room ; doors and archways were discreetly curtained. On an
upper foor Harris had a small but luxurious study, lined with books
(many of which were the gift of the Oliphants). Here in a soft,
specially designed arm-chair he would sit and, compose his verse or
his books of doctrine ; here also he could writhe in his trances and
fight, unseen by all but Dovie,' for the redemption of mankind.
Here came Lily Queen gliding down from the electro-vital to give
him comfort and physical release ; from here emerged the sound of
him reciting his verse to himself; his shouts of agony when the
infernals' attacked him, or the unearthly strains of his piano as he
established his rapports with the Unseen. This room opened into
his bedroom, and from there on to a vine-covered small private
verandah which looked across Lake Erie.
The exact length of Oliphant's period of probation is not clear.
It seems that for at least two years he was treated as an 6 external'
and not allowed to approach Father'; -
though he was closely
watched. The gossip of a household of five women, if nothing
else, was sufficient to keep Harris well informed of every detail of the
private lives ofthe members ofhis Community. There are, however,
letters from Oliphant to his publisher, Blackwood, showing that he
- himself was still in touch with the outer world, and that that rational
and intellectually active second selfin his strange make-up was enabling
him eagerly to discuss the re-publication of his novel Piccadilly in
book form. These letters give no inkling.either of his labours or


Seton Dearden
of the curious world in which he lived. They might have been
written from the Athenaeum and not from Brocton. Gay, business-
like, fuent, it seems almost incredible they could come from a man
worn out with menial labour and steeped in all the mysterious super-
naturalism of the Harris Community.
In the absence ofany clear information except Laurence Oliphant's
undated letters it is difficult to trace the actual sequence of events ;
but it seems thatby the end of1869 Harris had realised that Oliphant's
money-making talent was wasted in menial service at Brocton. His
subservience seemed complete ; and he was now allowed to pay
visits to New York, to put his knowledge of the financial markets
at the service of the Community. Possibly with Community funds
to invest, he was in New York frequently during the latter part of
the year ; and he saw sufficient of New York commerce and social
life to write a satire Dollie and the Two Smiths,' which began to
appear in Blackwood's early in 1870. This was entirely in his old
vein of gay, infectious satire. Fun,' wrote Mrs. Oliphant, who read
the instalments eagerly, a had never been SO wild in him, nor satire
SO bold, nor could anything be supposed more completely unlike the
conventional idea of a man who had given up everything for the
sake of religion, than the laughable, yet subtle, sketch - - too
ludicrous to be immoral, which he launched at his new neighbours
with the same laugh which had bewildered the' old.'
The first instalments had scarcely begun to appear when Oliphant
himself arrived in London, and immediately resumed his former
place in society. He strolled into the Athenaeum, a friend remem-
bered, as if he had only left it the previous day ; and took up his
old life again as if he had never been away. Yet those ofhis friends
who were sanguine enough to believe that his return meant a return to
sanity, and a final rupture with the crazy community at Brocton, were
spcedily disillusioned. Mrs. Oliphant who saw him wrote, / 6 He wasin
high spirits, unfeignedly glad to be released from his drudgery, and
to return to his native air of intellectual novelty and variety, after
long fasting from all that was exciting or agreeable. But this natural
sentiment did not in the least degree interfere with his faith. .
Harris had allowed him only a small pittance from the Community
chest on which to live, and remunerative work of some sort was an


Laurence Oliphant
immediate necessity. He made one attempt to obtain employment
in the diplomatic service, but this door was now closed to him. Yet
a journalist of such outstanding merit could not, in those days, remain
long without employment. The Franco-Prussian war, which had
just broken out, led to a race in the British press to be first
with the news. Delane, editor of The Times, was glad to offer him
the post of correspondent at Lyons at a salary of f1200 a year, plus
expenses. The work promised excitement, for which he craved, and
the terms were generous. He accepted, and in September 1870 left
London for the war front where, in the following months, he had
ample opportunity for displaying his physical courage, and capacity
for being first and often exclusive in his reports.
But a master, more imperious and more impatient, was calling.
Harris had told Oliphant before he left for England that he would
recall him by a mysterious sign, when the time came. This sign was
to be a bullet. Oliphant afterwards wrote that the sign came to him
during the street fighting of the Paris Commune. 'I had turned
into a house to avoid a charge of soldiery and a bullet grazed my
hair. I took it as a sign that my protection was removed, and got
away as soon as I could manage to do so.'
The reason for which he was summoned to Brocton is not
known; but after a few weeks he was allowed to return to Paris
and continue his work, and later his mother was able to follow him.
Possibly this rélaxation of discipline was made because during that
year Harris himself and 4 Dovie' ' were travelling in Europe, and
appeared in Paris where for a time they were housed in Oliphant's
hotel.
Among the English families at that time residing in Paris was that
of a Mrs.,Wynne Finch, who lived with her daughters by a previous
marriage to a man called Hamon le Strange, of Hunstanton, Norfolk.
One of these daughters, Alice le Strange, a charming, intelligent girl
of twenty-six, became the companion of Lady Oliphant during her
daily drives about the city. Ofher beauty, another woman, Frances
Power Cobbe, was to write, 6 Never was there a more bewitching
young creature, SO sweetly affectionate,s0 clever and SO brilliant in


Seton Dearden
every way. It was quite dazzling to see such youth and bright-
ness. -
And in Kinglake's sober judgment shé was € the most
intelligent ofwomen." She was a popular figure socially and some-
thing ofa a problem to her more serious friends because ofl her religious
scepticism.
The steps of the love and courtship ofLaurence Oliphant and Alice
le Strange are not clearly known ; but by March 1872, the former
is writing to his cousin Mrs. Oliphant : 6 My happiness has come at
last, one that I am sure you would approve, the sweetest, frankest
nature that I ever met, in thorough sympathy with all my vagaries
which she utterly agrees with and understands-with the intellect of
a man and the intuition of a woman. -
But the engagement was fraught with difficulties." The le Strange
family, for obvious reasons, were opposed to the union. Oliphant
had been quite frank with them. He had no money to offer Alice
-all had been given to God; and he made it quite clear that if Alice
married him her own portion would go the same way. It also
appeared that though Harris did not at first object to the idea of
Oliphant's marriage, Dovie, who, evil tongues were later to assert,
was herself in love with Oliphant, certainly raised objections and
perhaps persuaded Harris to agree with her.
Meanwhile the courtship, surely one of the strangest, progressed.
To his fiancée, still hesitant upon the brink of the new and alarming
world he was opening up to. her, he wrote :
- What more intense happiness could the world give than to see
my darling overcoming all opposition; and, like somé flaming angel,
leading on the suffering womanhood of her world to new and un-
suspected possibilities of victory. You will become a divine decoy,
luring with angelic art those round who the evil ones have woven
their toils .
and, he continues, 'I have sometimes been conscious
that the most successful things I have done have been owing to the
strength I derived, from an internal
with Mr. Harris. .
rapport
Surely, as this correspondence progressed- perhaps,' as Mrs.
Oliphant who saw it, remarks, 6 the most extraordinary correspon-
dence that ever passed between a pair oflovers -surely a young girl
of twenty-six might well be perturbed ? What is she being
pre-
pared for? Divine décoy ! Internal rapport with Mr. Harris !'


Laurence Oliphant
Approval for the marriage must have arrived in the spring of 1872,
for in June, Laurence Oliphant and Alice le Strange were married
at. St. George's, Hanover Square.
No sooner were they married than their tribulations began.
Whether under the instructions from Father, or from some wish
of their own to do penance, it was stipulated that they should
not live as man and wife; they slept together, but were not
intimate.
I learned self control,' Oliphant said in later years, 'by sleeping
with my beloved Alice for twelve years without claiming the rights
ofa husband. We lived as brother and sister. I am a passionate
lover, and SO it was difficult. But it did not prove to be impos-
sible, I was able to keep my vow, and I shall never regret having
made it.'
What Alice Oliphant felt is not recorded; ; but, having crossed her
Rubicon, she did not look back, and she accepted the trials and dis-
illusionments of the new faith with a fortitude which time was to
show exceeded that ofher husband. Meanwhile her letters appear to
have been fall of Mr. Harris, still a mysterious being in America ;
her husband has now become 6 Woodbine,' and she is already able
to talk and write the symbolic jargon of the Use.
She was soon to be'tested further. By 1873 Oliphant had found
Times work in Paris boring. The war was over and there was no
longer much excitement or glory in acting as a correspondent of the
tangled French political scene. He resigned his post in March, with
a vague promise to Delane, if Europe gets in a fix I shall return and
be ready again for any special service for which you may think me
Then, after a brief holiday in the Mediterranean and a
stay at Long Island, the pair proceeded to Brocton, whence Lady
Oliphant had preceded them, and, in the summer of 1873, presented
themselves at the Use.
Immediately the thunderbolt fell. Father no sooner saw Alice,
than he became aware of a state.' Alice was not Oliphant's true
counterpart ; this was a woman in the spirit world. They must
separate. Oliphant was sent back to New York to stay there and
deal with the business finances of the Use; ; Alice was ordered
to live with her mother-in-law in a small cottage at Brocton,


Seton Dearden
where they were to rear chickens and mend the clothes of the
Community.
Meekly, the Oliphants obeyed. Alice moved into a small cottage,
near to Harris's house, and here with that somewhat featureless
creature, Lady Oliphant, she passed the first eight months of her
life at the Use.
There were, as will bé seen, frequent meetings for her with Harris
during these months, and what happened between them will never
now be known, but when later Harris accused her of devilish spiritual
designs, and ofimitating his counterpart, Lily Queen, to him, we may
guess that some of the mystic seances shared by other women in the
study or the bedroom overlooking Lake Erie were also undergone €
by this refined young woman. But Harris's influence, that strange,
alluring mixture of the patriarchal, the warmly human, and the
semi-spiritual, to which even his enemies testified, evidently com-
pletely enthralled Alice. - 'I should like,' she confided to a friend in a
letter, to tell you about the greatest and deepest mystery- -the key
mystery-of all the lives here in some of my own knowledge ofit,
but I cannot bring myself to trust it to the post." I will only say to
you that things more wonderful than any imaginings become the
simple realities of everyday experience.'
What Harris's new revelation was, is difficult to disentangle from
the copious pages of his verbiage ; but it seems that the pivotal man
has moved one step forward nearer to the God-head and is about
to become the recipient and the channel for a kind of Messianic
second coming. The tone of his language consequently grew more
obscure and, where the sense emerged, more blasphemous.
A suitable site for another move had been reconnoitred and pur-
chased, possibly with the capital which had come from Alice's patri-
mony. The new place was called Fountain Grove, Santa Rosa,
California ; and here Harris, with Jane Lee Warner and two Japanese
disciples, moved in the winter of 1873. Lady Oliphant and Alice
were left behind to board at Vinecliff; and the rest of the Brocton
community were left to their own. devices.
The new house which was built for Harris on the pleasant rolling


Laurence Oliphant
countryside of Fountain Grove was even larger and more ambitious
than the Brocton demesne. Near the house, a building for a new
printing-press was set up, and in readiness for the 'new Community -
which, it was hoped, would gather round Father, two further large
buildings were erected, called respectively the Commandery and the
Familistery. In the former, men, and the latter, women, were to
be segregated.
No sooner was Harris installed at Aestivossa, as the new site was
called, than Alice Oliphant received a summons to leave her mother-
in-law and join him. Although she had seen virtually nothing of
her husband for a year she instantly obeyed. She had already been
told that Oliphant was not her true counterpart ; for this was a
spirit woman called Alaweine, a friend (possibly a neighbour) of
Lily Queen. Who was Alice's own counterpart was left unsaid ;
nor is it known what took place between Father and Alice at Fountain
Grove: But, after a short period, she was dismissed and sent to a
village called Vallejo to teach in a small school.
There can be little doubt that Harris was attracted by Alice, and
that he made her strange offers and promises. In latér years he was,
while trying to induce another woman to join the Community, to
refer to Alice in tones of some extravagance. You are to be our
little queen of the East,' he told one woman, C You are to be Alice.
You,have her brilliancy and grace and are well fitted to take her
place."
Did Alice, after succumbing to him, have some revulsion which
caused her not to be sent, but to flee away ? When the |schism
between Oliphant and Harris was complete, Harris was to accuse
Alice of' having resorted to occult practice by taking on the sub-
stance and appearance of Lily Queen. Whatever drama really was
jenacted in that somewhat sinister house at Fountain Grove, there
was no doubt that about this time Harris's megalomania was increas-
ing and that his occult pretensions and statements made more and
more demands on the credulity ofhis still loyal disciples. Lily Queen,
aided and abetted by Miss Waring, now reigned supreme, and many.
women (there is no record of a man !) received comfort and relief
in her arms. So real by now had she become to Harris and those at
Aestivossa that the Fountain Grove press was able to print, without


Seton Dearden
comment, the news that both Harris and Lily Queen were pleased to
receive letters from their-friends. Communications, 7 ran the press
notice, 6 should bë addressed, if from gentlemen, to Mr. T. L. Harris,
and if from ladies, to Mrs. Lily Harris. . - >
During this period dates and facts are few and confusing. There
is mention of Oliphant as a visitor at the usual society gatherings. Sir
M. E. Grant Duff, a friend, recollected a visit from him to his house
at Twickenham in December 1878. Oliphant was perhaps not in-
sensitive to the fact that, possibly from Alice's family and the friends
ofl Lady Oliphant, there was some criticism of his appearance in the
London social scene (he had visited the Queen at Sandringham in
October), while his mother and wife were left to languish in poverty
and distress in America. 'I come out from time to time into the
world to make, a little money,' was his explanation to Grant Duff,
€ and then go back again.'
However, early in 1880, Harris relaxed his discipline and allowed
Alice to join him in London.
One would like to know what emotions stirred the hearts of these
two strange creatures when, after such a long penance of separation,
they were rejoined. Did the ghostly figures of different counter-
parts still stand between them ; did Harris's mysterious and incal-
culable injunctions still bind them ? There is no record. They
took up their daily life together as ifnothing had happened ; shared
their duties in the social round, and then, since they. were both in
somewhat ailing health, left Europe for a holiday in Egypt as might
any couple in London Victorian society.
Communication with Harris and the community at Santa Rosa
seemed now to be non-existent and rumours of the moral decline of
the Community were rampant. Did the Oliphants, as they leisurely
saw the sights in Egypt; spending for the first time for years long
hours in each other's company, ever allow the breath of criticism to
disturb their many talks of Father and Dovie ? It appears not ; for
suddenly there came instructions. from Fountain Grove that they
were to make over to the Santa Rosa Community whatever lands in
Brocton were still held in Oliphant's name. This instruction they


Laurence Oliphant
accepted without demur ; and would-indèed havë immediately com-
* plied, but for a fortuitous circumstance. Consular delays and a
postal system prevented the immediate signature and. despatch of
fac
relevant papers to Santa Rosa. News of another and more startling
nature arrived in the interim ; and this, by holding-up the transfer
of the documents, saved the residue of Oliphant's property ; though
that of Alice was irretrievably lost.
The news now received was from Vinecliff, and told of the sudden
and serious illness of Lady Oliphant. This wretched woman, banned
from communication with either her son or daughter-in-law had,
during all these years, continued to languish in the austerities at Broc-
ton. On receiving the news of her illness, Oliphant at once cabled
to Harris asking for permission to visit her. There was no reply.
He therefore decided to break the ban, as, indeed he must earlier
have done in the case ofhis wife, and go tol her. Hearrived at Brocton
to find her seriously ill with cancer. It was clearly necessary that
Harris' S healing powers should at once be invoked; and Oliphant,
desperate, now took his mother on the long weary road from Brocton
to California. Both believed firmly in Harris's power to heal her,
and it must have been with pathetic hopes that he presented himself
ât Fountain Grove and asked to be received by Father.
Harris at first refused to see. him ;-but at length there was a stormy
interview in which Harris refused to exercise his healing powers.
Oliphant left the house in despair, and seeking somewhere for succour
for his mother, at length took her to another religious community
some distance away where there was also a healer, credited with
supernatural powers. The journey was in vain. At'a small village
called Cloverdale, where Mrs. Walker, a friend of Alice Oliphant,
hurried to join them, the unfortunate woman lay a few days in agony
and then died.
The death of his mother seems to have been the decisive blow to
Oliphant's belief both in the honesty and infallibility of Harris.
Doubts about Harris's personal honesty had been held by him for
some time, and he later declared that these first arose when Harris
tried to make use of knowledge obtained by his disciple in financial


Seton Dearden
circles in New York to*make money by dishonest 'méans. The
stories about Harris's way oflife at Fountain Grove which were now
circulating in the local press at Brocton, and among the deserted com-
munity there, no doubt helped to strengthen these doubts ; and the
chance discovery, during his visit to Fountain Grove, that some of
the female members of Harris's entourage were wearing jewellery
formerly owned by Lady Oliphant must also have come as something
of a shock.
But whatever doubts hé had earlier held about Harris's morals
and way oflife, and his treatment ofhis disciples, Oliphant had still
retained the belief that Harris virtually possessed the power of life
and death. Harris's refusal to see Lady Oliphant and the physical
fact of her death with all its attendant misery, seems to have con-
vinced him that Harris was not only fallible, but evil; though
this did not invalidate the religious beliefs he preached, which Oliphant
to the end, with minor changes, continued to put forward. He
now began legal proceedings to regain his property.
Harris was soon made aware of what Oliphant was doing, and his
reaction was typical. So long as the money and property were safe;
Oliphant could go his own way, and no doubt Harris had hoped
he would do SO. But to Oliphant's threat to regain his financial
contribution to the Use, he reacted quickly. To Alice Oliphant, still
the dutiful disciple in England, there came a telegram from Harris
instructing her to apply for Oliphant's certification in lunacy. Alice
was thrown into instant dismay, and we may well wonder at the
hold this man had over his disciples when we learn that she had long
to search her heart, and question her friends, before she decided not
to obey.
A struggle now ensued to wrest back from Harris the property -
bought at Brocton by the Oliphant money in 1869. After a long
and involved legal battle, Oliphant won his case, and most of the
Brocton property had either to be handed over or sold to repay
him.
And now fresh shocks, fresh infamies, were in store for Father.
The financial loss was great, and the failure to retain Oliphant's
unquestioning obedience and subservience was galling, especially as
Oliphant now explained that - Harris had been under the impression


Laurence Oliphant -
that I obeyed him because he mastered me. Hé did,not undefstand
that the bondage had been self-imposed, voluntary, thât it had been
suffered for a given end,; namely'to kill my pride." Oliphant, how:
ever, now propounded the heresy that Lily Queen had deserted Harris
and was now regularly visiting himself from the electro-vital ; and 1
that, in fact, the mantle ofl Prophet and leader of the Brotherhood of
the New Life had now fallen upon his own shoulders. In this he
was supported by a section of the Brocton community. Harris's
a printing-press went into violent action to prove that it wàs not Lily
Quèen who was visiting Oliphant at all, but Alice Oliphant in her
6 devilish disguise.' To explain this still further, one of Harris's
adherents wrote, that Oliphant, becoming mediumistically open to
the lower forms of spiritism, rejected the cautions of T. L. Harris
regarding the possible impersonations of the true counterparts, and
SO became exposed to deception and disaster.' For months a struggle
couched in the jargon of this strange sect waged between the two
communities. Distance at length put an end to it, but it continued
spasmodically to reappear, long after the two protagonists were dead.
The final rupture with Harris, and partly perhaps the failure of the
badly managed community at Brocton to be economically viable,
strengthened Oliphant in his resolve to move his own, branch of
the Brotherhood from the West to the East. The kingdom of
heaven upon earth was now to be awaited not at Harris's Aestivossa
in California, but in Palestine.
It is not clear from Oliphant's writings when this decision was
taken. The financial seems to march SO closely with the spiritual
in the lives of both Harris and Oliphant that it is often difficult to
decide which was the prior motive force. When, a fewfyears earlier,
he had propounded a scheme for financial investment in the colonisa-
tion of certain areas in Palestine, Oliphant had failed because of
Turkish intransigence and suspicion, and his own lack of funds.
With the sale of the Brocton properties and the part repayment of
his investment in the Use,' Oliphant was now able. to reconsider
the purchase of land for the settlement of the new colony of the
Brotherhood and the propagation of his own religious ideas.


JANE LEE WARING AT THE TIME OF HER MARRIAGE TO HARRIS


THOMAS LAKE HARRIS IN HIS LATE SEVENTIES


Seton'Dearden #
:After a stay in Constantinople in 1881, the Oliphant household,
now consisting of,Laurence and Alice, a Brocton, adherent Mrs.
Cuthbert, and a Jewish
and' scholar, Napthali
poét
Imber, arrivéd
at Haifa to set up house and'form thernucleus of a new colony of
religious. Haifa was then
seaside town in the
of Acre *
iymall
bay
mostly inhabited by German colonists of the Templar society. Here
the Oliphants took à house which soon became a centre for friends to
visit themi from England and,for, one by one, the 6 dear Brocton
people,' as Alice called them, to join them. For the summer heats
they built y a small house on the hillside at Daliet Carmel, and here,
according to Mrs. Oliphant, began a
happiest portion of their
lives.' Alice's mother and her brother,
le Strange the orientalist,
dan
were now guests at the simple household and there was a constant t.
stream of visitors-Jews seeking advice on colonisation, lost souls
begging refuge from spiritual oppression, fashionable acquaintances
from Belgravia'and a medley ofDruse chieftains and the usual hangers-
on of the Arab world which gather aboût any project promising
perquisites or profit.
Here, Oliphant and Alicé continued'to put forward; with modifica-,
tions,"the theories Harris had first propounded at Wassaic. Only the
idea of the pivotal man ' was now discarded. Every man might
equally obtain Christ by labour and service, and Oliphant himself,
inspired.by messages from the Unseen, continued to show how this.
should be done. He and Alice 'breathed together ' and with others,
and steadfastly preached the strange theory of heavenly counterparts.
Among distinguished visitors who came to the household was
General Gordon, and we have an unusual picture ofthe two eccentrics
pacing the seashore discussing the Second Coming, the theory of
female countérparts, and Gordon's model of Jerusalem, which he
had'made, to carry out his theory that the hill upon which the'greater
part
built, was in the form of woman -
the.
>d a
ofuicanes
divine Bride! .
- - Oliphant, who had first known Gordon twenty-nine years previ- -
* ously in the trenches before Sebastopol, showed him the manuscript
ofhis new book Sympneumata, which contained a new theory for the
attainment ofr Freligious experience. Gordon approved it, but wished
it had'been written from the more biblical point of view.' * People,'
1 B


Laurence Oliphant
wrote Oliphant later, would have been amused to see us two illus-
trious maniacs conferring together.'
Sympneumata, which appeared in 1885, was not produced under
Oliphant's name, since it had not been written by him directly. It
was received divinely through Alice, who was now proved to be his
true counterpart, and dictated by her to him in short sessions every
day.
Thus was the book written; ; and Blackwood the publisher con-
fessed that 6 he was quite unable to understand it'; , while Mrs. Oli-
phant declared in a letter to Blackwood that trying to read it made her
catch hold. of the furniture after a few pages to keep myself from
turning round and round.'
Oliphant explained the aims of the little colony as: - it is by the
active and conscientious performance of daily duties, by the cultivation
of pure love, humility and upright dealing and purity, that the frame
can be prepared for the conscious presence of the other half, and for
the descent of Christ as the comforter and bridegroom. - 3 But
Mr. Cuthbert from Santa Rosa, who had strangely deserted his
wife to join Harris, wrote tersely to a friend : € His system is to seek
the internal and what he calls <6 God 99 through sexual sensations. . 9
But the writing of Sympneumata was not the only occupation
during these two years. Oliphant was still earning money by his pen.
He might write a mystical, almost unreadable, book in the conditions
described above ; but he could still, with that curious dichotomy of
mind which characterised him, produce at the same time a most
entertaining series of sketches of past adventures in travel, journalism
and diplomacy in his Episodes in a Life of Adventure which appeared
in Blackwood's in 1885. He had already produced in 1885 a novel
Masollam, in which the mysterious, sinister central figure appears to be
a portrait of Thomas Lake Harris. Two years earlier had appeared
his Altiora Peto, a novel partly based on his American society, experi-
ences, and which he told Blackwood was intendéd - to ventilate the
theological opinions that are not old-fashioned and go in largely for
attacking the views of modern society.' Of Altiora Peto, his best
novel after Piccadilly, a distinguished critic could describe forty years
later as 6 the best description of the young American girl in our
literature. .


Seton Dearden
Other travel books were on the stocks, and Oliphant was also
closely concerned in financial projects, one of which was the pos-
sibility of raising capital to carry a railway line through the wheat
areas of the Syrian Hauran. As material for his books, Oliphant
and Alice made a constant series of journeys in Palestine and Syria.
His Haifa, ofLifein Modern Palestine, a series oflëtters to thé New York
Sun (later published by Blackwood's), contains descriptions of visits
to the Jordan Valley, Transjordan, and most of the lesser known
biblical sites in the area.
In January 1886 tragedy struck at them. Camping near one
of the swamps in the Jordan valley, Alice was struck down by
malaria, and was hurried home seriously ill. Sadly, her husband
brought her back to Haifa where she lingered for a while. Both
believed she would recover, and that it was not à physical illness,
but a spiritual pressure ) put out by Harris that was afflicting her.
In vain. In March 1886 this € beautiful and beloved woman, 9 as
Mrs. Oliphant described her, 6 departed out of the midst, not of a
family, but of an entire people.' In a letter to John Blackwood,
Mrs. Oliphant wrote what must surely be poor Alice Oliphant's
obituary :
- The impression of reality in all she did and said and hoped for
was SO strong that I myself felt something of the same, as if death
could not be anything but a trifling circumstance 'in the course of
such an immortal creature.
Laurence Oliphant was to follow her two years later ; but his bizarre
life had still a strange, erratic course to run. From America, Harris,
hearing of her death, had informed his disciples that he himself had
caused it, owing to the disobedience of the Oliphants. And remem-
bering Alice's haunting appearances at his bedside in the guise of
Lily .Queen, wrote :
'Did the subtlest soul of magic
Sting your heart to bleed and ache ?
By a down stroke swift and tragic
Died the siren of the snake.'


Laurence Oliphant
But to Oliphant her departure had only deepened and strengthened
his tie with her. She was now his true female counterpart in Heaven
and could descend to him in the spirit. :
She became constantly
with him about the house, was recognised by his. disciples as a factor
in their lives, and did not need, as. Lily Queen, a trance state to announce
her coming.
Now, under Alice's guidance, he began to write his magnum opus,
a book called Scientific Religion ; and the theory of counterparts
took a further step forward.
Woman,' rani this strange book, - is the central vessel in the human
for secret inception of all vitalities from the divine, and for their
distribution outwards into the masculine. In woman there remains
beyond a depth into which man can never penetrate ; in that within
she is eternally alone with God. What she knows within that depth
is for ever to man a mystery, save for what God, for ends of service,
instructs her to set forth ; but it can never be known to man except
through woman. In the deep and inward man-woman union of pure
essences, she touches God herself; through whatever atomic change
of beings this union is affected man touches God through her. -
But by mid-1886 he was back in London and Edinburgh again,
taking his wonted place in the social world. There is a record ofhis
visiting Prince Christian, an old friend, and the Prince of Wales at
Abergeldie, from whence he went to Balmoral for an even more
exalted interview.
€ Last night I dined with the Queen,' he wrote to a Brocton friend
from Abergeldie, 6 and told her about Sympneumata. She wants to
read it. - - - 1
The pen of the biographer pauses at this scene ; the imagination
fails. If a tribute to the Oliphant charm, wit and intelligence were
needed, surely this interview with a stern, unyielding old autocrat
of rigid religious principles, supplies it !
Never was his strange dual character more in evidence. Those
who knew him as the prophétic healer of Haifa, shaken with constant
spiritual seizures, would scarcely believe it was the same man who
entered the Athenaeum and greeted one as ifhe had only departed
yesterday, and immediately plunged into a whirl of political gossip,
punctured with delightful witticisms and good natured banter. .


Seton Dearden
Back at Haifa, life became stranger during the years 1886-7. A
clergyman of the Church of England,' Mr. Haskett Smith, who,
reading Sympneumata, had. thrown up his benefice in England to
join Oliphant as secretary, now in his surplice read the lessons in the
small Haifa church, returning no doubt to lunch and the mystic -
appearance of Alice. Mrs. Cuthbert, whose husband still remained
a fervent - Harrisite,' continued to play the part of female acolyte,
and who knows what else. And numbers of visitors, mostly, it must
be confessed, women, came to visit or join the little community in
various capacities. Over all of them Alice ruled, much as Lily Queen
had ruled at Brocton and Santa Rosa.
To casual visitors Oliphant could still be the charming and attentive
host and he was always willing to apply his faculties to any practical
problem. 46 How strong the influx is, "he would cry as he sat among
his circle of female admirers, and a tell-tale rippling vibration would
run over his breast and shoulders. A There is Alice," he would add,
with a half tearful smile, which would melt even the most sceptical
heart among his listeners.
But now, as the months wore on, a sad new element intruded
itself into his life. Alice seemed to withdraw herself from him and
take with her the divine influx. He could not understand it. A
restlessness fell upon him, and, looking worn and emaciated after
a period of fasting undergone in order to try to recall her, he arrived
again in England in 1887, where a friend Mrs. Hankin found, 6 that
the singular spiritual force which, to my consciousness, differentiated
Mr. Oliphant from all other men whom I had ever met, was no
longer, as before, almost of the nature of a persistent attribute allied
to his own original character. The sense of great spiritual power no
longer accompanied his mere presence. . - - 9
But help was at hand. In the spring of 1888 he was on the move
again ; this time induced by a curious combination ofcircumstances'
to go to America, and from New York € to make a pilgrimage
IIOO miles to see a lady of whom I had only heard, but who I found
to be a remarkable person. -
The lady was a Miss Rosamund Dale Owen, daughter of Robert
Dale Owen of the New Harmony community, and a spiritualist,
Oliphant had heard of her from a friend in Paris and some strange


Laurence Oliphant
impulse drove him to go and see hér. From New York he forwarded
a letter with a copy of Scientific Religion to Southern Indiana where
Miss Owen was staying, and followed it in person. In her auto-
biography Miss Owen gives a lively account of this meeting.
I was inclined to be timid when I met a stranger, but I felt com-
pletely at home with Mr. Oliphant from the moment he took my
hand in his. . - . He then drew from his pocket a picture of Alice
his late wife and handed it to me. "Iam going to Palestine with a
party of friends. Will you join us ?"'
Miss Owen needless to add was guided to accept ; and on board
ship to England agreed to marry him.
On the passage,' wrote Oliphant, 6 she was brought into very
close relations with Alice. . .
She realises Alice most intensely
and brings her closer to me than I ever remember, SO that instead
of in any way separating me from her, it unites me more closely
while she can work through us combined, more powerfully than
through me alone. .
It was a curious and complicated relationship; but these two
strange creatures, drawn to each other over thousands of miles,
accepted it. Their friends accepted it less easily. Those who had
loved Alice could not clearly understand this sudden new relationship
in which Oliphant had involved himself. Mrs. Oliphant wrote in
dismay to Blackwood : 6 What is this dreadful business about Laurence
Oliphant ? Married, after publishing his book to convince the
world if possible that marriage should not be, and with such a wife
SO lately buried !' He seemed aware of this and hastened to explain
to Mrs. Oliphant in a letter that it a does not imply any want of
faithfulness to Alice's memory, but is in fact only carrying out her
wishes. It is a duty inposed upon me by the necessities of the situ-
ation. As the number of people, especially women, increases with
whom I have to deal, it has become absolutely necessary for [Alice]
to have a human assistant of her own sex. She gets SO exhausted
with the amount of work she has to do, that I feel her fatigue. It
is a great mistake to suppose that beings in the.invisible have an
unlimited supply of nervous magnetism ; they get tired just as
wé do.'
Laurence Oliphant and Rosamond Dale Owen were married at


Seton Dearden.
Malvern in August 1888, and almost immediately Oliphant was
struck down by. sickness. There was no honeymoon, and he lay
prostrate for some weeks at the house of his old Californian friends,
the Walkers, now living in Surbiton. His illness was at first diagnosed
as malignant pleurisy ; but as pain and debility persisted, it became
clear that it was cancer of the lungs. From the Walkers, attended
assiduously by his new wife and a Bulgarian valet, he was moved
in the autumn to the large pleasant York House, the home of his
close friends Sir Mountstuart and Lady Grant Duff at Twickenham.
Mr. Haskett Smith came hasting from Haifa to his side, and for a while
he seemed to rally. But not for long.
- In his last hours of pain, one wonders what spirits, the product of
that brilliant but deluded mind, crowded about the bedside. - Was
the gentle Alice there ? Did the sombre eyes ofThomas Lake Harris
glare from the shadows ? 'No doubt Harris's S devils have been at
me,' he said gaspingly but with his old inféctious smile in a moment
ofconsciousness. But Lady Grant Duff récollected that his last words,
despairing, piteous-an epitaph. to his whole life-were 6 more
light . . - more light !'
One can only hope that this last, unhappy cry from the heart of
the once gay, brilliant and intelligent man, was answered by his Alice,
faithfully awaiting him ; and not by some dismal messenger from the
Shades.
- The actual end,' Mrs. Oliphant wrote, 6 was complete and perfect
peace. He passed away as into a tranquil sleep. .
And Harris ? Surely he must provide an epilogue ? The Prophet
of the backwoods > lingered on for another eighteèn years, sustained
by a small handful of disciples, including a few Japanese. After the
secession of the Oliphants he turned more to the East for his inspir-
ation, and evolved curious new theories in which Buddha figured
largely, and poor Lily Queen seemed banished. He made other
attempts to recruit disciples for his Community ; but times were
changing, and some of the odium which had clung about him at
Fountain Grove still remained. He finally was induced to abandon
the Santa Rosa community and for a sum of 40,000 dollars to sell his


Laurence Oliphant
rights and cede the property to a remnant ofhis disciples who remained,
including the Japanese. In 1892, under pressure from public opinion,
he married Jane Lee Waring, the faithful.Dovie, and led a wandering
life accompanied by her and the zealous Mr. Cuthbert. He had to
be watched carefully as senility drew on, for he had, to quote a
contemporary, become a drivelling, sensual old man . . > whose
only thoughts 6 appeared to be hugging and kissing women. .
He died in March 1906, and for some time his disciples refused to
believe the evidence of his mortality. His body lay, until the physical
evidences of dissolution were too obvious to be ignored. Then
Mr. Cuthbert took up his.pen and sadly wrote, from 308 West
Ioznd Street, New York :
'The end has come to the outward labours of the Lord's Beloved
Son-our Father in Christ-Christa. - -
There will be no death-
notice published, as the friends at home do not recognise this event
as death. - :
Little remnants of the Harris community lingered on into the
first decade ofthe new century in Glasgow and New York. Cuthbert
died in 1914, and dear, devoted Dovie could then write : I am now
the last survivor of the little group gathered by Father at Wassaic in
1861.' In 1916 she too followed Father- (dare one hope to Lilistan ?)
-and with her death the Harris legend ceased. But until 1932 a
few Japanese still lingered at Santa Rosa, and the remains of Harris's
library could be seen.
MAIN SOURCES
The works of Laurence Oliphant. Books on Laurence Oliphant by Mar-
Oliphant, C. N. Scott, and Louis Liesching. Oliphant-Blackwood MS.
Eerero Various Oliphant MS. letters (author's collection). My Perilous Life
in Palestine, by R. D. Owen. The Reminiscences of: Valentine Chirol,
A.J. Shand, Lord Redesdale, Sir Frederick Pollock, Sir M. E. Grant Duff,
Lord Dunraven, Lord Ronald Gower, F. P. Cobbe, etc. The works of
Thomas Lake Harris. The reminiscences of Hannah Whittall Smith. A
Prophet and a Pilgrim, by Schneider and Lawton. T. L. Harris, by W. P.
Swainson. Temple Bar, vol. 27. Quarterly Review, vol. 173.
Note. Since this article was written a new biography ofLaurence Oliphant
by Philip Henderson is announced by Robert Hale.


Samson -
BY FRANCIS KING
(HE tavern was called Ta Ornia-The Vultures-but it is
more than three years since it was demolished and a glass-
and-concrete laboratory of Salonica University was built on
its site. I used often to go there, as one goes to taverns in
Greece, not for the drink, which tasted of pine-disinfectant, nor for
the food, which tasted of mutton-fat, but for the dancing and com-
pany, both of which were excellent. From outside, it looked as if
someone had built a card-house out of rusty sheets of corrugated
iron and strips of ply-wood and pasteboard, but inside, on winter
evenings when a razor-sharp wind was blowing down the Vardar
Valley, through my house and on into the greasy milk-white sea
before it, it was one of the few places where I could be sure that the
cold would not penetrate. The customers were mostly either sailors
who came up from the caiques tossing along the quay or metal-
workers who came down from the small white houses scattered
like shoe-boxes to form a slum beneath the Old Fortress. I have
only three times smoked hashish, and once was at The Vultures ;
but in spite of the general poverty of the customers, one had little
sense of vice or of squalor. Perhaps it is only guilt in the search
of pleasure that produces that sense : and guilt, though SO terrible
a reality to the ancient Greeks, is fortunately almost unknown to their
descendants.
It was a night of driving sleet when Takis first came into The
Vultures, leading Boulis behind him. I say leading' because,
although the two men in fact entered separately, that was the impres-
sion which I at once formed, and which remained with me to the
end. Takis was obviously what the Greeks call a mangas,' a figure
the nearest English equivalent of which is neither the Teddy Boy
nor the Spiv, but the roaring boy' of Elizabethan times. He was


Samson
wearing no overcoat, in spite ofthe temperature, SO that, as he shook
out his threadbare umbrella in the doorway beside my table, I had
ample time to appreciate the extravagant width of the shoulders of
his jacket and its no less extravagant 6 drape,' as well as the little finger-
nails grown and trimmed assiduously. into miniature lances, and the
three front teeth all of which had apparently been wrapped in silver
paper. Under the narrow black stove-pipe trousers, with their
numerous horizontal creases and their wide turn-ups caked in the
mud of the Salonica streets, his shoes looked absurdly long and
pointed, and I noticed that one had a crack over the hump of what I
assumed to be a bunion.
As he rattled his umbrella up and down, spraying my legs with
water, he flashed me a grin and asked: : c6 American ? 99
46 English."
(. English-O.K. !" I had been in Greece long enough not to be
startled by the enthusiasm with which he snatched my handand
pumped it to and fro between both of his. 66 English," he said to
his gigantic companion who stood behind him, his legs apart and his
hands to his sides, while the melting sleet trickled off the blond prongs
of his hair and made their way down his forehead. 66 Shake," he
said in Greek. He added, still in Greek but more softly : c6 We may
get something out of him."
It was in Greek that I now made a point of remarking : 66 A
beastly night to be out." But I had been mistaken in my hope of
embarrassing them.
cc Ah, you speak Greek ! He speaks Greek ! Bravo !"
His companion grinned slowly. 6 He speaks Greek," he said.
<6 He speaks Greek," the other repeated.
It was then that they introduced themselves : or, rather, that Takis
made their introductions. He himself, he explained, came from
Tambouria, a suburb of Peiraeus, but Boulis was from a village high
up in the mountains beyond Yiannina. They had served together in
the army in Macedonia and now, having been demobilised, they
were working together. It was no life for a young man in a remote
village of Epirus. Was it, Boulis ? he asked.
Over Boulis's màssive shoulders there was thrown the kind of
rough sheepskin coat worn by Greek shepherds as a protection against


Francis King
rain and cold, and now, sodden as it was, I was aware ofits gamey,
not unpleasant odour. Below it, Boulis wore a khaki shirt, tattered
khaki trousers, and army boots, one of which was laced up with
string. Like many Epirotes he had high, rosy cheeks, blue eyes
behind short, thick lashes as pale as the bristles of a pig, and a white
skin scattered with freckles. His smile both came and faded slowly,
and when it faded it left on his face an expression of curiously blank I
desolation.
I had wondered what work two such incongruous people could
find to do together, and did not have to wait long for my answer.
After Takis had whispered for a while to the keeper of the tavern,
another record, this time of an Epirote song, was put on the gramo-
phone. Boulis was told to throw off his coat, and Takis then knelt
and clapped his hands to the music while his friend began an extra-
ordinarily graceless and clumsy version of the traditional dance. He
looked, I thought, like some performing bear, and had the same
pathos, as he lifted his booted feet and gyrated ponderously, always
a fraction of a section behind the beat of the music. Takis suddenly
hissed, and though that sound is commonly made in Greece by
dancers and onlookers-the, anthropologists say in order to keep off
evil spirits-yet, on this occasion, it seemed more like the signal which
a trainer gives to a performing animal at a circus ; and at once, as
though in obedience to it, Boulis began to dance his way over to
where I was sitting. He bent down and opened his mouth, and for
a moment I had the ludicrous fear that he was about to use his large
white teeth. to take a bite from my calf.
6 Ela !" shouted Takis. <6 Ela, agori moo ! Come, my lad ! "
- Boulis closed his teeth on the edge of the table, shut his eyes, and
then began to straighten himself. The chatter of the other customers
had all at once ceased and there was no sound now except for a curious
snorting whistle which emerged from Boulis's nostrils in rhythmic
spurts against the squeal, clatter and hiss of the ancient record on the
phonograph. Soon, to my dismay, my plate of'l liver,' which was
really spleen and lights, my glass, my can of wine, my cabbage salad
and my hunk of bread were all up aloft; and, a moment after, they
were circling about the room, with Boulis below them, the sweat
now joining the melted sleet to stick his khaki shirt to his shoulder-


Samson
blades and make his white face glisten. He put out his right hand,
the wrist of which was encircled by a leather strap, and brandished a
chair; ; then he put out his left, and swept off another chair. Takis
was clapping in a kind of ecstasy and shouting in Greek : <6 Go it,
boy! That's it ! Go it ! Go it !" His eyes glittered with an
extraordinary brilliance in his long; narrow face to which the stubble
of at least two days had given an Indian darkness, and from time to
time he would shriek at the onlookers : < Look at him ! Look !' "
and then at me : Hey, American ! Look see ! Look see !"
When the dance was over, Boulis brought my table back to me,
and as he stood, breathing heavily and mopping his face on a khaki
ragofal handkerchief,I poured him out some wine. Takis was mean-
while going from table to table, making a collection from which I
later saw him give the keeper ofthe tavern a few tattered notes: This
done, he came over and, unasked, drew up a chair beside me ; a
moment later he had ordered Boulis to seat himself.
With the lance on one ofhis little fingers he began to clean the other
lance, as he queried : < Good, Johnny, eh ? 3
<6 Very good. I've seen it done before of course-but not with
the chairs as well," I added in Greek.
<6 Ah, I bet when you saw it before, the bastard'had one leg of
the table firmly between his knees. Or if he didn't, he'd put it up
his . - >5 He finished with an obscenity which made him give a
shrill, cackling laugh and, several seconds later, caused a slow smile
to crease Boulis's face. He had already shouted for another plate of
the 'liver' and for a cut from the roast pig, for both of which dishes
I guessed I should have to pay; ; and now, when the boy brought
this food over, as a gesture of courtesy he first proffered me a piece
of gristle on the end ofhis fork before he himself ate and signed to
Boulis to do SO. I noticed that as they both fed, Greek fashion,
indiscriminately, out of the two plates before them, Takis would
fastidiously pick out the choicest tit-bits which he would chew with
a slow care, whereas Boulis blindly and voraciously jabbed, shoved
and gobbled, his left hand at the same time cramming hunks of
bread into his mouth to follow the meat. Sometimes he would
even use an enormous, nicotine-stained thumb to push the food home.
Having eaten, Takis wiped his mouth on a corner of the table-


Francis King
cloth and then began to talk. At first he questioned me about
myself-Was I married ? What was my age ? Had I any sisters or
brothers ?-for in Greece it is ill-bred to talk at length about one's
own affairs until one has asked about the stranger's. Then Takis
spoke about Boulis, who himself listened as though he were hearing
for the first time tales ofsome acquaintance. It.was only when Takis,
with a number of winks and sly chuckles, explained why it was
inadvisable for Boulis to return to his village-I guessed, though
Takis was far from explicit, that he had got a girl into trouble-that
Boulis showed any self-consciousness, lowering his blond eye-lashes
as he inspected the fish tattoed in red and blue on his massive forearm
and giving that slow-motion smile which broadened at.last to a grin
and finally ended in a giggle.
"Yes, he's a dangerous boy, this," Takis said. "Not the sort of
lad
ought to leave alone with your wife. Feel those muscles
ofht ! Go on, feel them ! Let him feel them, Boulis ! Like iron,
they are. He's like a tree that boy. Like a tree, and it would take
a stroke oflightning, to bring him down. There can't be a stronger
man in Greece-to that I could swear. Have you ever seen anyone
as tough as that? I bet there's no one as tough as that in America."
By now I had wearied of telling him I came from England. "Icall
him another Samson. And gentle-gentle as can be ! He wouldn't
hurt a soul, not a living soul . - - We're like brothers, he and I,
that's what we are-brothers. I've got no one else in the world,
and he's got no one else here." Takis paused to shout for another
can of wine, and then drained his glass : his cheeks were reddening
under the stubble, and his lips were relaxed and moist. 66 Women
--I've had thousands of them ! Greek women, French women,
Italian women, Turkish women. I even had an American once. - I
met her one evening when I was bathing at Vouliagmeni. Beautiful
car she had-Cadillac. And all alone, all by herself." He chuckled.
" I gave her what she wanted- -and something more ! But-what
was I saying ?" Again he dràined his glass. Yes-this lad ofours
here. Would you believe me if I say that there's not one of those
women that I care for, as I care for this lad? Would you ? Would
you now ?"
Later, he asked where I lived; hinted that I might have an old


Samson
pair of shoes, ruefully showing me the split over his own ; and
finally asked ifl ever managed to get English or American cigarettes.
At this turn of the conversation, I grew bored and irritated ; SO that
when I got up to goImade a particular point of giving a tin of Benson
and Hedges, not to him, but to Boulis. But Boulis, as though from
long habit,handed them at once to Takis, even before I had paid my
bill and closed the door behind me.
After that I often saw the two about the streets of the town. If
down some alley-way, along the quay or in the public gardens I came
on a small crowd, I could usually be sure it had gathered for Boulis.
Iwould then pause to watch as the Epirote, often in no more than a
grubby singlet above his khaki trousers in spite of the cold, would
lift prodigious weights, tear books asunder, bend iron bars, or lie
down in the mud to hold above him a table on which were often
seated as many as four self-consciously giggling loiterers. Meanwhile
Takis, like a terrier yapping at the heels of a bear, would excitedly
jump up and down as he shouted instructions or harangued the
watching crowd. On the occasions when Takis noticed that I was
present, he would always make the same elaborate exhibition of
running across, wringing me by the hand, and asking in detail about
my health and that ofmy family in England, none of whom, needless
to say, had ever been known to him : all this done, I suppose, in
order to impress his audience.
I did not like Takis, but slowly I became used to him, as one SO
often becomes used to people who persevere in making nuisances of
themselves ; Boulis I had always liked. IfI had a shirt the collar of
which was too frayed for wear, a spare packet of cigarettes, or a
bar of English soap, I got into the habit of at once thinking of him.
Occasionally I would take them both out for a meal, for I derived
the same pleasure from seeing Boulis gobble plate after plate of food,
till the sweat ran down his face, as one derives from feeding a starving
dog. Once or twice I even lent' Takis money.
In the spring, I had an English visitor, a children's doctor who,
growing bored of being entertained in the houses of his colleagues
or fellow-countrymen, asked to be taken out for what he himself
called a native evening'. / I suggested The Vultures ; but once
there, in the company of this gentle and.fastidious man who was


Francis King
twice my own age, I was suddenly aware of many things that I had
sornehow been able to ignore on all my other visits : the reek, for
example, of stale sweat and cooking ; the damp that trickled down
the walls, in large rusty drops ; all the horrors of the charred bits of
entrail, fat or gristle served on one chipped plate placed on the table
between us ; the hiss and grind of the pick-up ; and, above all, the
icy blasts that swept our legs and shoulders whenever the door was
opened.
"It's rather fun," Hawkins said weakly; and then he gave a little
cough. I knew that cough, for it invariably indicated that he was
either bored or embarrassed.
<6 Someone's going to dance," I said. "Those sailors dance
superbly. Heaven knows how or where they learn ! 99 -
Yes . . . Yes .
In all the months that I had been frequenting The Vultures, I had
never seen a worse daricer-except, of course, for Boulis.
As I thought this, we were swept by yet another sleet-laden blast
that came from the open doorway: : and there Boulis stood, with
Takis beside him. They greeted me, and being glad of the diversion,
Iurged them to join us. "I want to see some of the local characters,"
Hawkins had said. How better could I oblige him ?
When Boulis came to do his turn, Hawkins leant forward in his
seat and murmured: <6 Astonishing, astonishing.' >9 In his excitement
he even sipped some wine and forgot to pull a wry face when he
realised what he had donc. c6 As strong as a bull. Tremendous.
This really is something." He was not to notice, as I did, who had
seen it SO often before, that to-night there was something faltering
and unsteady about the whole performance : nor was he to be
alarmed, as I was, that when Boulis had first picked up the table,
instead of that usual snorting whistle, something which was almost a
groan had burst from his straining throat.
Hawkins was clapping noisily as the record hissed to its close.
Boulis lumbered grinning towards us, a drop of sweat gleaming from
the tip of his blunt nose ; then he put out a hand as if to still the
clamour, gave an odd little sigh, and buckled at the knees. Ijumped
up but Takis was before me. Snatching our can of wine, he flung
its contents in Boulis's face. Then, kneeling down, he raised his


Samson
friend's head and shoulders in his arms and began to shake him
vigorously. Hawkins approached : "Tell him to leave him alone.
That's not the way to deal. with him."
But when I translated, Takis retorted irritably :
"Yes, yes. This has often happened. Iknow what to do. Please
sit down. I know what to do."
46 My friend is a doctor."
6 Please sit down."
The thick, short lashes Auttered momentarily and then the eyes
werer revealed ; they were looking up at me, and their gaze of seeming
terror made my scalp prick. "You see, he's'all right, " I heard Takis
say. The enormous hands began to feel the floor, and then one
gripped my ankle. Slowly Boulis raised himself. On the dead-
white face the freckles looked like a rash.
6 Come and sit down, " Takis ordered. c6 Come !" He spoke as
though to a disobedient child, and I hated him for it. a Come on,
get up ! Get up !"
G6 What do you think was the mattér ? "I asked Hawkins in English,
as Boulisf floppedinto the chair beside me and buried his facein his arms.
c Hard to say. It may not be anything, just a faint. But the
lips are oddly blue-do you see? I don't much care for that."
Boulis slowly recovered : apologised, gulped some wine, wolfed
some food, and even giggled when Takis offered a characteristically
obscene explanation for his collapse. But I noticed that his hand still
trembled when he raised his glass to his lips, and that the sweat still
kept breaking out on his forehead.
Later, I asked Hawkins if he would be willing to' give Boulis a
quick medical check and Hawkins agreed. But when I put the sug-
gestion to the two Greeks, Takis was cold and éven resentful. c Your
friend is very kind, but it's not at all necessary, 95 he said. He - looked
down, as the nail of one little finger was used to explore the other.
66 We know many Greek doctors," he added with an airy condescen-
sion. 66 One of our friends studied in Germany. Another attends
the Governor-General. But a doctor is not needed."
I translated to Hawkins who said : c6 Well, that's all right by me.
After all, children are really my line-and I am here on holiday."
But still I persisted :


Francis King
c My friend doesn.t, of course, wish to be paid. We can
back
my place and he can look Boulis over, and then if
6 No!" There was something menacing in the way in which.
Takis suddenly stopped picking at his nails and hissed out the'negative.
<6 There is nothing wrong with Boulis. Boulis, you don't wish the
doctor to look at you, do you ? Do you ?"
Boulis glanced from one to the other of us, without giving
an answer. But when Takis repeated : "Do you, Boulis ? Do
you ?", he slowly shook his head. Only, as he did sO, his eyes
sought mine ; and that same look of glazed, animal terror with
which he had stared at me from the floor gave me a horrible pang.
i Please, Boulis !" I said, and I even grasped his shoulder.
Helooked away, as again Takis hissed : <6 No! ! It'snot necessary !
Not at. all necessary ! 1
From that evening I had the impression that the two Greeks
avoided me ; and I, in turn, found myself beginning to avoid them.
Takis's presence now only filled me with revulsion ; and even the
thought of those sharp little finger-nails, of his silvered front teeth, I
or of the greasy side-burns framing his narrow face, gave me a
momentary nausea. But I used to wonder how Boulis was faring ;
and once when, in the far distance, I'saw a back which I guessed to
be his, both because of its broadness and because it was covered in
an old Harris tweed coat which I had once given to him, I ran off
in pursuit. But I failed to overtake him before he was lost in the
crowd.
Then the summer came and with it the Volos Bazaar ; and it was
there that I saw them for the last time. For a week the town of
Volos was transformed, with music and dancing each night till
dawn ; with crowds of peasants from the surrounding countryside
wandering up and down the streets and along the sea-front ; with
side-shows, a dilapidated round-about, and even a Fat Woman'from
England.
I and two French friends were seated, at two in the morning, in
the garden of a tavern by the railway-track, all of us sleepy and a
little drunk, under a vast moon. Therel had come a lull in the dancing,
and also in our conversation ; but the music ground on from a loud-
speaker set in the pepper-trees over our heads. Two voices at a
VOL. 169-NO. 1009-D


Samson
table near us were raised in sudden altercation, and as suddenly were
silent. One of my friends yawned.
I was almost asleep when there blazed out, jangling and shrill, the
Epirote song ; and even as I opened my eyes and sat up in my chair,
I knew, I could not have said how, that over there, on the circle of
concrete where the men had danced all evening, Boulis had started
his turn. Ijumped up and hurried over, brushing the dustily hanging
leaves of the pepper-trees from my face and stumbling over roots
and odd bricks, and sometimes even the outstretched feet of clients
at other tables.
Boulis lay on the ground, with a wooden bench balanced, like a
see-saw, across his enormous chest from which, no doubt because of
the heat, he had stripped off the singlet SO that the bare flesh was
gleaming with an extraordinary luminosity in the light of the full
August moon. Takis was, as usual, leaping up and down, shouting
and gesticulating : <6 Come on now ! Let's have a volunteer !
Come on ! Come on now ! A volunteer ! A volunteer ! "
A young man got up ; then an old peasant woman who covered
her face with a crooked, dirt-seamed hand behind which she tittered ;
two boys in shorts ; a girl, obviously the daughter of well-to-do
middle-class parents, to judge from her disdainful air ; a grubby
little soldier : - :
€ That's right ! That's right ! Now you sit here, sir ! And you
here ! Yes, there's alplace for you, madam ! Don't be frightened,
madam ! You'll be perfectly safe here:! Hop up here, sonny !
And you here !" Darting hither and thither, pushing, pulling, using
his high-pitched voice as though in extempore song, Aashing his
brilliant eyes, tugging,at his moustache, and chuckling from time to
time, Takis gradually assembled his monstrous human pyramid.
Underneath, all I could now discern was the unearthly gleam of that
greenish-white torso and a. part of a forearm.
6 Now I shall sit on this lady's lap ! That's all right, dear-don't
let it worry you ! You're perfectly safe with me ! All right, then
I'll sit'on your Daddy's! Give me a hand someone ! Thank you,
sir-thank you. 95
Suddenly the luminous mass under the bench shifted; Boulis
turned his head, and he turned it to me--or soit seemed, as the moon-


Francis King,
light was reflected back from his fixed, staring eye-balls. We gazed
at each other.' Then, in a panic, I stepped quickly forward; I think
I called his name.
But simultancously there was a groan ; the bench rocked, creaked
and tilted sideways, toppling the laughing, screaming people in an
inextricable heap on cach other.
Takis shrilled : 66 That's all right, ladies and gentlemen ! No
cause for alarm ! No cause for alarm !" He struggled out of the
heaving mass, and repeated : < No cause for alarm ! No cause for
alarm !" Then he gave a little scream when he saw the blood on
his trousers. But still he continued : "That's all right ! That's all"
right ! Nothing to worry about !" as he began to tug at Boulis's
lifeless forearm, and eventually, sobbing, at his shoulders and hair.


Adolf Hitler's House
B Y MAURICE ROWDON
E were looking for Adolf Hitler's house. It was mid-
afternoon on a bare and cold day, with the clouds touch-
ing the trees, though it was June:
At the very top ofthe hill we called out to a passing
woman and asked her the way. We knew it must be somewhere
near. Behind us there were the ruins of what must have been a pill-
box-white blocks of concrete Aung together. She came towards
our car slowly, halfbending, her eyes narrowed as if she could not see
us properly. Then she said, 6 Ja, ja, des Fuhrers Haus
9> She
used the word Fuhrer without any hesitation. <6 -there, by Goering's
house, just under the road." And she pointed downwards, to where
the road looked over the side of the hill, across a shèer drop. Yet her
directions did not seem quite convincing. It would be a strange place
for a house, there on the steepest part of the hill. She was a pale
woman, bent ànd a little timid, with thin lips and lost eyes, as if some-
where she had lost her way in the years, though she was not old.
There were many other cars about-German, American, English
and French. It was like the scene ofa a great, but somehow casual and
untidy, pilgrimage. There were no signposts, people did not seem
to know exactly what to look for, and everything lay in a strange
hush, perhaps only because we were at the top of a very high hill,
almost a mountain. From here the vast, long valleys below began to
look like ditches covered with moss and the mountains on either side
like boulders that could be found in a field, ofan indeterminate great-
ness and height, SO that one could not tell whether there were two
kilometres 'or twenty between them.
We drove down to the end of the tarmac road, where she had
pointed, and stopped. We walked to the edge and looked down,
but there was only a grassy slope, as we had thought, and trees beyond.


Maurice Rowdon
Below us, to the left, we could see. the hotel now used by American
troops as a rest camp. We had passed it on the way up, and we knew
that the gutted and half-ruined building at its side, looking like a long-
neglected stable, with grooms' quarters overhéad, had once been a
hotel for Hitler's guests, for diplomats and friends when they came to -
visit him at the house. The American hotel was. built straight on to
it, a new, bright thing growing out of a ruin, with a terrace overlook-
ing Berchtesgaden. It seemed odd to me that the two should be SO
close together, indeed touching. The gutted windows of Hitler's
hotel were shuttered up, and the roof was still unrepaired. But per-
haps a contrast had been intended. -
Cars were parked in front ofit, andIcould see peoplestrolling about
in the courtyard taking photographs. On another hill to its right
there were more people : it seemed to me they were examining some-
thing-an aerial or beacon perhaps-but it was impossible to say what
from this distance.
Near us, on our own hill, were other groups ofpeople staring below
just as we were, their cars parked behind them. Now and then one
group would glance at the other, as if for a sign as to why we had all
come. The hill itself offered us no explanation : it was a few roads,
a ruined pill-box and a gutted hotel, and for the rest trees with a slight
wind going through them. If there had been signposts- - To Goer-
ing's house,' 'To Hitler's house,' 9 'To the Personal Bodyguards' house,'
'To the Bunker,' our reasons for coming would have seemed clearer,
But all we had was our curiosity, and that curiosity was itself mys-
terious to us. Our coming had turned the place into a kind of shrine,
but the shrine was altarless and unblessed.
And I noticed that when we passed these other péople on our way
back to the car we did not hear them speak. Like us they were talking
in hushed voices. I was an Englishman with American people, the
others were French and German : it was as if Hitler was a mystery,
and perhaps a guilt, common to all of us.
Just before I got back into the car I noticed behind us a dark
gravelled space which did not rise gradually with the hill but in three
tiers of equal size. Ibegan to wonder what this could be. Perhaps it
was the foundation ofsome future building. ThenIsaid, "This might
have been Hitler'shouse." I had heard that it was now in complete


Adolf Hitler's House
ruin, and it struck me that perhaps the invading troops-or S.S.
troops._before them-had taken away every stone, tile and brick. But
there was no one to ask. And it seemed an absurd place for a house,
after all, immediately on the road like that, and cut off from a direct
view of thé Bavarian hills. The tiers could as easily be the site of a
new café: for over ten years had passed since the end of the war,
though it was very difficult to realise that, because of the look of the
gutted hotel and the pill-box. I had seen other places with just that
look of disorder, lying under the same hush, a few days after a battle.
So we drove down to the lower road again, where the hotel was,
and once more we asked the way. This time it was a man, dressed in
the traditional lederhosen and green felt hat of Bavaria. He too used
the word Fuhrer without any hesitation, and he spoke rather casually,
hardly glancing down at us as we sat in the car. He told us how to
get there, crisply and slowly, as if he had heard the same question
asked many times before and in the same hushed, rather forbidden
tone. Perhaps he was one ofthe workers whom Hitler had specially
transported from other parts of Germany for work on the hill. Or
perhaps he had been a waiter at Hitler's hotel, even a servant in the
house itself. Certainly on his face there was a kind ofdedicated look;
and also the casualness of his answer seemed to accuse us-not us as
foreigners, for we werein a German car, but as sightseers. He seemed -
to say, 'Oh, yes, you all come and visit his shrine, but he died in your
name. You can't have him back.. .' There*was an absolutely
assured and calm pride in his voice when he said, "Der Fihrer. .
And this time, following his directions, we found what remained
of the house. We drove up the hill again to where the road turned
suddenly, just short of where we had been standing before. Above
us, on a little crest, we saw an inn, still half ruined-this must be the
Personal Bodyguards' Quarters.' And in front ofus lay a black pile,
simply a rise in the ground with grass beginning to grow over it-
nothing more. This was Hitler's house. Really there was nothing
to see. We climbed up over the mass ofbricks, chipped stone, piping
and rotten wood, worn smooth now and very hard to the feet, until
we reached the top. Not one of the walls was standing. There was
only this hard, black platform of rubble. Inoticed we had come up
by a winding path between the weeds, trodden there by SO many


Maurice Rowdon
visitors year after year. Two young men dressed in wind-suits and
crash-helmets were standing on the edge of the platform, in silence, a
few yards apart, gazing out across the mountains. Behind us rose a
green slope with fir-trees and.bushes, very quiet and undisturbed, and
the back windows of the house must have opened straight on to this
view. Iwandered about among the bricks, kicking at the rubbish in
the hope of finding something interesting. But there was only earth
and brick-dust. It thought I might take a piece ofbrick and keep it on
the desk in my room, but then I forgot all about it. There was a piece
ofmatted, burnt straw at the edge oft the platform, and it struck me that
this might have been part of a thatched roof. And I came across a
sudden hole which may once have led to a cellar, even to the bunker
itself, but when I peered down Icould only see empty cigarette cartons,
paper bags and orange peel.
Standing near us there were two young couples, and I noticed that
one of thë men was talking in a very animated way, but almost in a
whisper, while the others leaned forward close to him, concentrating.
Now and. then they glanced cautiously about them as they listened,
nodding as if to say, Really ? So that was how it was ? That was
how they arranged things here ?' I imagined to myself that he had
been one of Hitler's personal troops and that he was telling them how
he had opened his window on to just this green slope behind them on
SO many occasions. He spoke as ifhe had a special knowledge of the
place and they were ignorant. He kept pointing, and the others
would follow his hand slowly, a-little hesitantly, as if they thought that
someone might suddenly rush across and expose them for seditious
thinking. It was strange, how everyone here looked as though they
were aware of being watched and overheard.
There was nothing else to see, SO we decided to.go up to the 'Per-
sonal Bodyguards' Quarters,' on' the crest. Clearly it had once been
bombed : the walls and roof were intact, but everything looked ram-
shackle, with piles of cement and sand in the cobbled yard outside, as
if repairs were only just beginning. One of the workers' was standing
on the roof, tall and clear against the sky, and at this moment, as we
climbed up from Hitler's house, he was gazing out across the moun-
tains into Austria, altogêther lost, his tools forgotten in his hands. All
the time we climbed he did not move.


Adolf Hitler's House
The place was now an inn, and through one of the windows I saw a
cosy room, with a scrubbed wooden farmhouse foor and a stove.
We walked round to the stables and here we saw the first signpost-
THE BUNKER 3 -with an arrow pointing to the back of the house,
where there was a kind ofkiosk, like the pavilion on a cricket ground.
At first it was difficult to see where the entrance to the bomb shelter
could be, but then we realized that it must actually be inside this pavi-
lion. Ay young man dressed in a bright check shirt and lederhosen was
leaning against the counter quietly attending to some accounts, pencil
in hand. He did not glance up as we came nearer.
On a stand at his side there were photographs of Hitler's house as it
had been before the war, an expensive mountain chalet with the typical
overlapping roof ofthe Bavarian country, looking very white and tidy
in the sunlight. We began glancing through them. They were all
the same-just the house, its windows and main door closed, on a still
summer's day. Then we found others, taken from precisely the same
position, which showed it in a ruined state, its windows blasted out but
the walls and part of the roof intact. These confused us even more,
and we wanted to ask the young man questions. None of us knew
how the house had become a mere black pile ofrubble, but we thought
the demolition had been done by Allied troops.
First we asked him where the entrance to the Bunker was, and he
raised his eyes slowly. He had a sharp face, ruddy from the mountain
winds, and round, rather staring eyes. He did not speak at once but
pointed behind him to a concrete opening like the
of a well,
top
almost hidden in the shadows.
<6 Can we go down ?"
c6 Certainly. The price is one mark."
Then we asked about the photographs and, pointing to the first ones,
he told us that Hitler had not built the house himself but bought it
from a private owner soon after he came to power.. He spoke to us
casually, giving us the information in a flat tone, as if he had been
asked the same question many times before and had his answer pat.
We asked which of the Allied troops had done the damage and he
replied, glançing down at his accounts again, c None.' 99 No Allied
troops had donei it, they had only seen it in its demolished state just as
we had seen it a few minutes before. The house had first been


Maurice Rowdon
bombed from the air-hence the second photographs-and then,
when the war was nearly over, it was rased to the ground by the last
S.S. troops, SO that not a sign should remain.
c6 But we thought Allied troops had done it !"
< No." And he added with quiet pride, 66 They did it themselves."
He spoke with unmistakeable pride, yet he was too young to have
fought in the war. And it struck me that what I had sensed in the
other man, when he had told us the way up here, was perhaps no
devoutness for the memory of Hitler at all-the name may have
become meaningless to him-but simply the pride of one who had
been elected high priest by SO many awed faces day after day all
enquiring the same thing- Hitler's house ? the bodyguards ? the
Bunker ?' He may even have come to that road day after day in the
tourist season just to enjoy a moment's power. .
Perhaps we
had brought the mystery with us, and these inhabitants were doing
no more than bowing to our need. And there was money to be
made. -
Then, after we had paid the entrance fee, the young man gave us
cach a typewritten sheet on which the lay-out of the underground
rooms was described : 'I. Entrance to the administration and Bor-
mann-Bunker. 2. Machine-gun position. 3. Entrance to the heat-
ing and fresh-air system. 4. Dog kennels. . - , And at the bottom
were written the words : € Further there are the state archives, tele-
phone-central, kitchen, bathroom and toilets of the bodyguard unit,
which can not be visited due to the lack oflighting.' Each sheet bore
a circular stamp in blue ink : 6 HOTEL TURKEN. Neben Hitler-Haus."
We descended the concrete well, down a narrow, spiral staircase,
and we could hear a man's voice echoing in one ofthe corridors below
as he explained something loudly in German. At the bottom the first
thing wé came to was a machine-gun emplacement-two square holes
in the wall, and firing steps. I peered through these holes, hoping to
see across the mountains, but they were closed, perhaps immovably
now.
We were not yet in the shelter itself. Before us there was another
staircase, steep and long, with electric bulbs fixed in the ceiling at
intervals and a gutter for water to drain along, under planks. Every-
thing was silent now, apart from the trickling of mountain water.


Adolf Hitler's House
The bottom looked very far below. It was like the staircase leading
down to an underground railway, but without advertisements or any
ornament, only bare concrete walls.
Our footsteps echoed as if we were wearing heavy military boots.
The first word that came into my head as we walked down, staring at
the foot of the stairs below, was evil. Iimagined Hitler being shown
the shelter for the first time and the clear, rasping tones of his staff,
their heels sounding out on the concrete steps as ours were now. At
the bottom there was another machine-gun emplacement. Then the
living quarters began, on either side of a long corridor.
One room was much like another, its walls doorless and bare, with
light-brackets and piping hanging down and at floor level little air-
vents which led from the fresh-air system at the end of the corridor,
clogged now with cigarette cartons and waste paper. On the right
we passed the two dog kennels-low, dark tunnels cut into the wall,
like lions' dens, with cage doors. In the first room we came to, that
belonging to a bodyguard unit, someone had emptied a magazine of
bullets into the ceiling and walls, hardly chipping them.
Hitler'sroom was neither bigger nor more elaborate than the others.
The water-pipes and sockets were twisted and smashed, and the walls
dividing the inner rooms were in ruins. Clearly the shelter had never
been lived in, for there was no trace of a bath or wash-basin anywhere,
only the pipes necessary for them, and tiles on the floor.
I began to wonder what truth this typewritten plan in our hands
could have : perhaps it had never been decided which room should
be allotted to whom and the list had been drawn up by the owners
ofthe hotel above us in the interests oftourism. But at the foot ofthe
list there were the words - Eva Braun's Bath-, Dressing-, Bed- and
Living-room." This promised to be the most exciting thing of all.
So we hurried down to the end of the corridor, the safest and most
secluded part, where her quarters lay. We were not alone in the
shelter. Yet there was hardly a sound, only the shuffling of feet as
people walked from one room to another, seldom talking.
And here, in Eva Braun's room, things were a little different.
For one thing the quarters were larger and the bathroom more
elaborate than the others. One could actually see the layout of the
four rooms as they would have been. Ofall the inner walls dividing


Maurice Rowdon
the dressing-, living- and bedroom from each other, only that belong-
ing to the bathroom was still standing ; and a large hole had been
kicked or machine gunned into that. The damage was' wilder here
than anywhere else in the shelter. More people had come here.
They had crowded into the bathroom.just as we were crowding now,
waiting for the others to come out. In all the other rooms we had
been alone ; but here there was a concentration of péople.
The piping which would have led to the bath was savagely twisted,
the tiles on the wall had been ripped or kicked away, and the light
sockets had been torn again and again out of their,beds SO that they
hung now from limp, dusty wires. The walls were covered with
writing in pencil. Hitherto we had only seen names scrawled here and
there, those rather sad messages written by American tourists to pos-
terity- Ada andJack S
Westport, Conn.' But here all the walls
were covered. Above where Eva Braun's bath would have been
someone had written in German, ADOLF AND EvA, THE DEVIL-PAIR, and.
on another wall, under a David's star, there were the words, again in
German, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO OPPOSE THE JEWS.
Under a Nazi swastika there were six names, in block capitals. Day
after day for ten years people had come here and spent their fury,
muffled under the earth. And no doubt when they had emerged from
the concrete well back again into the quiet stable-yard they had looked
ordinary and safe, spectators like ourselves.
Most of the scrawled messages were obliterated now by fresh coats
of whitewash. Perhaps at the end of every day the custodian came
along the corridor with a brush and a pail of whitewash, to wipe out
the worst obscenities and curses, especially in Eva Braun's bathroom.
There was nothing else to see, and the air was chilling us. We went
back down the corridor, past the 6 state archives, telephone-central,
kitchen, bathroom and toilets of the bodyguard unit,' which could not
be shown because of the lack of lighting-a mere dark corridor, its
floor covered with rubbish and the rooms no different from anywhere
else.
We walked back up the long staircase and I lifted one of the planks
covering the gutter : it ran like a hidden mountain stream underneath,
the water very clear, its concrete bed worn after the passage ofn nearly
twenty years into the colour and smoothness ofa damp cave floor. It


Adolf Hitler's House
seemed quite unbclievable-twenty years since it had all begun, yet
we were still awed and hushed and moved to anger by the memory.
Twenty years had passed, yet this was still our lifetime, the key to our
lifetime.
We came up into the pavilion again, past the young man in a bright
MS. check shirt and round to the front of the inn, where we had planned to
hsr
take tea. The clouds were still very low and dark, and the air motion-
less. The entrance hall of the inn, with its full-length portrait of a
woman in a trailing evening gown, perhaps the owner, must have
looked like the hall ofa a great country house in the old days, when it
had been furnished and carpeted. The face in the portrait had style ;
it was not a peasant woman's S face.
We sat by a window overlooking the mountains beyond Berchtes-
gaden, and one of the girls came with strawberry cake and cream.
There were two rooms, and in the other one, behind us, an old man
was talking to a group of German sightseers. He had a healthy,
Aushed, lean face and he was telling them how life had been in this
same inn when it had been occupied by members of the bodyguard.
He told how he had been their host, how they had enjoyed many a
party in these same rooms during the winter nights, and how well they
had all eaten. They would come in, from a conference, say, and they
would order coffee perhaps, or take a snack ofham-and-eggs. Then,
strangely, a moment after he had said these words, one ofthe German
men to whom he was talking burst out with-but in English, "Ja ?
Ja? Ham-and-eggs (hem und ex) ?" He cried out with that encour-
aging, polite wonder of the tourist being told anecdotes by a guide, as
if all this, the house of the bodyguards and the Bunker, were very far
from him, as far at least as the English and Americans with their ham-
and-eggs, legendary and a little unreal.
And it struck me again and again on that mountain how quiet we
had all become, we Europeans, how much spectators of the past and
even of ourselves, as if our heads could not grasp what our hands had -
done.


Lina
BY PETER MATTHIESSEN
THIS is what happened to our Cousin Lina.
When her parents died, Lina went to live in a villa beyond
the walls of Florence, high on a Tuscan hillside of vineyards
and olive groves near the road to Fiesole, and separated from
the world by a huge iron gate at the foot of the drive.
The villa itselfi is worth mentioning since its atmosphere had much
to do with Lina's mistake. The home of a Florentine merchant of
the Renaissance, it had been kept intact even to the impossible high
windows on the ground foor and the burnt sienna colour character-
istic of the city. The present inhabitants, close friends of Lina's S
parents, had seen no reason to change it, although there was intro-
duced a great amount of antique art which hadn't been there before.
Count Erardi and his wife had the rooms arranged according to cen-
turies, and as their taste ran to Byzantine and' Primitive, the original
rooms were among the most modern in the house. There was, how-
ever, a seventeenth-century room and an alcove dedicated to the
eighteenth, as well as a lavatory of more-or-less nineteenth-century
appearance. They had not ventured any further. Even the grounds
were of a certain age, architected about a series of terraces and a
spacious arrangement of man with Nature suitable for concerts and
outdoor theatricals, the whole affair peopled with large gray-green
Venetian statues. These were a graceful smiling lot for the most
part, and after a year or SO ofliving in the villa, Lina retreated among
them more and more, and took to touching them by way of greeting.
The gardens entirely surrounded the house, drifting out along the
drive until they fell away at last intot the vineyards and olive groves
bordering the road. The drive itself was long and straight, rolling
down between two thin rows of candle cypress, at the distant angle
of which stood the gatekeeper's cottage. In the first year at the


Lina,
villa, Lina had gone there but twice, and each time retreated swiftly
when the gatekeeper appeared and stood with his hand on the gate
to the outside world. The man was SO old as to be unaffected by
the times he lived in, and was one of the few local traditions left
intact. Most of his days he slept away, coming out only on the
rare occasions when somebody passed through his gate. At these
times he wore a hand-me-down black overcoat with an astrakhan
collar, regardless of temperature or season, and looked very much
like some obscure functionary at a funeral.
Now Lina was a timorous person, and it seemed to her that the
gatekeeper eyed her with contempt, knew the secret of her poverty
and loneliness perhaps, and although this was not sO, her suspicion
ofhim had much to do with what subsequently befell her. Despite
her security at the villa, she felt in her heart that in somé way she
was fated, that it was only a matter of time before the Erardi would
tire ofl her ineptitudes and she would be sent away. And where, to
do what ? Through a retentive mother she had seen herself always
as a homely creature, without the most humblé talent, and was con-
tent to be that lady's unpaid companion, not to say lackey. Her life
had been sheltered and directionless, she knew nothing of the world
and dreaded the prospect of it. But perhaps because, as a spinster,
she tended to feel sorry for herself, and because her desires refused to
leave her in peace, she was not SO grateful for her security as oppressed
by an aloneness, a separation from her family and way of life that
she imagined at times to be worse than death. Not that she was
a morbid creature. On the contrary, Lina had somehow managed
to be gay, and it was this very need of gaiety which made her SO
poorly suited for survival.
For nothing need have happened to her at all. As secretary to
Count Erardi and his wife, she was treated well and her tasks were
simple, perhaps too simple. The Erardi shared a certain apathy about
details and were, in fact, too old and too established to be bothered.
Such servants as were left took the best care possible of them, and did
not object to the new secretary in the slightest. Like all the transitory
appointments of the villa, the wine and the limousine and the elec-
tricity, they seemed selected for their venerability, and considered Lina,
at that time a woman of forty-three, a modest shy well-elevated girl.


Peter, Matthiessen
She became, to be sure, a very modest creature, and as time wan-
dered past and finally lost itself in the dim antiquity of the rooms,
her shyness deepened into silence. In the stillness of the villa, the
old people themselves had grown less talkative. The tinkle of spoons
in transparent teacups trembling in transparent hands was the most
resonant sound in the house, and one that Lina at last could scarcely
bear. After tea, even in the dark of winter, she would run down
to the garden and attempt to commune with the graceful ghostly
statues. The garden was warmer than the great damp villa, and life
could be breathed into its figures. But once, in the summer, she
embraced the stone Apollo with her hands and suffered until autumn
with her shame.
At other times, Lina would try to educate herself. There was a
valuable Della Robbia enamel, but she disliked the milky lifelessness
ofit and fought down a feeling that it had once served to decorate
somebody's bathroom. She wandered for hours from century to
century, making friends with saints, and at first derived odd moments
of thin comfort from the ascetic solitude of the rooms. The dim
light itself, slipping down from the high windows or hanging inert
about its bulb, had a medieval air about it, and more and more she
caught herself peering about among the artifacts, the altarpieces, for
some sign of reassurance, not against the darkness but against a
growing apprehension that her own century was lost to her forever.
Twice this feeling had been too strong for her and she had run in
panic down the long mile to the road, where the gatekeeper came
out in his old black coat and put his hand on the iron latch and waited
for her to decide. And she would return in. tears between the dark
religious rows of candle cypress to the villa.
There were times, too, when Lina believed she was going mad.
In the stillness that deepened as time crept on, in the cold and gloom,
in the death, she thought, yes, the death of this terrible place, she
would pause in the middle of a meaningless errand and begin to
shake, stand and shake until she fell to the floor. But there was
nobody to cry out to, nothing to strike out against, only the idiot
tinkle of patient spoons in patient cups, a hoary butler who bowed
to an ancient woman, and both of them already dressed in black for
the most senile of them all, who now was dying. Dying not swiftly


Lina
or even becomingly but in the slow manner of the house as if, in-
fected by his own atmosphere, Count Erardi meant to take his place
among the other relics along the wall. And to the very end he
coughed weakly into his tea and. listened peevishly as his servant
bowed and whispered, <6 Carissimo Conte - > ,> and his wife chat-
tered on in an animated voice, as she had always done, about the
antique art.
It was on an afternoon in this period that Lina suffered the last OI
her seizures of repression and made her way as she had before down
the long drive towards the gate. It was a windy day of March, and
when the gatekeeper appeared, the astrakhan collar was turned up in
inelegant fashion about his neck. He looked even older than usual,
much too old to maintain tradition any longer. Nevertheless, he
plodded methodically to the gate and placed his hand on the heavy
latch and awaited her decision, and she stood a few moments as she
always did until her fear of the world without overcame her fear
of the world within.
But this time, as she turned away, the old man spoke to her, as
ifloneliness had overtaken even him, had resigned him to familiarity
with her. c6 There they are, 35 he said, and his voice was SO slight
and airy on the wind that at first she thought that there had been
no sound at all. She faced around and.f found him peering through
the bars at two young men across the road, who were loitering on
the corner and speaking to cach other much more loudly than seemed
necessary. Lina coughed and smiled, and when the old man turned
to her, said, 6 Buona sera, >> and smiled again.
c6 Buona sera, 35 the gatekeeper repeated, rather dully. He digested
the.phrase, smacking his lips a little before he said, Yes, there they
are," >> and shook his head scornfully in the direction of the men
across the road.
<6 Who are they ?" Lina said, almost gaily.
c6 Good-for-nothings. They know nothing but the cinema and
the shameless girls of these wretched times. I've watched them."
There was a look of such hatred in his eyes that before she could
control herself, she had turned and run. She had not gone ten yards,
however, before she realised the impossibility of returning to the
villa until she knew what it was she wanted. She had to know; for


Peter Matthiessen
otherwise, in the silence of the villa, her reason would never support
the suspense. And she came back slowly towards the gate. The
men across the street and the gatekeeper in his black coat watched
her. Then the gate opened and she passed through.
Lina had no clear idea of what she intended to do. She paused
in the road afraid, then started off slowly and stiffly in the direction
of the city. Across the road, the two men, still talking loudly, were
walking with her. It did not occur to Lina that her appearance
might have started them from their lethargy and put in motion the
idea of proceeding somewhere else. She thought, instead, the old
man had told them something about her, he had always despised her
and now he had betrayed her. And she had to stop a moment and
brace herself against the iron palings of the fence, beyond which lay
the cypress trees and the vineyards and the olive groves and the gay
Venetian statues and all the safety of other centuries.
Further along she came upon a grocery store, andg gazed at the dull
whité provender behind its flyspecked windows. "I am Lina, from
the villa," she said. "I haven't been out for a long, long time."
The March wind chattered in the remnants of an awning, and on
the pale face of the proprietor, staring at her from the door, lay the
foregone conclusion of failure. She then thought to ask for a few
potatoes, and while they were being weighed, while she felt in her
pockets for the money she had not carried in- years, the two men
stopped across the road and waited for, her.
Fleeing the store, she had to force her legs to move. Her stomach
stirred with excitement, and her palms were SO wet that she could
not dry them on her jacket. The two men watched her as she started
back toward the gate and were still watching when she stopped a
moment later and turned toward them.
They made no move in her direction.
Lina found herself moving across the road. She knew even then
that she was making a mistake, an irrevocable mistake, but she could
not help herself, she had to talk to them. Approaching, she glared
into one face, then the other. The two backed off uncomfortably
and one of them took out a cigarette.
6 Stop following me !" Lina cried, breaking down entirely. "If
you want to talk to a girl, you should come upt to her, like gentlemen !"
VOL. 169-NO. 1009-E.


Lina
The two men stared at her. The one with the cigarette tried un-
successfully to snigger, and the cigarette fell from his mouth. His
companion said: :
"I don't think you should worry about being followed. Not at
your age, mother."
And both laughed as she retreated from them, her hand clutched
to.her throat, then turned and ran clumsily towards the gate. The old
man did not come for several minutes, and while she waited, her fore-
head pressed against the coldness ofthe bars, the two men assumed their
original position acrossthestreet. They werel laughingveryloudly now.
Half-way down the drive toward the villa, she glanced back over
her shoulder and saw them gesticulating at the gatekeeper, who kept
his back to them, arms folded, and watched her as she ran.
Inside, she hurried from room to twilight room, trying to recap-
ture the mood of other ages which an hour before she had attempted
to escape. She could not do it. Time had entered with her, like -
a gust of air through the front door.
The Countess simply shook her head and nodded in the direction
of the dying man, whispering, 6 Really, my dear, why should they
insult you, you are trying to excite us all for nothing." As she
spoke, the Count resumed his coughing fit and dribbled weak tea
upon his bathrobe. At the foot of the stairs, the butler pursed his
lips and frowned upon her.
Passing through the drawing-room, she removed the cold Della
Robbia from the wall, clutched it for a moment, then dropped it
to the mosaic floor. As the butler shouted out his feeble horror and
tiptoed rapidly up the stairs, she knelt and swept at the dusty fragments
with her hand.
Lina went down into the garden. There was no moon and the
figures were invisible. She felt her way to them one by one and
touched the smooth stone of each, and when she was through, sat
down at the implacable feet of Apollo and began to shiver. When
she saw the lights in the drawing-room and the silhouettes in the
doorway, she crouched down even lower in the winter grass and
listened'to the wind'around the stone, and to her heart, and to her
own name, Lina, Lina, from a home she had lost and from another
she could never hope tg know.:


The Aucas and the Graduates
The Crisis in Islam
BY DESMOND STEWART
INCE 1498 Europe has been a missionary continent : for its
several religions, for its way of life, for its different political
- creeds. The missionaries have ranged from spiritual Xaviers
to opportunist crackpots. The: other continents show every-
where,t the signs of western intrusion, whether in the white tie and
tails worn by Liberian legislators, the use of swimming trunks where
before the body was innocent, Gothic churches in India, or in the
dignified turbaned Kurd who smiles knowingly to visiting English-
men, and says, in the Arabic which he thinks the foreigner will under-
stand, € nahnu ham ariya' ( we too are Aryans '). The missionaries
are sometimes cultivated, sometimes grotesque. Their scenes of
combat may be the Ming Court at Peking or the jungles ofEcuador.
In January 1956 five young American missionaries from the Good
News Chapel of the Wauwatosa (Wisconsin) Plymouth Brethren
Fundamentalist Church wheedled the Aucas of Ecuador from a
megaphone in an aeroplane. Hovering, thèy dangled gifts in a white
plastic bucket : machetes, bright beads and clothing. (The Aucas
were accustomed to go naked through their forest, except for a
pair of giant feathers in their noses.) Encouraged by the success of
their dipping bucket, the five young men made a rendezvous with the
friendly savages on the edge ofa river, without the aeroplane. Their
bodies have since been recovered, hideously mutilated. The Aucas
are still accustomed to stride through their forest, naked except for
two feathers.
A different man to a different world, as Mr. Vincent Cronin has
SO well described, Fr. Matteo Ricci went to China in the last years
of Queen Elizabeth the First. Possibly he had no stronger faith


The Aucas and the Graduates
than the martyred Plymouth Brothérs, but he had a very different
approach. Fifteen preparatory years were spent in mastering the
totality of Chinese culture, just as before he had left Europe he had
made himself a master of western literature and mathematics. Then,
dressing as a graduate among graduates, the friend of mandarins,
Ricci lived in Peking, insinuating, oh SO gently, that the Confucian
system found its true fulfilment, not its annihilation, in the Catholic
religion. He interpreted his own faith through the writings of
Master K'ung and Master Meng, a massive work of the synthetic
imagination. He allowed the converted Chinese, not to keep con-
cubines, but at least to honour the spirits of their ancestors.
Before considering the results of missionary activity, one may ask,
what is the intention of the missionary ? What dream did the young
Americans dream for the Aucas? That they should wear coloured
shirts, blue jeans and pork-pie hats and work at a fillingistation ?
No one would consciously lay down his life for such a venture.
Peace of mind-Union with God-the Knowledge of a personal
Saviour, that is more likely what was sought. None of the young
Americans knew (except from the outside, by conjecture, like their
confrères who know from the outside that Moslem women are less
happy than American women) whether the Aucas were not at one
with their totem gods, were not enjoying peace of mind, were not
convinced of a happy hunting ground with even more superb feathers
after death. Ah, but the totem is not the true God, the Americans
would reply. And there one may agree, and agree too to stop
discussion, since the answers are SO various. But one certain conse-
quence ofconverting Aucas en masse to Plymouth Brotherhood would
be that their jungle would become part of the 6 world served by
Caltex,' in the familiar advertisement : filling station attendants
are needed, and workers for the oil fields and the banana groves.
Fr. Ricci's dream for China was more subtle. He was not dealing
with Aucas, but with people-less violent, more peaceable than Euro-
peans, with a far older continuous culture. In a remarkable passage
Mr. Cronin describes how peace was maintained in the Chinese
empire : it must have impressed Ricci, a child of a disordered Italy,
as much as it impresses us in 1956 :
6 The governor rose and signalled to the guards. His inordinate


Desmond Stewart
authority, like that of every Chinese magistrate, lay not in rigorous
laws or the power of beheading, but in a humble bamboo cane,
with which he possessed the right to whip any one of his subjects
in public audience. Yet, SO terrible were the wounds it could
inflict, SO arbitrary, the will which wielded it, that China largely
owed her incomparable order and unity to a Aimsy-looking piece
of wood, five feet long, three inches broad and an inch thick."
There was nothing in the inordinate authority or the flagellation to
dismay this missionary, accustomed to thè Jesuit ferule. Ricci did
not wish to overthrow mandarin culture and introduce European
customs, except where those customs sprung directly from the faith.
Onto the sound stem he wished to graft the rose ofhis own revelation.
Between these two ambitions, of converting Aucas to a form of
Christianity embodying the American way of life, and of changing
mandarins in the same way as some late Roman gentlemen (though
not all) had been changed to a Hebraic mythology instead of a Hel-
lenic one (vide the hymns of Prudentius, Latin Sapphics with names
like Samuel in them) lie the intentions of missionaries. What of the
results ? The Aucas are still naked; happy or unhappy, no western
sociologist can yet determine. The Chinese, as Mr. Cronin regret-
fully concludes, are lost. To the west ? More piteously, lost to
China itself. The invasion of which Fr. Ricci was the cultivated
ambassador has rudely succeeded. The west has won in China.
Buddha is respected in London by Judge Christmas Humphreys,
and Master K'ung is honoured by Ezra Pound in Washington. In
Peking they are fashioning idecgrains, not for God, but for Marx,
Stalin and the devious phrases of dialectical materialism. Doubtless
some Marxist professors are also planning to do away with ideograms
altogether, and substitute something simpler, duller, and more useful
for factory organisation. The graduates who were amazed as much
by Ricci's clocks and prisms as by his argumentation about religion,
have discussed and discussed, and come to the conclusion that their
heritage is not worth fighting for.
'Itnow appears almost certain that the day will never dawn when
- the K'ung orthodoxy will regain its strong'hold on the intellectual
life of the Chinese nation. The former adoration of the intelli-
gentsia is over, and gone with it is the Master's authority and


The Aucas and the Graduates
influence. The younger generation brought
in the
days.
the down with K'ung-and-Sons Movement,' will never look at
Master K'ung with the same eyes of awe and respect as did their
ancestors. Itisindeed epoch-making that the greatesti idol humanity
has ever built should now be in the process of being dethroned, if
not broken.'
These words are written by Liu Wu-Chi in his short history of Con-
fucian Philosophy.
This discussion of Aucas and mandarins, groups whose crisis is
either in the future or the past, not only leads into the crisis in Islam,
which is in the present, but also gives us terms in which to discuss the
crisis, and parallels by which to evalue it. The crisis in Islam is not
one of religious missionary activity : Islam is as barren a mission-
field to Christians, of whatever sect, as Spain to Protestants. But the
crisis is one ofcontact with western influence : and the west. is as much
Adam Smith as Thomas Aquinas, as much disbelief as faith. The -
crisis is not the Gandhian one of whether to industrialise or return to
cottage industries. English Zionists or their friends assert a Middle
East divided between reactionary feudal landlords and toiling masses,
the latter waiting to be fired with a zeal for tractors, etc., ifonly Israeli
technicians can once be allowed among them. This picture is far
from the truth : Rabbi Elmer Berger has written of finding tech-
nological progress in the Arab countries which may soon outstrip
the factories ofIsrael. Arabs do not need converting to the desirability
ofs science, and Islam has never had an Auca attitude to applied science :
there is no record of an Islamic Inquisition, there were no Arab
Giordano Brunos. To take one Moslem country of five million,
Iraq: : more than a thousand young men and women are abroad,
studying western technology. Each year brings its quota ofg graduates
returning from western universities, to say nothing of the graduates,
far more numerous, from western-style universities in Cairo, Beirut,
Baghdad, and SO on. The crisis is not at all at the level of whether
western machines should be bought or not. Even the Aucas in Islam
would agree with the principle behind Chang T'ai-yen's neo-Con-
fucian formula : Western knowledge for practical affairs ; Chinese
culture for the basic pattern of life.'
The crisis in Islam is in the faith itself, the basic philosophy of life.


Desmond Stewart
The tree of Islam is vast, perhaps overgrown; ; in its branches, from
Morocco to Indonesia, different birds roost ; but to some extent,
birds recognisably of a feather, aves islamicae. Turbans, minarets,
- Kufic calligraphy, disciplined women, men dignified with assurance,
grave, polite, whole-these are the feathers. The seed of the tree is
Muhammad's religious experience, and the sap, belief in his experi-
ence. Here is the crisis.
The first onto the field of'crisis are the Aucas of Islam. A religion
is more than its documents, it is also the way that life is lived. A bird
without its feathers-is it the same bird? Like all religions, Islam
is a fusion of an idea with the different peoples who accepted it.
Just as the Christian humility of an oppressed minority became modi-
fied among the arrogant horse-riding tribalisms of Europe to knight-
hood for some, monkhood for others ; or as life-denying Buddhism
became a spiritual athleticism in Japanese Zen ; SO the original ideas
and revelations of Muhammad have become modified by the peoples
-who championed them. Muhammad's teaching had spiritualised and *
subtilised the Bedouin virtues ofkaram (more than English generosity)
and sheraf, honour. As Islam spread among, Persians, Greeks, Turks,
Africans, Polynesians, it wove into itself threads from other ways of
life as well. In all its aspects, however, the basic pattern of Islamic
life reflects a pre-industrial society (just às does most Christian
imagery) men wandering from oasis to oasis, carpet-sellers,
Doughty's lazy shepherd minding the herds of others, scholars,
astronomers, brigands in Kurdistan or the Hindu Kush, sailors from
Basra bringing the cômpass from China to Europe, lute-playing poets
in Andaluz, knightly combatants for the pax islamica in Palestine.
Above all, Islam has made itself the faith of the dignified-poor man.
No other community in the world has made such a synthesis between
dignity and poverty. Poverty is regarded as a noble burden imposed
by the Almighty, not a sign that the poor man is incompetent or
stupid or sinful. (Poverty in the Eric Gill sense, as something distinct
from penury : Muhammad himself said, hunger is blasphemy.)
And while it was the lot of man to be poor, the Moslem man had
more sheraf and more karam than the Christian villein or the Jewish
moneylender or the Russian moujik. Religion rightly concerns
itself with the immutables of human life : death, sorrow, joy,' sex,


The Aucas and the Graduates
economics, sin, poverty. But even religion cannot predict what the
immutables will be.
The Islamic Aucas are thus in one sense right, instinctively. Hassan
al-Bana, assassinated founder of the Moslem Brotherhood, or Nawab
Safawi, handsome leader of the Fadayan Islam recently executed in
Teheran, realised that this integrity of the Islamic man depended on
belonging to a community not based on money values. Usury is
as much a sin as blasphemy :
'Oh ye who believe, fear God and give up what is left of your
demands for usury, if in truth ye are believers.
'Ifye do it not, take notice of war from God and His prophet.'
There should be nothing outlandish to the. religious westerner-in this
passionate desire to return to the fundamentals of faith ; and a con-
comitant of this desire is the belief that Jesuit missionaries, Hollywood
cinemas, socialist parties, female. emancipators, are all symbols of
disruption. Indeed, Hassan al-Bana and Nawab Safawi were only
manifesting a cônsciousness of their own community of the same
kind as Chesterton's or Peguy's. A Roman missionary told the
author ofthis article that in Baghdad his order did not SO much preach
Catholicism as point out the contradictions (sic) in Islam, SO that the
enlightened Moslem would then turn to Rome. On the Malabar
Coast in India. where Christian. missions have been most active, the
communist vote has been highest. Nor is Christian Lebanon the
part of the Arab world where the penetration of Marxism makes
slowest corkscrew turns. The cinemas show women slapping men,
adultery, violence, all things opposed to the Islamic notion of order
and fitness. The emancipation of women runs flatly counter to the
whole male-assertive trend of eastern life. And as for socialism, it
submits man to a purely human order of economic laws, and would,
if followed, annihilate not only Islamic faith ( We have created you
in degrees ') but also the Islamic community, by importing the supra-
religious and supra-cultural concept of the proletariat.
The realisation of the danger is sharp. To this extent the Aucas
are more perceptive than the graduates who return from abroad with
foreign cars and often, foreign wives.
But the Auça reaction to the danger is hardly constructive. To


Desmond Stewart
control the missions, to shut the cinemas, to forbid socialist propa-
ganda, to make women veil themselves except for face and hands, to
punish drinking with the whip- -this would isolate the Moslem world,
not while the Moslem world wanted it, but while the non-Moslem
world permitted it. (One senses that there cannot be anything of
great value in the Aucaj jungle, or someone would have laid claims to it
already.) By using money, or open aggression, the outside world would
insist on entry, and the Aucas, faithful exiles from an industrial age,
would have only prayers or shotguns with which to confront invaders.
Like China, whose graduates slowly turned against the pacific
teachings of Master K'ung, Islam must have strength to survive as
Islam. Aucadom can give moral strength only, and a moral strength -
appealing only to a Nawab Safawi, not the ordinary sensual man
who has seen and desired those aspects ofa technical civilisation which -
appeal in a hot climate. But the majority of Moslems are poor, and
cannot contemplate buying a refrigerator. Aucadom has, therefore, -
wide areas in which to spread.
Most men in most countries have'a personal geography, vague as
that of the Ming Chinese who regarded the 6 Middle Flower 9 as
surrounded by a few barbarous vetches and weeds. Islamic men are
no exception. It is easy for them to think of Russia and America
as peripheral countries, coveting and competing for the now divided,
once united, lands of the Caliphate. In talk with many Iraqi students,
for example, one senses their impression that a British Foreign Secre-
tary gets up at dawn and studies till midnight one theme-how to
dupe the Arabs. Abu Jassim Ler, the Baghdad John Bull, would
never believe that in England few can distinguish between Iraq and
Iran. To such people, particularly when the economic machine
seems to be running down, there is a great appeal in Aucadom.
Hassan al-Bana and Nawab Safawi both died by violence. Both
preached in parts of the Moslem world where penury was wide-
spread and where foreigners seemed exploiters. Both were men in
whom the repressed violence of the Islamic peoples incarnated itself:
both shouters of categorical imperatives, both men of that eloquence
which in a land ofjaded rhetoric speaks out the best-the willingness
to die and to make others die for the prophetic formula.
But their formula, sô exciting compared with the cautious wisdom


The Aucas and the Graduates
of a Nuri Said, or SO sincere compared with the opulent promises
oflying ministers, are not the formulas of the Prophet. They arouse
the same enthusiasm as the early preaching of Muhammad-the
preaching of a sacred group, conferring privilege and honour in the
world to come, always arouses enthusiasm among the poor ; but
their message is not the same. Islam, like Christianity, has been
many things among many peoples. But its starting impetus-the
seraphic coal carried to Muhammad-was not the negations of - an
inferiority complex. The last thing Muhammad was, was an Auca.
Students in Damascus, the most rigorous of the larger Moslem cities,
may dispute whether ablutions are more pleasing to God ifmade from
glass or if made from pewter. Such disputes were not the pre-
occupation of the Arab whose serious youth and meditative manhood
erupted into the tremendous :
Recite in the name of thy Lord who created.
This conception of the Prophet as volcanic sincerity is Carlylean, and
Carlyle's estimate of Muhammad wears better than the assessments of
orientalists : because perhaps he had in him something of the prophet,
while those who know all about hamza and the Syriac loan words
in the Quran, know nothing of the passion of a man to whom God
has spoken. A logical positivist could make nothing of such revela-
tions. No one to whom God is an 6 as if,' a hypothesis, can do more
than gape, or scold, at a prophet : just as no one who has not lived
with a people and loved them and hated them can know their feel-
ings and their dreams. Muhammad was not afraid of contradicting
himself. Indeed, SO deep a nature can go beyond the realm of con-
sistency and contradiction : apparent inconsistencies are realised as
being islands in an archipelago of truth, a common bedrock under the
shallow dividing. seas.
Islam, the religion of submission to Allah, does not involve the
range of theological disputation over the man Muhammad that has,
in Europe, created the word Christology. Muhammad was a man,
a mortal : on 'this Aucas must agree with graduates, as the Quran
itself says :
6 Muhammad is no more than a prophet : many prophets have
died before him. Ifhe died or were killed, would you retreat ?


Desmond Stewart
(England's arbiter of verbal elegance rebukes those who pedantically
write Muhammad with a dot under the h; he may be right. But
the retention of Mohammedan for Moslem by such writers as Mr.
Cronin is as misleading a barbarism as it would be for an Arab to
speak of Christians as tritheists.) But on the prophet Muhammad there
is dispute. Indeed, the dispute on what Muhammad was as a prophet,
and what his revelation was andis, takes us to the heart of the religious
crisis in Islam.
Before the dispute, the indisputable, or at least, the undisputed.
It is agreed that Muhammad, the posthumous son of Abdullah, the
husband of the rich merchant Khadijah, the citizen of Mecca (a
Venetian-type ploutopolis) produced in his own' lifetime a series of
prophecies which were. collated after his death by the third of his
successors, the Caliph Uthman. There is no serious textual problem
in the Quran.
Now the dispute : what are the revelations ?
We may summarise the possible answers to this question.
(t) Muhammad's claim : that the revelations came from God,
ànd were a statement in Arabic of the eternal religion of the Prophets :
the Quran is written in the persona of God, in accord with Muham-
mad's belief that the revelations come from outside himself, and are
not his own conscious productions.
We have made it a Quran in Arabic, that you may understand.
And it is in the Umm al-Kitab with Us.' -
(Umm al-Kitab is
almost untranslatable ; the source of the Scriptures is an approxi-
mation.)
(2) Orthodox Islam accepted, and accepts, the Prophet's view ofthe
Quran. By emphasising Muhammad's illiteracy (which depends on
whether one translates the word ummi as - illiterate i, or as unversed
in foreign scriptures ') the origin of the Quran' is shown to be
miraculous.
In the Islamic Middle Ages, the great schism which divided Moslem
theologians was about the miraculous book : was It created in time,
or was It existent before time began ? The orthodox party, to whom
the victory finally went, stated that the Quran was created before the
world, the eternal prototype of Scripture. Against this view, the


The Aucas and the Graduates
Mu'atazilites, or freethinkers of Islam, had taken their stand on the
absoluteness transcendence and oneness of God, arguing that to posit
an eternal Quran would be to undermine the. uniqueness of God.
This medieval wrangle interests few modern Moslems.
(3) The Christians ofl Muhammad's time at first viewed the Prophet
favourably, just as the Quran accepted them as € people of the Book,'
6 Nearest in friendship to the believers.' The Negus of Ethiopia
protected Moslem exiles from Mecca, and Waraqah bin Nawfal, an
Arab Christian, recognised Muhammad's message as the same namis
(Greek nomos) as had been sent down to Moses. With the growth
of Moslem power, however, the Christians discarded this friendly
attitude, and the medieval attitude to the Quran was as a demonic
medley of Biblical thefts. Those Europeans (Voltaire, Gibbon,
Napoleon, etc.) who elevated Muhammad from the hell where -
Dante put him, did SO more as deists, anxious to attack the Church,
than as believers in his prophetic sincerity.
(4) The modern 6 Auca,' disregarding the erosion of the bases of
medieval thought, would go back to a literalist interpretation of the
Quran, and in politics, a strict imitation of the first four Caliphs.
This 6 Aucadom is as widespread in Islam as fundamentalism in some
Protestant societies ; the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia, or the Moslem
Brotherhood in Egypt, both exhibit the - Auca' attitude to the
religious crisis.
(s) The Arab nationalist (ofwhom Gamal Abdul Nasser is only the
most spectacular example) exalts the Prophet. But in- conversation,
many nationalists admit that their admiration is for the Prophet's
leadership of the Arab nation, or for his stupendous crystallisation of
the Arabic language in the Quran. To some of them, the Quran is
only a more splendid Mein Kampf.
(6) The Arab materialist, whether rich and capitalist, or poor and
socialist, believes that Muhammad, like everyone else, was prompted
by economic motives. Materialists are usually too busy making
money, or conspiring to take it, to bother about religion. When
they do so, they imply that Muhammad was anxious to restore the
pilgrim trade to the Kaaba, and introduced a new religion for this
purpose. The best quotation I can find for this point of view
comes in Gerald de Gaury's Rulers of Mecca. The British Colonel,


Desmond Stewart
having spoken of the precarious nature of Meccan prosperity,
writès :
( The town was depending for its wealth on the caràvan trade,
for its food supply and. the safety of the pilgrims on the mercy of
tribes outside its control. How soon this danger and other material,
as well as spiritual, considerations directed his thoughts towards
religious reform and a return to monotheism is unknown. .
(7) Psychoanalysts have made havoc with other great men, attribut-
ing Byron' ' S ardour to his club-foot and Caesar's genius to his epilepsy.
Muhammad's inspiration may be regarded byisuch as a paranormal
outburst, and his assertion ofan omnipotent Allah a more than usually
severe desire for a father, since Muhammad was a posthumous child.
This attitude to the Quran, it must thankfully be recorded, is not
common among Islamic graduates. But some such notions may be
expected among the stream of Arab students returning with Ph.D.s
in Psychology from the United States.
This consideration of the Quran, and attitudes to it, may seem too
detailed. You have said,' someone might object, 6 that a religion
is more than its documents : that it is something organic, which
changes among peoples and periods.' The objection would be
weighty if one were considering Christianity, and if one spent too
long on the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon is only part ofa
much bigger whole, and, one was always told at school, was not to
be taken literally. No Christian society has ever tried to model itself
on the exhortations to perfection there delivered. But in contrast
to Christianity, Islam is far simpler and far more practical-is indeed,
meant to be practised. Its one miracle is the Quran ; its two articles
of faith are the oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammad ;
and the Quran, the link between God and Muhammad, gives, not
counsels of perfection, but detailed regulations for everyday life.
It therefore makes a great deal of difference to the graduates, the
leaders of the Moslem peoples, what the Quran is. Is it a primitive
Mein Kampf, composed by an Arab burning to maké his nation great ?
If so, it remains admirable, but not necessarily binding, unless once
more it can be used for a nationalist purpose. Is it a cunning com-
pilation of magic phrases, to seduce the peasants into belief SO as to.
maintain a social system ? In this case, sweep it away, as Mao has


The Aucas and the Graduates
swept away Master K'ung ; unless you are part of the ruling class,
in which case, hang onto it, to quell the people. Is it an interesting
pathological work of literature, like Rimbaud's poems or Blake's
prophecies ? In which case, analyse it for a Ph.D. over a glass of
whisky, and look elsewhere, or nowhere, for guidance. Is it the
guide to life of my grandfather, something to which I should pay
lip-service, but whose words are not binding, beautiful though they
are when well recited, and evocative though they are, for their associ-
ations with my childhood? In which case, honour it as the English
honour Shakespeare. Or is the Quran what it claims to be, the word
of God?
If the word of God, what then ? Must the graduate enrol in the
Moslem Brotherhood ?
Here, it seems, we are at the heart, not only of the Moslem crisis,
but of the Christian crisis, indeed of every religious crisis of the
twentieth century : this either/or. Either all the Quran is the word
of God, or none of it. And yet, need the dilemma stand ? If we
assume a God-and it is idle to discuss the question in the way we
have been doing if we do not-and assume that that God wishes to
communicate his purposes to mankind, as mankind evolves, do'we
have to assume the written tablet ' form of revelation ? Or could
we make a different picture of the process : not an angel stooping
down with eternally pre-existing words on a golden tablet (like the
Angel Mormon, as late as the nineteenth century). but of a spirit-
the wind of the Hebrew ruach-affecting the brain of the prophet ?
1 The brain of the prophet we might compare to the cave at Cumae,
where the Sibyl sat among leaves ;; the wind blew'and the leaves
formed into new patterns. The leaves in the prophetic brain are the
prophet's words, and the experiences they image, just as the leaves
in the poet's brain are images caught in words. But while the force
which arranges the poet's leaves and makes the poem-his inspiration
-is some internal explosion, the force which arranges the prophet's
leaves into new patterns comes from outside. The God does not
need to introduce anything new ; what is new is the rearrangement
of the old.
This explanation, brief though it here is, would solve many prob-
lems. Prophecy would no longer be something fixed and therefore


Desmond Stewart
dead ; as the diamond and crystal streets of the New Jerusalem
seëmed dead to D. H. Lawrence ; but something vital and changing ;
truth not tied down to one linguistic utterance, but living through
different utterances, living and expanding. The source of scripture
is not some tablet in a language created before it was evolved on the
lips of men, but the spirit of God. : God communicates through the
minds of men when they are ready for him. There are great prophets
and lesser prophets, just as there are Beethovens and composers of one
song. God does not reject the imperfect. (A practical analogy may
underline the inadequacy oflanguage as a fixed revelation. However
brilliant the modern scholar of atomic fission, he would be unable to
describe the process except in the most unsatisfactory manner to
peoples with an undeveloped language, a language that is, that had
not grown through all the processes leading up to atomic fission,
with appropriate names for every stage. Even in a highly developed
language like Arabic in 1956, certain modern books translated into
Arabic are only fully intelligible to those already able to understand
the English original from which they are translated. The Arabic, as
it were, has to be translated back into English to be understood.)
Having thus rescued the prophetic truth from the false either/or
that leads to Aucadom or apostasy, the graduates will only have
begun the struggle. What is the essential truth in the Revelation ?
There will be, there already is, a trend towards an enfeebling
modernism : instead ofthe five strenuous prayers, a few quiet times ;
instead of daylight fasting in Ramadan, one can give up smoking or
alcohol ; one can drink alcohol in moderation ; instead of zakat,
one pays one's taxes. Modernists are as numerous as motor-cars.
This way leads as quickly to spiritual death in Islam as it does in other
religions. The spiritual disciplines in a faith, prayer, pilgrimage,
fasting, alms, are its essentials. Its laws and customs and costumes
can be changed for changing times and circumstance.
Finally, who can make these changes, these steps forward in an
understanding of prophecy ? Islam has traditionally three bases of
faith : the Quran, the sayings of Muhammad, and ijma', or consensus
of opinion among Moslems. As in other religions, there is a deep-
seated desire among the learned to freeze the process, to stop change,
and'some Islamic doctors assert that the religion is fixed and that ijma


The Aucas and the Graduates
has no further field on which to work ; others have asserted that
ijma' is restricted to the consensus of opinion among learned Moslems.
As Gibb has pointed out, however, the issue of smoking refutes this
latter hypothesis. When tobacco smoking first started, all learned
doctors of Islam denounced it by analogy as haram; like drinking
alcohol. The masses of the people thought otherwise, and today,
when doctors of medicine are beginning to denounce the practice,
smoking is as common as coffee-drinking among Moslems. Whether
ijma', learned or popular, will move fast enough, ofitself, is a more
serious question. The modern world outruns even committees, let
alone religious councils. More likely, some great spiritual leader
will reformulate the faith and acquire by his force of leadership a
following which will embody the general will : this is the only way
in which Rousseau's general will ever seems to show itself, and it 1s
much the same as ijma'. Only, however,ifsome such restatement does
take place, and does gain acceptance, will the peoples of Islam have a
road to tread between Aucadom and graduate disbelief. Muhammad
said that Moslems were to be a € people of the middle,' between
extremes. If they can achieve this in the twentieth century they will
have solved a crisis not peculiar to them, but'found wherever religious
man confronts his creature, the machine. For though the conflict' is
not truly one of faith against machines; it is a conflict encouraged by
man's emergence into a world of the machine, totally different from
the worlds in which his religions were first evolved.