Madame Blavatsky MADAME BLAVATSKY was a remarkable woman. The Western
reader at least can never take to her kindly—she is too foreign to his whole intellectual atmosphere for that—but that she has her students is testified by the very _project of this uniform edition of her complete works, of which no less than the first eight volumes will consist solely of contributions to periodicals, many of them never previously reprinted. The major works, Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine, and others will appear subsequently.
That a publisher should be found to put such a project into effect is but one sign of the changing attitude to Madame Blavatsky. In her own later lifetime the wider world accepted her as a character but denounced her as a charlatan. She failed to impress few of those who met her more than pass- ingly, but she inspired, one feels, more of curiosity concerning herself than reverence for her teachings. Though she had the eyes of a seer, there was something evasive, ungraspable, about her that made people write her down adventuress, and she abetted them by transgressing, in manner, dress, speech and action most of the domestic conventions of her day. Discretion she knew not. She appeared a creature of impulse, driven by anger, impatience, generosity, scorn, humour—almost everything in fact but that calculating guile her opponents attributed to her. In more ways than can be defined here, she stood between the world and her teachings and it would not have been surprising had both she and they, at her death, sunk into a common oblivion.
In fact, much of her writing seems more impressive now than it could have done when first printed, for it ran then too contrary to the spirit of the age not perforce to compel instant out-of-hand rejection. Today there remains much in her account of the universe which is impossible to reconcile with the findings of Western science, but at least we are sufficiently freed from Victorian self-assurance to appreciate the real acuteness of the mind which in 1876 could frame the dictum : " The nineteenth century is essentially the age of demolition," and while admitting the just pride of science in " forcing from Dame Nature some of her most important secrets," point to the " boundless stretches " still left behind unexplored. Most of us have had to learn by a bitter expe- rience to what degree materialistic science, rightly clearing the ground of ignorant superstition, has left us nothing by which a man may live ! Madame Blavatsky's criticism of the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Huxley was likewise acute—she contested that, omitting the spiritual nature of man, they told only half the story—and in her attitude to spiritualism she was at once cautious and liberal, ahead of her generation. She stood between the scientific materialism and the religious orthodoxy of the day, and, as Mr. Middleton Murry has said, smote them both. Her spiritual insight was unquestionable ; it was not always pure, but it was often profoundly penetrating.
Since the first eight volumes of this edition are chronological in order, it must be presumed that no material prior to 1874 is recoverable, though one gathers it existed. Of the two present volumes the first covers the period from just before the foundation of the Theosophical Society in America in 1875 to the first nine months in India, the second that of the next eighteen months spent wholly in India. Much of the matter of Volume I was contributed to American spiritualist papers. The main later source is The Theosophist, founded in October, 1879: these will suggest roughly the topics principally dealt with. There is much controversy. Madame Blavatsky was always a fighter and her sword was seldom sheathed. She used her pen, in fact, rather like a cutlass, with rude swashbuckling vigour rather than finesse—the woman was the style. The bulk of these first two volumes will appeal mainly to the student, but a number of the longer articles do display, not unimpressively, the nature and range of her interests and knowledge. GEOFFREY WEST.
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