BOOKS.
LAURENCE OLIPHANT.* THE charm of Mrs. Oliphant for her admirers, among whom we may frankly count ourselves, is nowhere more perceptible than in her biographies. She brings to them not only her easy style, and her descriptive powers, which as regards all scenes we should rank with those of Scott, but a faculty of sympathy * Tho Life of Laurence Oliphant. By Mrs. Margaret Oliphant. B linburgh and London: "NT. Blackwood and Sons. for ideas she does not agree with which gives her at once im- partiality and insight. She has done this Life in particular admirably, so that, perplexing as her hero is even to herself, she still leaves him a real though never a perfectly intelligible figure, whose history will be followed by all readers from first to last with a strong personal interest. To ourselves, we confess, that interest deepens so greatly in the second volume that it is for us the biography of Laurence Oliphant. The first one merely paints a bright and gifted young man of good family, who wandered over the world in search of occu- pation and adventure, and who was at once BO gay, so thoughtful, and so daring—Oliphant's courage was quite exceptional, being a positive desire for danger—that he gave every considerable man he met an impression that he was a man to be advanced. He captured Jung Buhadoor—who cannot have understood a word he said ; he had not to extort civility from Lord Stratford de Redcliffe—a social triumph in itself; the Foreign Office broke its rules for him, offering him a Secretaryship of Legation in Japan as a first step in the Department ; he fascinated American Senators—whom he utterly despised and disliked; and he entered Parliament, when tired of roving, as easily as other men enter a pro- fession. He was, moreover, from the first a littftateur who found publication easy, and a journalist whom a man like Mr. Delano was always eager to employ in any quarter of the world. Still, BO far he was an interesting rather than a remarkable figure. There are dozens of young men as capable as he trotting about the world; many of them have as striking adventures ; and one or two possess, if not all his charm—for few men are„ like Oliphant, double-natured—still sufficient attraction to render their careers abnormally easy, and their prospects excep- tionally bright. Some of them are liWrateurs, too, for we cannot admit that in this direction Oliphant's gifts were phenomenal, or even as great as his biographer, in her deep amazement at the antithesis presented by his life, has en- deavoured to describe them. Laurence Oliphant was the ideal Special Correspondent, with keen eyes, much descriptive power, unconquerable gaiety, and a turn for social satire of the rather obvious kind ; but that is all. None of his books will live, and, indeed, of most of them it may be said that they are already dead. Piccadilly is the best of them, and Piccadilly is not beyond Pelham in artistic merit.
It-is the second part of his career which renders Laurence Oliphant an object of study worthy alike of philosophers and men of the world. At the age of thirty-eight, with his Parlia- mentary career just commencing, and the world at his feet, this brilliant man, with his strong ambitions and love of adven- ture, and habitude of many worlds—not excluding the world in which license is deemed venial—stopped dead-short in his career, and after nearly two years of doubt and meditation, gave himself into slavery to a religious pretender named Thomas Lake Harris, an American, possibly of Jewish extrac- tion, who had failed as a Swedenborgian lecturer, and who was hardly educated, whom Oliphant afterwards believed to be pecu- niarily dishonest,* and who was in no respect, except original mental force, his neophyte's equal. At the bidding of this man, Oliphant sacrificed his personal fortune, and his mother's, and afterwards his wife's, and became not only a common farm- labourer and drudge, doing the most servile and disgusting work as carter to Harris's " community " at Brocton, but an agent in pecuniary schemes, in one of which he had to ask, and with his usual personal charm obtained, the forbearance of Jay Gould, who could have crushed the speculation. He did all this, too, with his eyes open, with the keenest sense of what he was throwing away, and. with a capacity for being bored to death by his low labour which once produced a singular incident :— " One bitter winter's night, he was driving back to the stable after his long day's work with a sleigh and a pair of vigorous horses. He had been leading a life of the most tiresome descrip- tion for many months, and the tedious routine had become almost unbearable to him. Suddenly his horses got frightened at some- thing in the way, and with a quick impulse Laurence threw away the reins, and throwing himself into the bottom of the sleigh, yelled so vociferously as to arouse the villagers, who ran into the street. The horses, mad with fright, and urged on by Laurence kicking and shouting in the bottom of the sleigh, soon left the village far behind, and the sleigh spun over the frozen snow.
It is just to record that Mr. Arthur Cuthbert absolutely denies, in the Standard of May 28th, all charges against Mr. Harris, gives a new version of the pecuniary story, and intimates Ins firm belief that Oliphant was mad. There are inconsistencies In his letter, but it seems to be written in perfect sincerity.
The barn where they were kept was some distance from the village; and to his surprise, when the horses reached it, they swept through the gate without upsetting the sleigh, and drew up before the barn.door trembling in every limb. Laurence coolly climbed out and led them into the stable. The excited villagers rushed far along the road in search of him, expecting to find him in the bottom of a ditch, crushed by the heavy sleigh. After a vain search, they returned to the barn for a consultation, and found Laurence quietly feeding his horses, very much refreshed by a taste of that excitement which he had so loved in earlier life."
More than that, he permitted his mother, a most tenderly nurtured old lady of beautiful character, to be subjected to the same discipline, she becoming practically a laundress for ploughmen. Her history, as related in this biography, is pathetic to the last degree, and it ended thus :— " The invalid however never reached the waters in whose healing influence her anxious companion had some hopes. They got as far as a village called Cloverdale (the reader familiar with that country will pardon my ignorance of the localities), whore there was a woman who possessed one of those panaceas which are to be found in every country, decoctions of herbs and faith, curing actually in some few eases, by what action on body or mind it is hard to te]l, various ailments and diseases. When ho found that his mother could go no further, Laurence wrote to his friend in need, Mrs. Walker, telling her his circumstances. That kindest of friends at once went to their aid. She found Lady Oliphant very ill, but quite incredulous, as was Laurence, of the possibility of approaching death—and attended by the woman with her cure, which, however, was administered without confidence, the rural healer doubting that the patient had strength to recover. That any cure should have been sought at all was entirely contrary to the orders and will of Harris, and angry letters had been received from him denouncing it. On what proved to be the last night of Lady Oliphant's life, Mrs. Walker watched with Laurence in the sick-room : and she has described to me an extraordinary agita- tion of which she was sensible, in the air, which she could com- pare to nothing but a storm or battle going on over the bed, which affected oven herself, no believer in the mysteries which were so dear to them—with all the sensation of a terrible conflict, during which the patient suffered greatly. And then there came peace and great quiet, and the sufferer looked up, restored to ease, and told, her son that sho had seen his father, who had poured new strength into her, so that she felt overflowing with vitality, and knew that now she should live and not die. With these words on her lips, and murmuring something about the angels all around and about, Lady Oliphant died."
And more even than this, he imposed the same yoke on his wife, a bright, sweet lady of the highest culture and refine- ment, whom he tenderly loved; lived with her through life as brother and not as husband; sent her wholly away, when bidden, to earn her living as a school-teacher in the wilder- ness; and, in short, changed himself into a living machine, moved only by another's breath :— "I have never," writes his biographer, "been able in the smallest degree to fathom what was meant by the spiritual respiration by which they believed even their bodily con- ditions to be changed : nor is it easy to enter into the now law of marriage, which was already the most distinctive feature of their economy. That the relation ought to be strictly Platonic, to use a comprehensible phrase—a union as of brother and sister, though distinguished by an absolute oneness of spirit, peculiar to the 'sacred tie,' 'the most sacred of ordinances,' in which, as they believed, the being of the dual Godhead was dis- played and imitated—was, I believe, their strange creed. That it was not always consistently carried out was of course inevitable. What is much more wonderful is that it was sometimes carried out with unflinching resolution, neither the most tender affection nor the usual circumstances of confidential intimacy between married persons affecting the self-imposed rule, It is not a question which can be entered into further ; but it may to some readers afford a clue to the somewhat incomprehensible influence exercised upon certain minds by the mystic teachings of Laurence Oliphant's later works,—works which are as chaos to the majority of readers, but to some direct revelations from heaven."
Even when, years after, Oliphant found out Harris; he retained belief in his teaching, and in his five years of idyllic life on Carmel with his wife, still maintained and taught the faith Harris had put into his mind. His obedience in theory went even further than this slavery, for Harris demanded the surrender of the conscience. There is a letter to Harris in Vol. II. (p. 113) in which Miss l'Estrango afterwards Oliphant's wife, states this, which it is almost painful to read :— " One only thing has been a terrible pang to me, the giving over of my own judgment in questions of moral judgment to any human authority. It is so absolutely new and incomprehensible an idea to me, that any outer test should supplant, without risk to itself and to me, the inner test of my actions that my conscience affords, that when—seeing the impossibility of working success- fully with others without giving practical proof that I can obey without criticism of the command, I decided to shut my eyes and leave the seeing to you—I felt as though I were putting out the one clear light that had been given to me for my guidance, and that I had been living so many years to God to purify ; as though I had suddenly thrown my own compass overboard, and was loft with my whole life exposed to the chances of a sea of uncertainty, and with the grim question asking itself over and over again in my heart, whether I were not doing wrong ?"
There is hardly such another instance in histou,—though we believe the Anabaptist "Prophets," like Knipperdoling, generally fascinated a knight or two ; and Mn, Halhed, Governor, statesman, and gentleman, worshipped the " Pro- phet " Brothers. Scores of cultivated gentlemen have passed into the severest fraternities of the Catholic faith, have laboured with their hands, and have followed a rule of implicit obedience ; but they did it to save their souls—an idea which Laurence Oliphant expressly repudiated as selfish—and in obedience to doctrines taught by a great and venerable Church, in- spired, as they conceived, through ages, and which had at least this testimony to give, that it had through those ages produced many men and women of the saintliest character. Mahom- raed's "Companions," the men who lived and slept and argued around him for years before his recognition by others, obeyed him as implicitly; but Mahommed was far their superior in intelligence, and gave them at least what were to them pro- digious ideas, the unity of the Godhead, the equality of the Faithful, and the possibility of immediate salvation through earthly and material battle. So far as we can understand from this book, Harris taught three things. First, that God was bi-sexual, the penetrating idea of Oliphant's Sym- , pnetonata, and absolutely without evidence or meaning; secondly, that the duty of man below is to live the life of Christ, which is true in a sense to all Christians, and not a new revelation ; and, thirdly, that he, Harris, alone knew perfectly what this life should be, its main ruled apparently being the unnatural one of married celibacy, the renunciation of personal freedom, even as to opinion about moral questions, and absolute confidence that an order conveyed through Harris was an order from on high. That any man of Oliphant's religious instincts—they shine out through some of his gayest letters—knowledge of the world, and desire for a better life, should have accepted such teaching, is almost incomprehensible, for, be it remembered, the teaching sur- vived the teacher. Harris professed to be in direct communi- cation with Christ, and to exert in consequence certain miraculous powers of insight into thought ; and while Oliphant believed this, believed it till he thought he felt the visible sign of possession by Christ—a change in the mode of respiration—within himself, his credulity is ex- plicable; but he believed it afterwards, after he had, as he thought, found his teacher out, and treated him, through Californian lawyers, as a dishonest man who had kept others' property for himself, and who had telegraphed to Mrs.
Oliphant (Alice Oliphant) to put her husband in a mad-house. Recollect', the theory of ordinary insanity will not bold water. Oliphant was one of the sanest of mankind, capable of com- prehending intricate business, utterly contemptuous of most "fads "—he always demanded " normality " of mental and physical health as a condition of valid spiritual progress— and in all the ordinary intercourse of life a satirical man of the world. He did, indeed, once read some doggrel verses to Mrs. Oliphant, his biographer, which he said his counterpart in the spirit world bad dictated to him ; but work done in trances, or even in sleep, is not an unknown phenomenon. No friend or disciple ever suspected his sanity, and the writer of these words, a mere acquaintance, who had happened to meet him in boyhood and at times throughout his life, and who thought his record to be explained only by mental lesion, eduld in their last interview detect no sign of aberra- tion. Besides, if he was insane, why not his mother and his wife, the latter a woman who left on every human-being who. encountered her an impression of acute intelligence, sweetened by philanthropy and love for all P That theory will not suffice, nor will any other in the present condition of our know- ledge about him. It may be that there exists among his correspondence with disciples some letter, written with the lucidity with which he treated earthly affairs, which will make it clear what he hoped from the strange, and in many respects indefensible, life he led. There is no such letter in these volumes, though there runs through them a suggestion clear to the writer of these words, though probably obscure to better critics, that Oliphant was domi- nated by a hope which is adumbrated in the following sen, tences from a letter to a relative, dated from Haifa, his Syrian retreat :—
"What we are seeking for is a force which shall enable us to embody in daily life such simple ethics as those of Christ, which were based on altruism, and which no one after 1800 years of effort has succeeded in doing, for want of adequate spiritual potency. If some of us, myself included, have come into an abnormal physical condition, it was not with a view of finding out occult mysteries about the cosmogony of the world, but of seeking to discover a force which one could bring down and apply to the physical needs of this one. It was in this effort I found that trance and abnormal physical conditions were unreliable, though I am far from saying that the experiences gained through them may not be turned to good account, or that certain truths even may not be acquired ; but unless these truths are afterwards sus- ceptible of verification while in full possession of all our natural faculties, they should not be received or acted upon as truths."
We do not understand the words we have italicised to apply to spiritual influence only as ordinarily understood, but to an actual miraculous potency which could be used at will. Laurence Oliphant had all through life displayed the passion of pity for a world lost in physical misery, together with a cer- tain despair of the benefits to be derived from any existing agency, creeds and Churches included. He hoped for a new force ; hoped, with the passionate intensity which has repeatedly produced in sane men a belief in the immediate arrival of the Millennium, for a new and miraculous power ; and believed that if a certain life could be led by a community, it would draw this Force from Heaven, that is, this miraculous person or power of working miracles. It was this hope which gave him his endurance, and this which made him doubt if death could come until it was fulfilled. It is a Hindoo idea rather than a Christian one, but it is the hope that in the Valley of the Ganges animates hundreds to bear the most hideous austerities. There is no warranty for it in revelation or in reason, but of its strange power over the minds which have entertained it there can be no question.
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