In the most tragic and most trying moments of life it is well to turn aside from one’s sorrows and refresh one’s mind and strengthen one’s soul by gazing upon the follies of others. Those others gaze on ours.

In my spiritual adventures I have met many amazingly freakish people. Ten years ago the Theosophical Society overflowed with them. They were cultured without being educated, credulous but without faith, bookish but without learning, argumentative but without logic. The women, serene and grave, swam about in drawing-rooms, or they would stand in long, attitudinising ecstasies, their skimpy necks emerging from strange gowns, their bodies as shoulderless as hock bottles. The men paddled about in the same rooms, but I found them less amusing than the women.

“You were a horse in your last incarnation,” said a fuzzy-haired giantess to me one evening, two minutes after we had been introduced.

“Oh, how disappointing!” I exclaimed. “I had always imagined myself an owl. I often dream I was an owl. I fly about, you know, or sit on branches with my eyes shut.”

“No; a horse!” shouted the giantess, with much asperity. “I’m not arguing with you. I’m merely telling you. And I don’t think you were a very nice horse either.”

“No? Did I bite people?”

“Yes; you bit and kicked. And you did other disagreeable things besides. Now, I was a swan.”

89I evinced a polite but not enthusiastic interest.

“You would make an imposing swan,” I observed.

“Yes. I used to glide about on ponds, like this.”

She proceeded to “glide” round and round the corner of the room in which we were sitting. She arched her neck, raised her ponderous legs laboriously and moved about like a pantechnicon. Her face assumed a disagreeable expression and I thought of a rather good line in one of my own poems:
And swans sulked largely on the yellow mere.

“And how much of your previous incarnation do you remember?” I asked, when she had finished sulking largely in the yellow drawing-room.

“Oh, quite a lot. It comes back to me in flashes. I was very lonely—oh, so lonely.”

She gave me a quick look, and I began to talk of William J. Locke, who, a few days previously, had published a new book. Resenting my change of subject, she left me and, a few minutes later, as I was eating a watercress sandwich, I heard her saying to a yellow-haired male:

“You were a horse in your last incarnation.”

I met this lady on other occasions, and always she was occupied in telling men that they had been horses and she a swan—an oh-so-lonely swan.

“Why,” said I to my hostess one day, “don’t Madame X.’s friends look after her? See—she is arching her neck over there in the corner, and I am perfectly certain she has told the man with her that he has been, is, or is going to be a horse.”

For a moment my hostess looked concerned.

“Look after her? What do you mean?”

“Well, she is obviously insane.”

“On the contrary, she is the most subtle exponent we have of Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. Eccentric, 90perhaps, but as lucid a brain as Mr G. R. S. Mead’s or as Colonel Olcott’s. You should get her to describe your aura. She is excellent, too, in Plato. She doesn’t understand a word of Greek, but she gets at his meaning intuitively. There is something cosmic about her. You know what I mean.”

“Oh, quite, quite.” (But what did she mean?)

“Cosmic consciousness is a most enthralling subject,” continued my hostess, digging the hockey-stick she always carried with her well into the hearthrug. “Walt Whitman had it, you know.”

“Badly?” I inquired.

She appeared puzzled.

“I don’t quite know what you mean by ‘badly.’ He could identify himself with anything—the wind, a stone, a jelly-fish, an arm-chair, a ... a ... oh, everything! They were he and he was they. He thought cosmically. Fourth dimension, you know. Edward Carpenter and all that.”

I rather admired this way she had of talking—a little like the Duke in G. K. Chesterton’s Magic.

“Oh, do go on!” I urged her.

“What I always say is,” she continued, “why stop at a fourth dimension? Someone has written a book on the fourth dimension, and some day perhaps I shall write one on the fifth.”

“A book? A real book? Do you mean to say you could write a book? How clever! How romantic!”

“Well, I have thought about it. One is influenced. One has influences. The consciousness of the ultimate truth of things, the truth that suffuses all things, the cosmic nature of—well, the cosmos. Do you see? Tennyson’s In Memoriam.”

“Yes; Tennyson’s In Memoriam does help, doesn’t it?”

“Did I say Tennyson’s In Memoriam? I really meant 91Shelley’s Revolt of Islam. The fourth dimension is played out. It’s done with. It was true so far as it went, but how far did it go?”

“Only a very little way,” I answered.

“Yes, but Nietzsche goes much farther. Have you read Nietzsche? No? I haven’t, either. But I have heard Orage talk about him. Nietzsche says we can all do what we want. We must dare things. We must be blond beasts. Mary Wollstonecraft and her set, you know. Godwin and those people.”

She waved her hockey-stick recklessly in the air and marched inconsequently away. Nearly all the Theosophists I met were like that—inconsequent, bent on writing books they never did write, talkers of divine flapdoodle, inanely clever, cleverly inane. Dear freaks I used to meet in days gone by!—where are you now?—where are you now?
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A freak who ultimately lost all reason and was confined in a private asylum used to sit at the same desk that I did when, many years ago, I was a shipping clerk in Manchester. This man, whose name was not, but should have been, Bundle, had considerable private means, but some obscure need of his nature drove him to discipline himself by working eight hours a day for three pounds a week. The three pounds was nothing to him, but the eight hours a day meant everything. He was a conscientious worker, but I think I have already indicated that his intelligence was not robust. He had no delusion; he merely possessed a misdirected sense of duty.

One day he left us, and a few months later I met him in Market Street. He looked prosperous, smart and intensely happy.

“Are you busy?” he asked. “No? Well, come with me.”

He slipped his arm in mine, led me into Mosley Street, 92and stopped in front of the large, dismal office of the Calico Printers’ Association.

“That,” said he, “is mine. Now, come into Albert Square.”

When we had arrived there he pointed to the Town Hall.

“That also is mine. The Lord Mayor gave it to me with a golden key. Here is the golden key.”

Producing an ordinary latchkey from his pocket, he carefully held it in the palm of his hand for my inspection.

“It is,” he announced, “studded with diamonds. But you can’t see the diamonds. Crafty Lord Mayor! You don’t catch him napping. He’s hidden them deep in the gold....”

I enjoyed this poor fellow’s company more than I did that of a very old woman to whom I was introduced in a pauper asylum. She was sitting on a low stool and, pointing at her head with her skinny forefinger, “It’s pot! It’s pot!” she said.

But even she provided me with more exhilaration than do the tens (or perhaps hundreds) of thousands of real freaks who, I imagine, inhabit every part of the globe. I allude to the vast throng of people who arise at eight or thereabouts, go to the City every morning, work all day and return home at dusk; who perform this routine every day, and every day of every year; who do it all their lives; who do it without resentment, without anger, without even a momentary impulse to break away from their surroundings. Such people amaze and stagger one. To them life is not an adventure; indeed, I don’t know what they consider it. They marry and, in their tepid, uxorious way, love. But love to them is not a mystery, or an adventure, and its consummation is not a sacrament. They do not travel; they do not want to travel. They do not even hate anybody.

All these people are freaks of the wildest description; yet they imagine themselves to be the backbone of the 93Empire. Perhaps they are. Perhaps every nation requires a torpid mass of people to act as a steadying influence.

In the suburbs of Manchester these people abound. I know a man still in his twenties who keeps hens for what he calls “a hobby.” Among his hens he finds all the excitement his soul needs. The sheds in which they live form the boundaries of his imagination. I should esteem this man if he kicked against his destiny; but he loved it, until the Army conscripted him. God save the world from those who keep hens!

I know a man who has been to Douglas eighteen times in succession for his fortnight’s holiday in the summer. Douglas is his heaven; Manchester and Douglas are his universe. No place so beautiful as Douglas; no place so familiar; no place so satisfying. After all, Douglas is always Douglas. Moreover, Douglas is always miraculously “there.” God save the world from men who go to Douglas eighteen times!

I know a man who hates his wife and still lives with her. He is respectable, soulless, saving, a punctual and regular churchgoer, a hard bargain-driver. He walks with his eyes on the ground. He has always lived in the same suburb. He will always live in the same suburb. God save the world from men who always live in the same suburb!

I know a man ...

But this is getting very monotonous. Besides, why should I particularise any more freaks when all of them, perhaps, are as familiar to you as they are to me?
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Then there is the literary freak; not the poseur, not the man who wishes to be thought “cultured” and intellectual, but the scholarly man who, during an industrious life, has amassed a vast amount of literary knowledge, but whose appreciation of literature is lukewarm and without zest. Very, very rarely is the great writer a scholar. Dr Johnson 94was a scholar, but, divine and adorable creature though he was, he was not a great writer. None of the great Victorians had true scholarship, and very few even of the Elizabethans. And to-day? Well, one may consider Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett and G. K. Chesterton as great writers; if you do not concede me all these names, you must either deny that we have any great writers at all (which is absurd) or produce me the names of six who are greater than those I have named (and the latter you cannot do). Have any of these anything approaching scholarship?

And yet in our universities are scores of men who are regarded as possessing greater literary gifts than those who actually produce literature. These learned, owlish creatures pose pontifically. Whenever a new book comes out they read an old one! The present generation, they say, is without genius. But they have always said it. They said it when Dickens, Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë were writing. I have no doubt they said it in Shakespeare’s time. The present generation teems with genius, but our “scholarly” mandarins know it not. How barren is that knowledge which lies heavy in a man’s mind and does not fertilise there. When one considers the matter, how essentially dull and stupid and brainless is the man devoid of ideas!

One of these bald-pated freaks is well known to me. He moves heavily about in a quadrangle. He delivers lectures. He has written books. He passes judgment. He annotates. He writes an occasional review. Funny little freak! Great little freak, who knows so much and unders............