L. H. Myers and the Ancient
Wisdom of India
Dr. D. K. CHAKRAVARTY
L. H. Myers was the son of
Frederic W. H. Myers, an essayist, a poet of minor distinction, and a Victorian
enthusiast of psychic research. He was also one of the founders of the Society
for Psychical Research which interested a number of the best minds of late Victorian
intellectual society. L. H. Myers was born in 1881. He had his education at
Eton and Cambridge. He was by nature aloof and reserved. He preferred to stand
apart from the social groups. This resulted in an acute sense of loneliness in
him: indeed, he remained a lonely man throughout his life. The Lekhampton House, Cambridge, at which Leo Myers was brought
up, was a centre of intellectual life attended by many dignitaries of the day.
The common enterprise of psychical research provided his father with an
adequate company of intellectual people. Myers, however, remained a lonely boy.
He pined for the company of social group failing in which he, in a determined
mood, preferred to maintain his aloofness.
His father died in
January, 1901. Leo went with his mother to America. There he met Elsie Palmer,
with whom he was married later on. Myers was financially well-off and he had
not to work for a living. He had in fact no regular employment save and except
one for a brief period at the Bard of Trade during the First World War. The
reputed Indian scholar, K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar says:
“Being financially well-off, he wasn’t obliged to work for a living, but his
extreme sensitiveness saved him alike from sloth and triviality. He could be
sad, and he could laugh, but he wouldn’t snear, or
give way to cynicism”.1
One could perhaps add that
his financial independence also gave him an opportunity to write many massive
books, particularly “The Near and the Far,” a book which is bulky and full of the
interweaving of philosophical significances, perhaps too bulky and too
philosophical.
The novel “The Near and the
Far” is quite rich in texture. Various issues crop up in this novel and it would
perhaps be wise to take up these issues separately and analyse
them. Paul West finds Myers’s books highly intellectual and the two issues that
attract him are human relationships and a condemnation of the society lost to
materialism.
The problem of personal
relationship always haunts the mind of L. H. Myers and he expresses this time
and again in his novels. For example, he makes the Guru remind that “in making
one’s life satisfactory, one automatically makes one’s public life satisfactory
too”. The conclusion automatically follows that the individual must shape
himself such that while acting on his own behalf he also acts for others. The
Guru represents the author himself. Walter Allen rightly points out that “the
character that emerges most strongly and clearly is the Guru, the expository
and impassioned voice of Myers himself”.2 We
can therefore rightly put emphasis on the views of the Guru as expressed in
different parts of the novel.
The Guru advises Damayanti to fashion individual action to suit the
community. But even then his emphasis invariably falls on the importance of the
individual. He says: “The personal alone is universal. The popular leader, the
subtle statesman or lawyer, they speak only for the monster of the day and
their words die. But the man who speaks out of his own personal depths, speaks
for all men, is heard by all men, and his words do not die”.3
Yet a constant attempt is
made to bring about a reconciliation between
individual aspiration and social needs. The positive values are expressed at
two levels. The first level is of an intimate social relationship and on the
second level the author considers the contacts between broader social groups.
The theme of personal relationship is stated in the contrast between Hari and Rance Sita and the
latter, i. e., the problem
of contact among the wider circle is introduced by Mohan and Sita. Gokal, the erudite Brahmin, who plays a very important role
in the greater part of the novel, acts as the commentator. The Guru addresses Hari and tries to convince him that love with candour alone can provide him with a solution to all his
problems.
Again, Myers in this novel
goes on to examine the rival entities of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ minutely and
painstaking he builds up the rival entities. Rajah Amar
stands for ‘good’ and on the other hand Prince Daniyal
stands for the evil principles. A multitude of hints, innuendoes and obscure
actions serve to show the symbolical aspects of these two characters. It
appears that slowly but surely these two characters gravitate towards each
other. The climatic moment comes in their lives when the meet in Daniyal’s place.
Harding opines that “to
speak of ‘evil’ in this way inevitably suggests the archaic, and it is a very
great achievement to have given a completely modern significance to the
conception”.4 This statement also applies
to Myers’s handling of the problem of appearances and reality.
The treatment of Prince Jali’s train of thought is symbolically designed to explore
the illusions mainly centering round the problem of appearance and reality.
Prince Jali remains
throughout the evolution of the story a curious but hesitant explorer, all the
time attempting to feel his way. In him we find the expression of a puzzled
uncertainty. His journey of life seems more philosophical than literary, His obsession is with some form of “non-existent
existence.” What is more, we are left in no doubt that Myers has put his most
intimate thoughts in the mind of Jali – thoughts chiefly centring
round the problem of existence. These thoughts and the puzzlements of Jali
bring him very close to the essence of Indian philosophy. To the philosophical
Indian mind the only problem is that of the soul. What is the real self? How is
it distinguished from mind and body? What is its nature? How can it be known?
These are surely some of the important issues and concerns of the Hindu School
of thought.
In this vast novel L. H.
Myers has introduced various complex issues. It ends with a distinctive philosophical
vision of reconciliation.
At the end of the novel,
we find that Jali’s education proceeds at a very
quick pace and ultimately it is complete. At long last he can see the veil tear
as under and ineffable reality reveal itself under the radiance of the Guru’s
immaculate gaze. His pilgrimage is over and with the active aid of the Guru, he reaches a stage which might be described as akin to
the Upanishadic conception of an intermediate state
of consciousness in which a man’s consciousness is both normal and transcendental.
When he is in a normal state he clearly perceives finite objects, but the
memory of the transcendental vision of Reality being present in his
consciousness – the finite mist that veils the infinite dissolves before his
eyes as fast as it appears. Prince Jali’s silence (as
described by the author at the end of the novel) has also a distinctive
philosophical significance. Silence is the prelude to the eventual
understanding of the Infinite (the Far in the sense of Myers).
In “Taittiriya Upanishad”,
we find, “Brahman is the delight of the Eternal from which words turn away
without attaining and the mind also returns baffled”.5
Shankara’s
comment on this runs as follows: “Sir,” said a pupil to his master, “teach me
the nature of Brahman.” The master did not reply. When a second and third time,
he was importuned, he answered: ‘I teach you Indeed,
but you do not follow. His name is silence’”. 6
In fact, Prince Jali
reaches the stage of consciousness which can be described as the stage of real
freedom. This stage has been described by Dr. Radhakrishnan in the following
words and one can meet here an explanation of Prince Jali’s
own stage of freedom: “The using of the finite and the infinite, of the surface
consciousness and the ultimate depths, gives the sense of a new creation. To
live consciously in the finite alone is to live in bondage, with ignorance and
egoism, suffering and death. By drawing back from an ignorant absorption in
ourselves, we recover our spiritual being, unaffected by the limitations of
mind, life and body, so that the finite in which we outwardly live becomes a
conscious representation of the divine beings. Thus does it escape from its
apparent bondage into its real freedom”.7
One of the final messages
emerges out as the right action in accordance with the divine purpose which
Myers describes as acting in close relation to the centre. “When the relation
of man with man is not through the centre, it corrupts and destroys itself”
In Myers’s work “The Near
and the Far,” “history and fiction mingle, the past and present coalesce, and
politics, intrigue and romance fuse with religion, philosophy and mysticism;
names, places, situations vaguely familiar yet exotic also as in a dream jumble
in accepted categories and sixteenth century and twentieth century India and
Britain seem to be but variations of an essentially unchanging human situation.”
And finally the message of
the novel is revealed through the realization of Prince Jali, who at the end of
his journey stands before the old palace of Agra, an infinitely wise man than
before. The realization of Prince Jali is closely akin to the teachings of the
ancient philosophers of India. He is convinced of the fact that man is not a
helpless plaything in the hands of God–man is, in fact, an instrument of divine
destiny. It is his duty to live and to act. It is probably within his reach to
achieve here sooner or later, the rounded efflorescence of the life Divine. The
path of this realization is indeed very difficult: “Like the sharp edge of a
razor, the sages way is the path. Narrow it is and
difficult to tread”. 8
Prince Jali treads this
narrow path and almost succeeds in reaching the stage where, “If a man is
blind, ceases to be blind; if he is wounded, ceases to be wounded; if he is afflicted,
ceases to be afflicted”.9
Thus one can say that
Prince Jali anticipates Larry of Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Eelge” – their journeys of life have the basic similarity
in that at the end both of them have attained fortune in the Thoreavian sense, i. e., a man is
rich in proportion to the things he can let alone.
The theme of this great
novel of L. H. Myers may perhaps be aptly summarised
in the following words of Dr. Radhakrishnan, which he wrote while describing
the Hindu view of religion: “How can we rise above the present vision of the
world with its anarchic individualism, its economic interpretations of history,
and materialist view of life? This world of Maya has thrown our consciousness
out of focus. We must shift the focus of consciousness and see better and more. The way to growth lies through an
increasing impersonality, through the unifying of the self with a greater than
the self”. 10
L. H. Myers laboured at this great work “The Near and the Far,”
containing his attempts to fuse his manifold philosophical ideas for long
fifteen years – a work which might be described as a prolonged’ and agonizing
search for the element of certainty in this wasteland of the twentieth century.
Small wonder, this hard labour broke him; but the work
remains a monumental record of the spiritual quest of a man who always dreamed
of the far; though tragically the near always triumphed over it. L. H. Myers
spent his whole life trying to work out a compromise, a way round, which
stupendous endeavour cost him his life. A parallel
case in point is perhaps Virginia Woolf, who, in all
probability succumbed to the moral offensive of the Second World War.
References
1 K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar: The Adventure of Criticism. P. 583.
2 Walter Allen: Tradition
and Dream. P. 58.
3 L. H. Myers: The Near
and the Far. P. 900.
4 G H. Bantode:
L. H. Myers and Bloomsbury. Pelican
Guide to English Literature – Modern Age. P. 270.
5 Taittiriya Upanishad. Translated by Sri Aurobindo in Eight Upanishads.
6 Swami Prabhavananda:
The Spiritual Heritage of India. P. 45.
7 Dr. Radhakrishnan: Eastern
Religion and Western Thought. P. 98.
8 Katha-I. iii-14.
9 Chandogya. VIII.
IV -1 -2.
10 Dr. Radhakrishnan
: Eastern Religion and Western Thought P. 48.