We knew Robert Browning pretty well, and I recollect one interesting conversation which I had with him on death and immortality. Of the former he had the rather curious idea that the soul’s last sojourn in the body was just between the eyebrows. He said that he had seen several people die, and that the last movement was there. I cannot think that a quiver of the forehead proves it. For immortality, he said that he had embodied his feelings in the “Old Pictures in Florence” in the lines ending “I have had troubles enough for one.” No one, however, can read his poems without realising his faith in the hereafter.
MR. GLADSTONE ON IMMORTALITY
How diverse are the views of great men on this mystery! Lady Galloway wrote to me once from Knowsley of a talk she had had with Mr. Gladstone which I think worth recording in her own words:
“The theory of Mr. Gladstone’s that mostly interested me last night was—that every soul was not of necessity immortal—that all the Christian faith of the immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body was a new doctrine introduced and revealed by our Lord in whom alone, maybe, we receive immortal life. This he only suggests, you understand—does not lay it down—but I don’t think I have quite grasped his idea of the mystery of death, which as far as I can understand he thinks Man would not have been subject to but for the Fall—not that Death did not exist before the Fall—but that it would have been a different kind of thing. In fact that the connection between Sin and Death meant that you lost immortality thro’ Sin and gained it thro’ Christ.”
I might as well insert here part of a letter from Edwin Arnold, author of The Light of Asia, which he wrote me in January 1885 after reading an article which I had perpetrated in The National Review on Buddhism. I had not known him previously, but he did me the honour to profess interest in my crude efforts and to regret what he considered a misconception of Gautama’s fundamental idea. He continues:
“I remember more than one passage which seemed to show that you considered Nirvana to be annihilation; and the aim and summum bonum of the Buddhist to escape existence finally and utterly. Permit me to invite you not to adopt this view too decidedly in spite of the vast authority of men like Max Müller, Rhys David, and others. My own studies (which I am far from ranking with theirs, in regard of industry and learning) convince me that it was, in every case, the embodied life; life as we know it and endure it, which Gautama desired to be for ever done with.... I believe that when St. Paul writes ‘the things not seen are eternal,’ he had attained much such a height of insight and foresight as Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. I even fancy that when Professor Tyndall lectures on the light-rays which are invisible to our eyes, and the cosmical sounds which are inaudible to ears of flesh and blood, he approaches by a physical path the confines of that infinite and enduring life of which Orientals dreamed metaphysically.”
After this Mr. Arnold—afterwards Sir Edwin—became numbered among our friends, and was very kind in giving us introductions when we went to India, as I will record later.
THOUGHT-READING
Meantime I may mention a quaint bit of palmistry or thought-reading connected with him. We had a friend, Augusta Webb of Newstead, now Mrs. Fraser, who was an expert in this line. She was calling on me one day when I mentioned casually that I had met Mr. Arnold, whose Light of Asia she greatly admired. She expressed a great wish to meet him, so I said, “He is coming to dine this evening—you had better come also.” She accepted with enthusiasm. He sat next to me, and to please her I put her on his other side. In the course of dinner something was said about favourite flowers, and I exclaimed, “Augusta, tell Mr. Arnold his favourite flower.” She looked at his hand and said without hesitation, “I don’t know its name, but I think it is a white flower rather like a rose and with a very strong scent.” He remarked, astonished, “I wish I had written it down beforehand to show how right you are. It is an Indian flower.” (I forget the name, which he said he had mentioned in The Light of Asia), “white and strong-smelling and something like a tuberose.” It is impossible that Augusta could have known beforehand. Her sister told me later that she did occasionally perceive a person’s thought and that this was one of the instances.
To return to Thomas Hughes, who originally gave me Lowell’s poems. He was an enthusiast and most conscientious. On the occasion when, as I said before, he stayed at Middleton he promised to tell my boy Villiers—then six and a half years old—a story. Having been prevented from doing so, he sent the story by post, carefully written out with this charming letter: