It has been said by his critics, that, in becoming a Theosophist, Mr. Saltus stepped down from the Olympian heights, became mundane, and did not, as I have suggested, ascend the Mount of Transfiguration. Constructive criticism of any description is helpful, but it is open to question whether or not this touches the crux of the matter. The fact that his imaginative faculty became somewhat transmuted into channels not wholly literary, gives critics this chance.
It has been said that I persuaded him to become a Theosophist. Nothing is further from the truth, for, while I believed much that is called Theosophy, I had scarcely dipped into a book on it, and our chats on these lines had been more or less personal, one saying to the other, "Perhaps we were brother and sister or twins in our last life," suggesting various amusing combinations of relationship.
I never tried to persuade him to accept anything. It would have been not only foolish and futile, but would have defeated its purpose.
Though his acceptance of it came suddenly, it was the culmination of remote causes, too deep for either his critics or his friends to see.
It has been said also of Tolstoi that when he turned to religion he turned from greatness. This may be true in a sense. It resolves itself into the question "What is greatness?" That Mr. Saltus' keen interest in occultism over-shadowed and coloured every act and thought of his life thereafter, is undeniably true; but what it took from him in one sense it gave to him in another. It gave him what he had been unconsciously seeking,—the ability to build up a series of sequences in his mind, and in the acceptance of them to find peace. Peace and progress were his pole stars. Who can say how little or how great are such objectives? If any change took place in his creative potentialities, it was because he deliberately allowed it.
From that hour a new world opened before his eyes, a world of endless vistas,—of delightful study and research,—of new thinking, reconstruction and regeneration, Mr. Saltus' one lament being:—
"Why has it taken me so long?"
Destroying the finished copy of "The Monster," he set about rewriting it entirely from his new viewpoint, and thereafter until the day of his death he wrote nothing untinged by the philosophy that had become an essential part of his consciousness.
This new and complete distraction was a godsend, for Mr. Saltus was far from well and he was inclined to be terrified over the least symptom of anything out of the common. Abstract reading and study took him out of himself and bridged many an hour with pleasure and profit.
Coming in the house one day Mr. Saltus said:—