Triveni Journal
1927 | 11,233,916 words
Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....
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 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.