Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  H.P.B. loved being adored by sensitive young men of artistic temperament, but of all of them who descended on Lansdowne Road, only one would achieve for Madame a special significance. His worth would come not from his poetic vision because he was not literary, but from his willingness to sacrifice his personal concerns in order to serve her. His name was George R. S. Mead, the son of a colonel in the Ordnance, and he had taken honors at Cambridge after shifting from mathematics to the classics. For a while he taught school but after reading Esoteric Buddhism and meeting Mohini and Bertram Keightley, he began to study Hindu philosophy, later entering Oxford to take up philosophy in general, then moving on to the University of Clermont-Ferrand. However, it was not until meeting H.P.B. in 1887 that he made a complete conversion to Theosophy and joined the Lansdowne Road household as her private secretary. His clipped beard, narrow nose, and long curved mustache gave his face a sharp intellectual look, but to Willie Yeats, who took an instant dislike to him, Mead’s intellect was “that of a good size whelk,”62 and his manner overrighteous. Annie Besant, describing him several years later, would find Mead an “earnest disciple, a man of strong brain and strong character, a fine scholar and untiring worker.”63

  Such were the major figures who drifted in and out of Helena’s world, but there were others: the Wilde family would be mildly impressed, especially Oscar’s older brother, Willie, a journalist on the Telegraph, who did his best to see that nothing derogatory about H.P.B. appeared in that paper’s columns; their mother Lady Wilde, who dabbled in Spiritualism and seemed to think that Madame’s At-Homes were seances; and finally Oscar’s wife, Constance, who had spent the early years of her marriage arranging receptions for literary figures. Of late, however, since Oscar had become rich and famous and had mysterious new companions of whom his wife knew nothing—young men whom Oscar entertained in hotel rooms and explained his frequent absences by saying he had taken up golf—the shy Constance had little to do. She decided to write a book because everyone wrote books; she joined ladies’ committees, promoted missions to the heathen, and had herself initiated into what purported itself to be an occult Egyptian order; and she also joined the Theosophical Society, where she became acquainted with H.P.B. Just being around Madame gave her a second-hand importance, and besides, it always provided an interesting talking point for those dreary receptions Constance was obliged to attend.

  Everyone who wanted to appear au courant went to see H.P.B., or at least talked as if they had; and even thirty-five years later the fabulous Lady Margot Asquith would recall in her memoirs that she had attended one of H.P.B.’s séances. She had met Madame, “a Russian Jewess,” at a private home in Brook Street to hear her views on God. But once Lady Asquith got a glimpse of Madame’s “heavy white face, as deeply pitted with smallpox as a solitaire board,” and of the “palpitating ladies” who surrounded her, she took a seat near the window, as far from H.P.B. as she could get without actually leaving the room. According to Asquith, the Madame gave a conclusive shudder, heaved her bosom, and whispered, “A murderer has passed below our windows.” Swiveling around to peer out, Lady Margot wrote that “I strained my eyes up and down Brook Street to see the murderer, but there was not a creature in sight.” Of course, she remarked in her autobiography, the Madame had been “an audacious swindler.”64

  Obviously it was not H.P.B. whom Lady Asquith met, for she rarely left Lansdowne Road and certainly not to conduct a séance, nor had she ever had smallpox. But it made for a story.

  It is surprising that in this hectic period H.P.B. got any work done at all but she did. Keeping sacrosanct the hours between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. she spent the first half of 1888 on The Secret Doctrine. Most of Volume One and part of Volume Two was being retyped by the Keightleys, with Bert working at a small table near the end of her desk. Between them sat a large ash tray that always served as an excellent barometer of the day’s progress; if things were going well, the ash tray would hold a few half-smoked stubs; if she were encountering blocks, the dish would be heaped with butts and matches by six o’clock. Sometimes she made Bert rummage through every drawer and piece of paper in search of some obscure note, and accompanied the request by “a stream of scolding, stinging comments on my work, laziness and general incompetence.”65 One of Bert’s biggest headaches was that of verifying Madame’s countless quotations, a difficult task because she claimed the books were not in the house and also because the page numbers were always wrong. After hours at the British Museum, Bert finally figured out that Madame reversed the page numbers, writing p. 321 for p. 123; once he made this discovery, his job went somewhat more smoothly.66

  During this period Helena also had the editorial assistance of Edward Douglass Fawcett, who had briefly given her a hand at Ostend the previous year. How much Fawcett actually helped is a matter of controversy: both the Keightleys would later single him out as a source of immense assistance, claiming he supplied many quotations from scientific works and also did some of the writing; Fawcett himself went much further, implying that much of the second volume was his.

  Throughout the summer H.P.B. read two sets of galley proofs and then a set of page proofs, all the while correcting, adding and altering up to the very last moment. The printer’s bill for corrections amounted to a staggering three hundred pounds.

  Doubtless no one knew better than H.P.B. that the dream she had sought all her life was finally becoming a reality. It pleased her to know that her teachings were spreading and that she was surrounded by devotees whose only wish was to broadcast throughout the world her personal vision of the cosmos. Still, there were times when she could not help screaming in pain to Vera: “I feel so sad, oh so sad! Oh, if I only could see you.”67 Her constant cry was for something Russian, something familiar, somebody or something from her childhood: to please her, Vera offered to ask the minister of the Russian Embassy Church in London, Reverend E. Smirnoff, to call on her. “But will he not refuse?” she countered. “Maybe he also takes me for the Antichrist.”68

  She professed to feel astonishment that she, a detractor of Protestantism and Catholicism alike, should suddenly find herself drawn toward the Russian Church. “I am a renegade, a cosmopolitan unbeliever—everyone thinks so, and I also think so, and yet I would give the last drop of my blood for the triumph of the Russian Church and everything Russian.” Calling herself a silly old fool, she had a secret interview with Reverend Smirnoff, after which she concluded that Russia must be in her blood and “I can’t help it.”69

  Around this time, the Bright’s disease began recurring. Madame’s physician frightened her by saying that the microscope revealed enormous crystals of uric acid in her blood, that in his opinion the fact that she was still alive must be judged a miracle. It was not only her own approaching end that made her turn back to her Russian past and her family, but the fact that suddenly she sensed death on all sides; in February, 1888, Anna Kingsford had died at the age of forty-one. All the hostility Helena had once harbored for Anna had long since evaporated and the previous August, when she learned that Anna was spitting blood, she had advised Edward Maitland to have her drink the oil of cactus leaves. With characteristic honesty, she admitted to Maitland that even though she had admired Anna, she had never really liked her until the Ostend visit. Now, she said, “I love her as a woman.”70

  Four months later, when she received word that one of Vera’s sons from her first marriage had died,71 she felt her sister’s sorrow as acutely as if it had been her own and begged Vera to bring her daughters to England, where perhaps “in a country new to you all, you, maybe, will find some relief. Come all of you, my dears.” Her house had a nice shady garden with singing birds, just as if it were in the country, and Vera would have a separate room. “You shall be comfortable, and the poor girls will have what little distraction is possible for them.” Because she could not discuss her intense grief even with the countess, she sent for Reverend Smirnoff, the only person with whom she could share these feelings. When Vera replied that she
would bring her daughter Vera to England in July, H.P.B. hailed the news as a “ray of light in the darkness”72 and emptied her savings account to finance their trip.

  The darkness she felt enveloping her is partially traceable to her life-and-death struggle with Henry Olcott over ownership of the Theosophical Society. Ever since her relocation in London had won her fame as well as new converts, she had been gradually cutting herself off from Adyar; by this time, she felt strong enough to capitalize on her popularity by demoting Olcott to figurehead position. Her general discontent, as well as the chronic displeasure with Henry that had been festering ever since he hustled her out of India, were summed up in one of the rare Mahatma letters she addressed to herself. Olcott, K.H. told her, “says he has saved it [the Society]. He saved its body, but he allowed through sheer fear, to [sic] its soul to escape, and it is now a soulless corpse, a machine run so far well enough, but which will fall to pieces when he is gone.”73 What she meant of course was that the Society was bound to crumble when she died, and she intended taking positive steps to prevent that. If it was necessary to emasculate Henry in the process, she counted this a trifling price to pay.

  The formation of Madame’s own Blavatsky Lodge stunned Henry, but he managed to accept it; her second blast, the founding of Lucifer as a rival to the Theosophist, had impressed him as unbusinesslike, but once again he had given in. It was her third innovation that hurled him into an uproar: her intention, as she announced it, was to establish a secret organization within the Blavatsky Lodge to be known as the Esoteric Section—the E.S. The hand-picked candidates, admitted only after a rigorous perusal of their former lives, were obliged to sign a pledge of absolute obedience, affirming their belief in both H.P.B. and in the Mahatmas, and vowing to defend them all, subject to their consciences. Probationers would be expected to practice abstinence and asceticism, to give up meat, alcohol and sex, and to spend several hours a day meditating before a photograph of the Masters, who ruled the E.S. As the Mahatmas’ representative, Helena would give individual instruction in occultism.74

  Olcott was alarmed by the news: he feared this secret society would be nothing more than a device for continuing her fraudulent marvels; that the same gimmickry as her shrine and Occult Room would once again appear to wreck Theosophy. When he opposed the idea as unconstitutional, she countered with a volley of letters that were characterized, he thought, by “language violent, passion raging, scorn and satire poorly covered by a skin of soft talk.”75 He replied that he refused to have the whole machinery of the Society upset to gratify her whims and, incidentally, she should remember that the more she threatened him, the more stubborn he would become. Helena expressed herself even more bluntly:

  Now look here, Olcott. It is very painful, most painful, for me to have to put to you what the French call marche en main, and to have you choose... But this [the E.S.] is no threat at all, but a fait accompli. It remains with you to either ratify it or to go against it, and declare war to me and my Esotericists. If, recognizing the utmost necessity of the step, you submit to the inexorable evolution of things, nothing will be changed. Adyar and Europe will remain allies, and, to all appearances, the latter will seem to be subject to the former. If you do not ratify—well, then there will be two Theosophical Societies, the old Indian and the new European, entirely independent of each other.76

  Clearly the altercation was snowballing into a battle for supremacy, and Olcott knew it. For his part, he had little taste for such a struggle; in recent months he had been suffering from rheumatism, boils and carbuncles. At the age of fifty-five, his hair and beard had already turned white; he looked ten years older than his age and, even worse, felt it. In March, while spending several weeks at Ootacamund as the guests of Maj.-Gen. and Mrs. Henry Rhodes Morgan, he had bought a plot of land on which he planned to build a retirement cottage. The last thing he wanted, or had expected, was an ugly confrontation with his old chum, but at the same time could not permit her to destroy everything he had worked for. At last, the colonel had decided to stand up to the Old Lady.

  What Henry did not anticipate was H.P.B.’s having the cunning to enlist allies. On July 6, she cabled William Judge that American support was necessary to save the Cause and ordered him to have the U.S. branches adopt the following resolution: “In event of the President in India declining to recognize Madame Blavatsky’s authority in the West, we undertake to support her in any course she may consider necessary to adopt.”77

  Although head of the American Theosophical Society, Judge was in an extremely precarious position: for the past year, persistent attempts to oust him had been made by Dr. Elliott Coues, the well-known Washington, D.C., scientist and ornithologist. Not six weeks earlier, Judge had assured Henry of his loyalty: “I am always striving to keep your name at the top, for until your death you must be at the head,” but when it came to a showdown between the founders, he preferred to place his bets on Madame. Only H.P.B. was crafty enough to put Dr. Coues in his place and clamp down on the fake Mahatma letters Coues manufactured to enhance his position. In asking the American branches to adopt her resolution, Judge was careful to add that in his own case, “what she orders me I do as she says without reasons,”78 a phrase designed to warm Madame’s heart. Not surprisingly, all but three branches passed the resolution.

  By mid-summer the Olcott/Blavatsky situation had deteriorated to the point where Henry felt obliged to travel to London personally to stay Helena’s hand. H.P.B., in turn, felt the necessity for a timely miracle. Leaving Bombay on August 4 aboard the SS Shannon, Olcott reached the Italian port of Brindisi on the morning of the twenty-third. According to him the day before the ship docked, a letter from Master Koot Hoomi dropped from nowhere into his cabin. “Your revolt, my good friend, against her infallibility—as you once thought it—has gone too far and you have been unjust to her, for which I am sorry to say, you will have to surfer hereafter along with others.” K.H. went on to say that when Henry arrived in London he must keep in mind that there were two sides to the Society, its external administrative and its internal esoteric one. “Keep the former under your control... leave the latter to her.”79

  How Helena managed to have this letter delivered is impossible to say; it is perhaps the only one of her drops that cannot be easily explained. Later, in London, Olcott would show it to Sinnett, who apparently had trouble suppressing his temptation to laugh. Olcott, he wrote Charles Leadbeater, “in his simple guileless way takes the letter as genuine without a thought of questioning it... and I have not thought it of the least use to tell Olcott that I do not believe in the authenticity of the letter.”80

  Once again, Helena’s reliance on higher authorities had paid off: by the time Henry reached London in late August he accepted defeat as meekly as Helena could have wished. Once he learned that she had lined up not only the Mahatmas but the American branches as well, Henry had no choice but to agree to a division of the Society; she could have her Esoteric Section and be queen in Europe, while he continued as king at Adyar. After months of wrangling, their bitterness was not easily mended, and a photograph from this time shows them sitting in the garden at Lansdowne Road, Helena clutching her Ceylon basket of tobacco and Henry fiddling with a hat and cane. Both are staring tight-lipped into the camera. No doubt Henry would have looked even more unhappy had he known the mocking nickname that some of her E.S. students had given him: “the Fairies’ Friend,”81 although in the photograph he might be taken for a silvery-bearded, bespectacled leprechaun. In another shot the two of them are joined by Vera Zhelihovsky, her daughter, and Charles Johnston, and in this case there is a similar downcast expression on all the faces except the two young people’s.

  That summer Johnston had graduated with honors from Dublin University, passed the notoriously stiff examination for the Indian Civil Service, and came to London to while away a few months before leaving for Bengal in the fall. Naturally he went straight to Lansdowne Road. “Charley Johnston,” remarked Yeats to Katharine Tynan, “was a
t Mme. Blavatski’s the other day with that air of clever insolence and elaborate efficiency he has ripened to such perfection... If you only saw him talking French and smoking cigarettes with Madame’s niece. He looked a veritable peacock. Such an air of world-worn man of society about him, as if he also were one of the penitent frivolous instead of a crusading undergraduate.”82

  At twenty-four, the young Vera Zhelihovsky was a merry-eyed blonde, with a Kewpie-doll face. Yeats thought her “very nice, decidedly pretty, and has a laugh like bells of silver,”83 as did Johnston who began by asking her to teach him Russian and proceeded to fall in love with her. How he and Vera managed to conduct a serious romance is impossible to say, for the atmosphere was not conducive to love: Helena could not broach the subject of marriage without expostulating bitterly on the institution, after which she would follow up with a disparaging discourse on the weaknesses of the female sex. As it happened, there was usually at least one woman present with the temerity to offer a mild contradiction: “My dear,” H.P.B. would growl, “I am a woman, and so I know.”84

  On joining the Society, Johnston had adopted the rule of celibacy and also had actively inculcated the ideal in other male members. Now, when he and Vera announced their intention to marry, a hurricane of consternation ripped through the T.S. in England and Ireland. “Theosophy despairs,” Yeats remarked jokingly. “Johnston was in the running for Mahatmaship and now look how the mighty have fallen!85 “jE,” an admirer of Johnston’s asceticism and one of those who had been struggling to emulate him, expressed his shock to Yeats by swearing that he would never again make anyone his ideal. Later he would say of Johnston, “I always wonder whether there is any real C. J. under that smiling, handsome exterior, or only a bundle of mental attributes.”86

  Those most unconcerned were Johnston himself, who announced his apostasy with easy assurance—”She is my excuse. They have only to see her”— and H.P.B., who must have felt in an expansive mood; even though she called the couple flapdoodles, she undertook arrangements for the wedding at the Russian Church. The elder Vera could not contain her weeping and, according to Henry, took herself back to Russia before the ceremony. Young Vera’s wedding was one of the very rare occasions when H.P.B. set foot out over the threshold of 17 Lansdowne Road.