Bubbles of the Foam | Page 3

goddess of Love,
rose originally from the sea: and they retain traces of their origin, both
in their essence and their appearance. For what is more like a great
Foam-Bubble than the Moon? and what is more like the delusion of
love than a bubble of the foam, so beautiful in its play of colour, while
it endures: so evanescent, so hollow, leaving behind it when it bursts
and disappears nothing but a memory, and a bitter taste of brine? And

as love is but a bubble, so are all its victims merely bubbles of a bubble:
for this also is mirage.
[Footnote 3: I was sorely tempted to give it the title of Mere Foam:
which, if the reader would kindly understand mere in its German, its
Russian, its Latin, and its ordinary English sense, would be an exact
translation. But it has an unfortunate suggestion (meerschaum) which
made it impossible.]
Mirage! mirage! That is the keynote of the old melancholy Indian
music; the bass, whose undertone accompanies, with a kind of
monotonous solemnity, all the treble variations in the minor key. The
world is unreal, a delusion and a snare; sense is deception, happiness a
dream; nothing has true being, is absolute, but virtue, the sole reality;
that which most emphatically IS,[4] attainable only through knowledge,
the great illuminator, the awakener to the perception of the truth. We
move, like marionettes, pulled by the strings of our forgotten antenatal
deeds, in a magic cage, or Net, of false and hypocritical momentary
seemings: and bitter disappointment is the inevitable doom of every
soul, that with passion for its guide in the gloom, thinks to find in the
shadows that surround it any substance, any solid satisfaction; any
permanent in the mutable; any rest in the ceaseless revolution; any
peace which the world cannot give. Who would have peace, must turn
his back upon the world; it lies the Other Way. Three are the Ways: the
Way of the World, the Way of Woman, the Way of Emancipation.
[Footnote 4: Sat. The thesis of Socrates, that virtue is knowledge:
probably borrowed, by steps that we cannot trace, through Pythagoras
or "Orpheus" from the East.]
Does anyone in Europe care about this last, this Way of Emancipation?
No: it is Liberty that preoccupies the European, who about a century
ago seemed, like the old Athenian, suddenly to catch sight of Liberty in
a dream.[5] And yet, who knows? For Europe also is disappointed:
there seems, after all, to be something lacking to this Liberty,
something wrong. With her Utopias ending in blind alleys, or issues
unforeseen: with her sages discovered to be less sages than they seemed:
with her Science turning superstitious, her Literature wallowing in the

gutter, and her women descending from the pedestal of sex to play the
virago in the contamination of the crowd: with so many other things,
not here to be considered, to raise a doubt, whether this Liberty is
taking her just where she wished to go, what wonder if even Europe
should begin to meditate on means of emancipation, even if only from
vulgarity, and steal a furtive glance or two towards the East, to see,
whether, by diligently raking in the ashes of ancient oriental creeds, she
might not discover here and there a spark, at which to rekindle the
expiring candle of her own. For there seems to be some curious
indestructible asbestos, some element of perennial, imperturbable
tranquillity and calm, away in India, which is conspicuous only by its
absence, in the worry of the West. Where does it come from? What
does it consist in? Is there a secret which India has discovered, which
Europe cannot guess? Is there anything in it, after all, but barbaric
superstition, destined to fade away and disappear, in the sunrise of
omniscience?
[Footnote 5: [Greek: honar heleutherias horhôntas. Plutarch.]]
I cannot tell: but well I recollect a fugitive impression left on me by an
early morning in Benares, now many years ago. I threaded its
extraordinary streets, narrower than the needle's eye, and crowded with
strange, lithe, nearly naked human beings, with black, straight, long
wet hair, and brown shining skins, jostled at every step by holy bulls or
cows, roaming at their own sweet will with large placid lustrous eyes,
in an atmosphere heavy with the half-delicious, half-repulsive odour of
innumerable flowers, mostly yellow, that lay about everywhere in
heaps, fresh and rotten, till I came out finally upon the river bank. A
light steamy mist, converted by the low sun's horizontal rays into a kind
of reddish-golden veil, hung in the quiet air, lending an almost magical
effect to the long row of great temples, whose steps run down into the
river, along the northern bank: half of them in ruins, and looking as