As those who are familiar with Swami Vivekananda's life will know, Margaret Noble was to become Sister Nivedita, one of his foremost Western disciples, and was to give her life to the service of his India. It is from her book The Master as I Saw Him that we learn about that Sunday gathering in Lady Isabel Margesson's West End drawing room, where Swamiji "was seated, facing a half circle of listeners, with the fire on the hearth behind him." "We were but fifteen or sixteen guests," she wrote, "intimate friends, many of us, and he sat amongst us, in his crimson robe and girdle, as one bringing us news from a far land, with a curious habit of saying now and again ‘Shiva! Siva!' and wearing that look of mingled gentleness and loftiness, that one sees on the faces of those who live much in meditation, that look, perhaps, that Raphael has painted for us, on the brow of the Sistine Child." He chanted Sanskrit verses for them, thrilling them with "those wonderful Eastern tones," which they found "at once so reminiscent of, and yet so different from, the Gregorian music of our own churches." And he answered their many questions, staying on until dark-ness came and the lamps were lighted.
In her narrative of that afternoon, Sister Nivedita refrained from giving names; thus we cannot know with absolute certainty that was present among the guests, besides her. She does tell us, however, that "[the] hostess and one or two others were interested in those modern movements which have made of an extended psychology the centre of a faith. After puzzling over this sentence, the present writer has guessed that the reference is to the young New Thought and faith-healing movements of the time, such as Christian Science and Unity. And, to be sure, Mrs. Asliton Jonson, who was a friend of Lady Margesson and who was almost certainly present, was a believer in mental and spiritual healing.
On the same page Nivedita poses another riddle: "The white-haired lady, with the historic name, who sat on the Swami's left, and took the lead in questioning him, with such exquisiteness of courtesy, was perhaps the least unconventional of the group in matters of belief, and she had been a friend and disciple of Frederick Denison Maurice." There are several hints here, and I do not think one would be wrong in coming to the conclusion that this courteous, liberal, and elderly lady was the Marchioness of Ripon, wife of Lord George Ripon, and widely known for her sweetness and charm. Together with her husband, Lady Ripon had, to be sure, been a friend and follower of Maurice, the idealistic and heterodox theologian, out of whose teachings grew the movement known as Christian Socialism. Further, Lady Ripon was a friend and cousin of Lady Isabel Margesson and, with her, had been co-founder of the Sesame Club, to which Sister Nivedita and Mrs. Ashton Jonson belonged. To clinch the matter, Lady Ripon had white hair in this period of her life, and the name Ripon surely qualifies as historic. Since she fills all these conditions, let us place Lady Henrietta Ripon on Swamiji's left.
As for the rest of his audience, they were, as has been seen above, skeptical of "religious propaganda in general," and had been invited for that very reason. Why? Had Lady Margesson, a Christian Scientist or the like, meant to crack their shells of disbelief? Had she meant, on the other hand, to face Swamiji with challengers? Or had she wanted simply to set the scene for the kind of stimulating discussion she enjoyed -the kind in which intellects glowed in the heat of argument and shot off sparks and perhaps now and then a rocket? Whatever her motive, she had surely not dreamed that the life of one of her young skeptics would be completely reforged that afternoon in the furnace of the Indian Yogi's thought. This consequence was not immediately obvious. On taking leave of their hostess, Miss Noble and her friends remarked that the Swami had said nothing new; it had all been said before. There was, in short, nothing to become excited about. And yet, as even Margaret Noble was to admit, he had put forward ideas new to them. He had told them "that both the mind and the body were regarded by Hindus as moved and dominated by a third, called the Self." He had also insisted on the word "realization" as the crux of religious experience, rather than "faith." Further, he had dwelt for a while on the "infinite power of man" and had declared "the one message of all religions to lie in the call to Renunciation." Again, it must have surprised that group to be informed that the desire to reach Heaven was regarded in India "by the most religious people, ‘as a little vulgar.'
It will perhaps be of interest to take a moment here to wonder why Swamiji's thought, most of which was actually revolutionary in the nineteenth century, seemed familiar on first hearing to his well-read, though perhaps not scholarly, listeners. One reason may have been his way of making the most subtle and difficult of ideas seem available and natural; but another may have been the apparent and deceptive similarity between the philosophy of Vedanta and the element of idealism and romanticism in the background of nineteenth century thought. Just at random, one can think of a number of disconnected ideas floating about in the English consciousness that could have been brought to mind by Swamiji's talk. The romantic poets, for instance, had found God flamingly immanent in nature and had felt within themselves intimations of immortality that could not, to themselves, be gainsaid. Some were pantheistic in outlook, and Shelley, as everyone knew, had sung, "The One remains, the many change and pass " and had likened life to a dome of many-colored glass staining the white radiance of Eternity. In philosophy, Immanuel Kant had declared that the very structure of the human mind, with its built-in lens of time and space, was itself that many colored glass, unavoidably distorting the real world-the thing-in-itself of which nothing at all could logically be known or said. Later German idealistic philosophers, such as Fichte and Schiller, who were inspired but not restrained by Kant, speculated at length upon the nature of the "truly Real." Hegel, the most influential of all, believed the Absolute to be involved in the finite, unfolding itself through a dialectical process in time and history. He said such things as "The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom, which sounded somewhat like Swamiji's "The whole life of society is the assertion of that one principle of freedom. (But to Hegel, the finite world was in process of becoming the Infinite; whereas to Swamiji, as the illusory veil of finitude grows finer and yet finer, "the light behind shines forth, for it is its nature to shine.") Schopenhauer, who considered Hegel's philosophy to be "a monument of German stupidity and found solace in the Upanishads, advised renunciation. "If we turn our glances from our own needy and embarrassed condition to those who have overcome the world," he wrote, ". . . We shall see that peace which passeth understanding, that perfect calm of the spirit, that deep rest, that inviolable confidence and serenity . . . ; only knowledge remains, the Will [by which he meant a blind and driving cosmic Force] has vanished.
The vehement Carlyle in England and the benign Emerson in America lent their voices to German idealistic views, popularizing them. Of immortality, Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus (the theme of which was itself Vedanta-like), "Know of a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable; the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and for ever. And of our earthly lives he wrote, "They are dust and shadow; a shadow system gathered round our ME; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence, is to be revealed in the Flesh. And Emerson, who had studied the Bhagavad Gita, declared in his "Over-Soul," "We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.
Such ideas reached down the years through later-day romantics and idealists as, for instance, Moncure Conway and Haweis. South Place Chapel, where Hindu and Buddhist scriptures were regularly read at the Sunday services, was a veritable mart of idealistic thought. In the published collection of lectures on World Religions delivered at the Chapel in 1888 and 1889, one finds opposite the title page a quotation from the Universal Review of December 1888 which reads in part: "A new Catholicity has dawned upon the world. All religions are now recognized as essentially Divine. They represent the different angles at which man looks at God." (It was, of course, not true that all religions were then recognized as essentially divine, least of all by the official Church of England; but the thought was in the air and in print, even before the Parliament of Religions had been dreamed of.) Man, too, was recognized as essentially divine, in a way. At least he was recognized by some as essentially and innately good. Froebel (whose theories of education were followed by Lady Margesson and Miss Noble) had defined education as "the unfolding of the Divine within us -a sentiment which, again, sounded Vedantic,but which, again, was not. It stemmed back to Rousseau's natural man and was mixed with pre-Darwinian theories of evolution.
Thus, ideas noble, lofty, idealistic, poetic, metaphysical were familiar to most educated Englishmen (and a few educated Englishwomen), particularly those who sought relief from the harsh light of science and escape from the windowless walls of dead-end skepticism. They did not flow from an irrefutable core of hard-won realization and knowledge (jnana); they were speculative, vague, and, when pushed, stumbling and con¬fused; yet there was greatness in them. In their intensity of search, the thinkers and poets of the first half of the nineteenth century had reached into deeps of human consciousness and had come up with gems of transcendent wisdom. Their thought, moreover, had a tinge of Eastern influence, for Indian scriptures and philosophy had not been unknown in the Europe of that age. Nor, of course, were they unknown in England in the ` latter part of the nineteenth century to a more general public; the Freethought magazines had given respectful attention to the scriptures of India, and Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia was widely read. On a more scholarly level, the works of the Orientalists Max Muller and Paul Deussen were studied and discussed. And then, for better or worse, there was Theosophy. In the early 1890s Mrs. Annie Besant, newly converted, gave many knowledgeable lectures in and around London, in which she expounded much of Indian philosophy, including (or perhaps particularly) the theories of karma and reincarnation. If her old friends, such as George Bernard Shaw and Charles Bradlaugh, thought she had probably lost her mind, hundreds of others, mainly from the upper classes, flocked to hear her and hung upon her every word.