Part 1 (1/2)
Annie Besant
by Annie Besant
PREFACE
It is a difficult thing to tell the story of a life, and yet more difficult when that life is one's own At the best, the telling has a savour of vanity, and the only excuse for the proceeding is that the life, being an average one, reflects ive the experience of rapher does his work because he thinks that, at the cost of soht on so the souls of his conte hand to so hirip Since all of us, eneration--surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy for the ht us by Science but looking askance at her agnosticisards the soul, fearful of superstition but still rown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual ideals--since all of us have the sa hopes, the sae, it may well be that the story of one may help all, and that the tale of one should that went out alone into the darkness and on the other side found light, that struggled through the Storht and of peace into the darkness and the storm of other lives
ANNIE BESANT
THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY,
17 & 19, AVENUE ROAD, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON
_August_, 1893
CHAPTER I
”OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE”
On October 1, 1847, I aht(?) of a London afternoon at 539
A friendly astrologer has drawn forthe position of the planets at this, to y, so feel no wiser as I gaze uponin view the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the physical condition of the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the orderly course of nature in the view that they also influence the physical bodies of ely moulded by its conditions Any one who knows the characteristics ascribed to those who are born under the several signs of the Zodiac,his own acquaintances, and he er and find out under what signs they were severally born He will very quickly discover that two men of con, and the invariability of the concurrence will convince him that law, and not chance, is at work We are born into earthly life under certain conditions, just as ere physically affected by the on our subsequent physical evolution At the y, as it is now practised, can only calculate the interaction between these physical conditions at any given iven person whose general constitution and natal condition are known
It cannot say what the person will do, nor ill happen to him, but only ill be the physical district, so to speak, in which he will find himself, and the impulses that will play upon him from external nature and froy is not quite reliable--judging from the many blunders made--or else its professors are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science of astrology I have no doubt, and there are some men who are past masters in it
[Illustration: Horoscope of Annie Besant]
It has always been sorievance to me that I was born in London, ”within the sound of Bow Bells,” when three-quarters of my blood and all my heart are Irish My dear mother was of purest Irish descent, andto the Devonshi+re Woods on his father's The Woods were yeo their own land in honest, independent fashi+on Of late years they seem to have developed more in the direction of brains, from the time, in fact, that Matthew Wood becaainst her racious royal husband, aided the Duke of Kent with no niggard hand, and received a baronetcy for his services froiven England a Lord Chancellor in the person of the gentle-hearted and pure-living Lord Hatherley, while others have distinguished themselves in various ways in the service of their country But I feel playfully inclined to grudge the English blood they put into my father's veins, with his Irish e, Dublin, education For the Irish tongue is musical in my ear, and the Irish nature dear to my heart Only in Ireland is it that if you stop to ask a worn-out ragged woman the way to some old monument, she will say: ”Sure, then, my darlin', it's just up the hill and round the corner, and then any one will tell you the way And it's there you'll see the place where the blessed Saint Patrick set his foot, and his blessing be on yer” Old woht and as friendly and as garrulous And where, out of Ireland, will you see a whole town crowd into a station to say good-bye to half a dozen eover each other for a last kiss, crying, keening, laughing, all in a breath, till all the air is throbbing and there's a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes as the train stea the streets on an outside car, beside a taciturn Jarvey, who, on suddenly discovering that you are shadowed by ”Castle” spies, beco that he thinks will interest you? Blessings on the quick tongues and warm hearts, on the people so easy to lead, so hard to drive And blessings on the ancient land once inhabited by hty men of wisdom, that in later tiain be the Island of Sages, when the Wheel turns round
My randfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by ed to a decayed Irish faay youth, with a beautiful wife as light-hearted as hih what ree, with abundant snohite hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the lightest provocation, storry for a hter in a large fareer, and she was adopted by a heffect on both our characters This maiden aunt was, as are most Irish folk of decayed families, very proud of her fas” Her particular kings were the ”seven kings of France”--the ”Milesian kings”--and the tree grew up a parchment, in all its impressive majesty, over the -rooarded with deep respect by child Emily, a respect in no wise deserved, I venture to suppose, by the disreputable royalties of who Chased out of France, doubtless for cause shown, they had come over the sea to Ireland, and there continued their reckless plundering lives But so strangely turns the wheel of ti and barbarous scaentle Irish lady in the early half of the present century For my mother has told htiness, her aunt would say, looking gravely over her spectacles at the small culprit, ”Emily, your conduct is unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France” And E masses of raven black hair, would cry in penitent shaue idea that those royal, and to her very real, ancestors would despise her small, sweet, rosebud self, so wholly unworthy of their disreputable majesties
Thus those shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised over her a power that ht that was unworthy, petty or htest breath of dishonour was to be avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into hter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of sharace To the world always a brave front was to be kept, and a stainless reputation, for suffering ht starve, but she ht break her heart, but it ht that the training in this reticence and pride of honour was a strange preparation for my stormy, public, much attacked and slandered life; and certain it is that this inwrought shrinking from all criticism that touched personal purity and personal honour added a keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none can appreciate who has not been trained in sonified self-respect And yet perhaps there was another result frohed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant feeling that rose and inwardly asserted its own purity in face of foulest lie, and turning scornful face against the foe, too proud either to justify itself or to defend, said to itself in its own heart, when condemnation was loudest: ”I ae my own self You cannot make me vile whatever you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you deeainst degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear to beco not without its use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends, and Society So peace to the s, for I owe therateful rand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women It is well to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shi+eld No other experience in life could quitethe perfect tie between mother and child--a tie that in our case never relaxed and never weakened Though her grief at e of faith and consequent social ostracisht a cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all to face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it ulf between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love And I look back at her to-day with the saratitude as ever encircled her to me in her earthly life I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron in will, irlhood sunny as dreae, from every touch of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who died in the little house I had taken for our new hoe touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May, 1874
My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove Road, St John's Wood I can re round the dinner-table to see that all was bright for the ho husband;”for papa”; the loving welcoame of romps that always preceded the dinner of the elder folks I can re up inout triurave dee, at dinner-time: ”May not Annie have a knife to-day, as she is four years old?”
It was a sore grievance during that sao to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faintpictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were ied only the more to see Far-away, dusky, trivial memories, these What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot observe, cannot re of the external world on the hus looked when they were first ied on the retinae; e felt when first we beca was as faces of father andchaos and becareeted with a smile, lost with a cry; if only memory would not becolances backward into the darkness of our infancy, what lessons we y, howfor in the West in vain
The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the past is that of my father's death-bed The events which led to his death I know from my dear mother He had never lost his fondness for the profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds, or share with the the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid consue of the breast-bone The cut did not heal easily, and the finger becaer off, Wood, if I were you,” said one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of the wound But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at first inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to ”leave Nature alone”
About theon the top of an o resulted in a severe cold, which ”settled on his chest” One of the h in manner, was called to see his, and left the room followed by my mother
”Well?” she asked, scarcely anxious as to the answer, save as it ht worry her husband to be kept idly at hohtless answer ”He is in a galloping consuer” The wife staggered back, and fell like a stone on the floor But love triuain at her husband's side, never to leave it again for tenwith closed eyes asleep in death
I was lifted on to the bed to ”say good-bye to dear papa” on the day before his death, and I ree, and his voice which sounded so strange, as hethat ”papa should kiss Cherry,”