THE BUILDER APRIL 1916

ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE - AN APPRECIATION
BY JOSEPH FORT NEWTON

ONE of the greatest masters of the field of esoteric lore and
method of culture, by far the greatest now living, is Arthur Edward
Waite, to whom it is an honor to pay tribute. In response to a
number of requests, and as prelude to a lecture on the deeper
aspects of Masonry, soon to appear in these pages, we offer a brief
sketch of Brother Waite, with a statement of his conception of
Masonry and its service to man in his quest of God. If these lines
induce any of our readers to study his works, they will thank us
for having put them in the way of so wise and skillful a guide, who
is at once a poet and a mystic, the sum of whose insight, set forth
on his latest page, is that

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
Are but the ministers of love,
And feed his sacred flame."

By rare good fortune, as we think, our friend and teacher was born
in America--in Brooklyn, New York --and on his father's side traces
his descent back to the earliest settlers in Connecticut. His
mother was English, belonging to the old family of Lovell. The
family name, originally spelled "Wayte," was attached to the
document authorizing the execution of Charles I., and it was
probably the fact that the family found England a rather
uncomfortable place in which to live after the Restoration that
sent his ancestors across the sea. While the poet was still in his
infancy his father died, and he was taken to England at the age of
two. He has never returned to America--a fact to be held against
him, but for which we hope he will atone in a time not far away.

Educated privately, he began writing while still in his early
teens, poetry being his first love. His first book, a volume of
verse, was published in 1886. For ten years or more he pursued an
active business life, as secretary and director of public
companies, at the same time engaging in elaborate researches in the
fields of magic, occultism, and the esoteric side of religion and
philosophy. How he found time to do both is not easy to know. He
took the whole realm of mysticism for his province, for the study
of which he was almost ideally fitted by temperament, training, and
genius-- and, we may add, by certain deep experiences in his own
life, of which he rarely speaks, the glow of which one detects in
all his work, and nowhere more vividly than in his latest book on
"The Way of Divine Union." In later years, as the result of long
study, he has come to deal only with the higher mysticism, as
totally separated from the magical, the psychical, and the occult.

Exploring a hidden world, he has brought to his task a religious
nature, the accuracy and skill of a scholar, a sureness and
delicacy of insight at once sympathetic and critical, the eye of a
symbolist and the soul of a poet--qualities rarely found in union.
Brother Waite does not write after our American fashion-- "hot off
the bat," as Casey put it--but in a leisurely manner, seeking not
only to state the results of his research, but to convey somewhat
of the atmosphere of the themes with which he deals. Prolific but
seldom prolix, he writes with such lucidity as his subject admits
of, albeit in a style often touched with strange lights and remote
and haunting echoes. Much learning and many kinds of wisdom are in
his pages; and if he is of those who turn down another street when
wonders are wrought in the neighborhood, it is because, having
found the inner truth, he does not ask for a sign.

Always our Brother writes in the conviction that all great subjects
bring us back to the one subject that is alone great--the
attainment of that Living Truth which is about us everywhere. He
conceives of our human life as one eternal Quest of that Living
Truth, taking many forms, yet ever at heart the same aspiration, to
trace which he has made it his labor and reward. Through all his
pages he is following the tradition of this Quest, in its myriad
aspects, finding in it the secret meaning of the life of man from
his birth to his union--or reunion--with God who is his Goal. And
the result is a series of volumes noble in form! united in aim,
unique in wealth of revealing beauty, of exquisite insight, and of
unequalled worth.

As far back as 1886, Brother Waite issued his study of the
"Mysteries of Magic," a digest of the writings of Eliphas Levi, to
whom Albert Pike was more indebted than he let us know. Then
followed the "Real History of the Rosicrucians," which traces, as
far as such a thing can be done, the thread of fact in that
fascinating romance. Of the Quest in its distinctively Christian
aspect, he has written in "The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal"; a
work of rare beauty, of bewildering richness, its style partaking
of the story told, and not at all after the fashion of these days.
But the Graal Legend is only one aspect of the old-world sacred
Quest of the truth most worth finding, uniting the symbols of
chivalry with the forms of Christian faith.

Masonry is another aspect of that same age-long Quest; and just as
Brother Pound has shown us the place of Masonry among the
institutions of humanity, and its meaning as such, so Brother Waite
shows us the place of Masonry in the mystical tradition and
aspiration of mankind. No one may ever hope to write of "The Secret
Tradition in Masonry" with more insight and charm, or a touch more
sure and revealing, than this gracious scholar to whom Masonry
perpetuates the Instituted Mysteries of antiquity, with much else
derived from innumerable store-houses of treasure. What then are
the marks of this eternal Quest, whether its legend be woven about
a Lost Word, a design left unfinished by a Master Builder, or, in
its Christian form, about the Cup of Christ ?

They are as follows: first, the sense of a great loss which has
befallen humanity, making us a race of pilgrims ever in search of
that which is lost; second, the intimation that what was lost still
exists somewhere in time and the world, although deeply buried;
third, the faith that it will ultimately be found and the vanished
glory restored; fourth, the substitution of something temporary and
less than the best, but never in a way to adjourn the quest; and
fifth, the felt presence of that which is lost under veils and
symbols close at hand. What though it take many forms, it is always
the same quest, and from this statement of it surely we ought to
see that Masonry has a place in the greatest quest which man has
pursued in the midst of time. Our Order is thus linked with the
shining tradition of the race, having a place and a service in the
culture of the life of the soul, leading men in the search for God,
if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He is not
far from any one of us.

But this is a long and difficult quest, and we must walk carefully,
lest we trip and fall into the pits that beset the path. Brother
Waite warns us against the dark alleys that lead nowhere, and the
false lights that lure to ruin, and he protests against those who
would open the Pandora's Box of the Occult on the altar of Masonry.
After a long study of occultism, magic, omens, talismans, and the
like, he has come to draw a sharp line between the occult and the
mystical. and therein he is wise. From a recent interview with him
in regard to these matters in an English paper, we may read:

"There is nothing more completely set apart from mysticism than
that set of interests and things called occultism. Occultism is
concerned with the idea that there were a number of secret sciences
handed down from the past, and which, roughly speaking, represented
the steps toward the attainment of abnormal power by man,
corresponding to the idea of Magic. Magic, of course, meant many
things: it meant the power obtained by man as a result of dealing
with spirits, raising the spirits of the dead, everything that we
understand by the supposed efficacy of talismans, and all that is
comprehended in the word Astrology. My interest in these things has
been purely historical and critical.

Occult and psychical research does help, of course, to show that
the purely materialistic interpretation of things does not cover
the whole field. It shows a residue of experience which points to
the existent of powers beyond the ken of man, some of them
maleficent, others innocent in themselves, of which the student may
take account. Unfortunately, I have known too many who follow these
things as the be-all and end-all of their interests. I know others
also, and many, to whom the exaggerated pursuit has spelt not less
than ruin. I mean, morally and spiritually. I know, for the rest,
that they reach no real term; very soon they come up against a dead
wall."

Here are grave and wise words, spoken out of full knowledge of
history and fact, and he is wise who heeds them. It is no
theological bias of any sort, but the profound fallacy of the
occult, and its danger to the highest life and character, that has
moved us more than once in these pages to utter a like warning to
those who would turn aside from the historic highway of the soul to
follow a will-of-the-wisp into the bog. If Masonry forsakes its
Great Light to follow these wandering tapers, it too will fall into
the ditch. But to listen to Brother Waite:

"Symbolism is sacramental. To me all visible things are emblems.
When you come to think of it, is it not true that all the workings
of the human mind are in the form of symbols? These symbols are
truly representive and not mere figments of the mind, and to get at
the reality behind the symbol is the aim of the mystic. The theory
of mysticism is that the voice of God is within, and that the soul
has to enter into the realization that God is within. The question
is whether that realization can be fully achieved in this life.
All, or nearly all, the great mystics, held that they only
approximated it. The absolute vision and union lie very far away--
so the quest of the Lost Word goes on, ever on.

Mysticism is not a way of escape either from one's self or the
world. It is by the realization of the indwelling of God in all
around, and within, in things animate and inanimate, and most of
all in the soul of man, that we attain to knowledge of God--in so
far as we attain it in this life. Thus, it is not a path of escape
from the world, as the old ascetics imagine, but by finding God in
the world, the ideal in the real, one with the ideal within
ourselves, that we attain to union with God. We are sacraments to
ourselves. A man building a house would perhaps be surprised if you
told him that he is not merely building bricks and stones, but that
he is trying to bring into being something of the idealism in his
own nature, but if he could be brought to understand that, would it
not give a new glory to his work ? "

Thus mysticism, as here presented, is practical common sense--
bringing to the humblest task the highest truth to lighten and
transfigure our labor. Time does not permit us to speak of the
poetry of Brother Waite, though some think his best work has been
done in that field. He himself thinks of his poetry as "light
tongued rumors and hints alone of the songs I had hoped to sing."
We must, however, mention his drama of "The Morality of the Lost
Word," which may be found in his poems, recently collected in two
noble volumes, and we bespeak for it a long study. At another time
we shall speak of the poetry of our friend to whom the world is
ever an infinite parable, giving at present only the following
lines as a hint of his poetic purpose and power:

In the midst of a world full of omen and sign, impell'd by the
seeing gift 
On auspice and portent reflecting, in part I conjecture their
drift; 
I catch faint words of the language which the world speaks far and
wide.
And the soul withdrawn in the deeps of man from the birth of each
man has cried.
I know that a sense is beyond the sense of the manifest Voice and
Word,
That the tones in the chant which we strain to seize are the tones
that are scarcely heard;
While life pulsating with secret things has many too deep to speak,
And that which evades, with a quailing heart, we feel is the sense
we seek:
Scant were the skill to discern a few where the countless symbols
crowd,
To render the easiest reading, catch the cry that is trite and
loud.

For the rest, we confess a great debt to our dear friend and
Brother across the great waters, divided by distance but very near
in thought and sympathy and regard; a man of pure and lofty spirit,
tolerant of mind, noble of nature, in all ways a true Master Mason
--and one who does not forget "that best portion of a good man's
life, the little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of
love."


THE FOUNDATION STONE

Thus saith the Lord God:--Behold, I lay in Zion fol a Foundation
Stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation;
he that believeth shall not make haste. Judgment also will I lay to
the line, and righteousness to the plummet.
--Isaiah.
