19th Century Eccentric

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28234, 23 March 1957, Page 3

19th Century Eccentric

The Life of Laurence Oliphant— Traveller, Diplomat and Mystic. By Philip Henerson. Illustrated. Hale. 281 pp.

Laurence Oliphant was one of the most remarkable eccentrics, or —to speak in twentieth century terms —one of the most spectacular schizophrenics of the nineteenth century. During the first half of his life he was a brilliant worldly success, crowding into his varied career adventures that would have provided material enough to fill as many novels as his industrious cousin, the Prolific Mrs Oliphant. wrote. He had an immense zest for travel, and whether as ordinary traveller, as secret agent, foreign correspondent or diplomat, he had a gift for being right on the scene when sensational things were happening. He was in India at the Mutiny, in Italy with Garibaldi, in Canada and later in China with Lord Elgin, in Yeddo, Japan—and lucky to come out of it alive—-when the British Embassy was attacked by Japanese terrorists; and he was correspondent of “The Times” in both the Crimean and FrancoPrussian wars. He was also a successful writer, “A Journey to Katmandu" <an account of his travels as a very young man in the then rarely visited kingdom of Nepal) and other travel books and essays, and the satirical novel “Piccadilly,” making his reputa tion as an author. And he was further renowned as a ’ wit, a man-of-the-world, and a bit of a “roue,” whose charm and brilliance caused him to be much in demand as a week-end guest at distinguished country-houses. In middle life, at a time when he was painfully involved in a disreputable love affair, Oliphant suddenly renounced the world and turned to mysticism. A strain of Calvinism, of which his biographer finds some traces in his earlier life, suddenly came uppermost, and in company with his mother, with whom the Calvinistic streak appears to be associated, he went to join one of the most outlandish religious communities of nineteenth century America. This was the Brotherhood of the New Life, led by a gentleman named Thomas Lake Harris, a sadistic and domineering prophet with an unpleasant brand of sexual mysticism at the core of his teaching. He established complete sway over Oliphant, who at his bidding spent two years of rigorous work as a farm labourer, gave up most of his worldly goods, and lived for 14 years without consummating his marriage with his first wife, Alice le Strange, a woman with a taste Cor masochism and sexual mysticism as great as his own. After a time. Oliphant did become disillusioned with Harris, but only to the extent of wresting some of his property from the prophet and retiring to Palestine io establish an independent religious community of his own. where his wife practised her extraordinary sexual “missionary work" among the not unwilling Arabs. became a pioneer of Zionism; but he remained for the most part a crank to the end.

A life such as this may have appeared to most of Oliphant’s contemporaries as one of saintly and heroic renunciation, but to the twentieth century biographer, equipped with the insights furnished by modern psychology, the interpretation must be different.

This reunuciation (writes Philip Henderson) was actually retreat: a headlong flight from the aopalling muddle of his emotional life motivated by a craving for absolute authority and a return to the security of his childhood. He achieved this bv sharing his ‘‘conversion" with his mother, by feeling that he had his father’s approval from beyond the grave, and by finding a father substitute in Harris, who would now punish him for his self-indulgence. This state of psychological muddle had its origin in his mother’s dominant influence and to the fact that he was far too attached to her to achieve anything like a normal or satisfactory relationship with another woman. There was, that is. in Laurence Oliphant a fundamental split between sensuality and affection due to his unconscious identification of the love of women with the love of his mother.

Without such an interpretation it would be impossible to make sense of Oliphant’s life. With its help and with the assistance of the abundant documentation available, Mr Henderson has been able to write a coherent and interesting biography which is a useful contribution not only to nineteenth century studies in particular but to the study of religious experience in general.