Subtranscendental
Deficiencies in individuals, as in States, have their value and import. Indeed, that sublime impulse of perfectibility, always vivacious, always working under various forms and with one underlying purpose, would be futile without them, and fatuous. And what were life without this incessant striving of the spirit? What were life without its angles of difficulty and defeat, and its apices of triumph and power? A banality this, you will say. But need we not be reminded of these wholesome truths, when the striving after originality nowadays is productive of so much quackery? The impulse of perfectibility, we repeat, whether at work in a Studio, or in a Factory, or in a Prison Cell, is the most noble of all human impulses, the most divine.
Of that Chapter, In Prison, we have given what might be called the exogenous bark of the Soul, or that which environment creates. And now we shall endeavour to show the reader somewhat of the ludigenous process, by which the Soul, thrumming its own strings or eating its own guts, develops and increases its numbers. For Khalid in these gaol-days is much like Hamlet’s player, or even like Hamlet himself—always soliloquising, tearing a passion to rags. And what mean these outbursts and objurgations of his, you will ask; these suggestions, fugitive, rhapsodical, mystical; this furibund allegro about Money, Mediums, and Bohemia; these sobs and tears and asseverations, in which our Lady of the Studio and Shakib are both expunged with great billahs ;—the force and significance of these subliminal uprushes, dear Reader, we confess we are, like yourself, unable to understand, without the aid of our Interpreter. We shall, therefore, let him speak.
“When in prison,” writes Shakib, “Khalid was subject to spasms and strange hallucinations. One day, when I was sweating in the effort to get