[Impressions of Madame Blavatsky]by Henry Sidgwick
[Reprinted from Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir by Arthur Sidgwick and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, London, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 190 , pp. 384-385, 405, 410. The excerpts are from Henry Sidgwick's "intermittent journal kept between 1884 and 1892."]
August 9 [1884] - Arthur [Sidgwick] comes to spend Sunday; after dinner we all go to a meeting of the Cambridge Branch of the S. P. R. [Society for Psychical Research], where Madame Blavatsky, Mohini [Chatterji] , and other Theosophists are to show off. The meeting is in Oscar Browning’s spacious rooms: which are crowded to overflowing - all the members of the Branch, and more than as many outsiders. There must have been over seventy; I should not have thought that such a crowd could have been got together in the Long Vacation. [F.W.H.] Myers and I had the task of ‘drawing’ Mme. B. by questions, Mohini taking a share of the answers. We kept it up better than I expected for a couple of hours; the interest of the miscellaneous throng - half of whom, I suppose, came with the very vaguest notions of Theosophy - being apparently fairly well sustained. On the whole I was favourably impressed with Mme. B. No doubt the stuff of her answers resembled [her book] Isis Unveiled in some of its worst characteristics; but her manner was certainly frank and straightforward - it was hard to imagine her the elaborate impostor that she must be if the whole thing is a trick.
August 10 [1884] - We all went to a Theosophic lunch with Myers. Madame de Novikoff was there; certainly she has social gifts, but she does not interest me. Our favourable impression of Mme. B[lavatsky] was sustained; if personal sensibilities can be trusted, she is a genuine being, with a vigorous nature intellectual as well as emotional, and a real desire for the good of mankind. This impression is all the more noteworthy as she is externally unattractive - with her flounces full of cigarette ashes - and not prepossessing in manner. Certainly we like her, both Nora [Eleanor Sidgwick] and I. If she is a humbug, she is a consummate one: as her remarks have the air not only of spontaneity and randomness but sometimes of an amusing indiscretion. Thus in the midst of an account of the Mahatmas in Tibet, intended to give us an elevated view of these personages, she blurted out her candid impression that the chief Mahatma of all was the most utter dried-up old mummy that she ever saw. . . .
March 22 [1885] - On Friday last we went to Brighton to experiment in Mesmerism. . . . We talked over Theosophy, of which [Richard] Hodgson keeps us amply informed by weekly accounts [from India] of his investigation. His opinion of the evidence seems to be growing steadily more unfavourable; but there are still some things difficult to explain on the theory of fraud. I have no doubt, however, that Blavatsky has done most of it. She is a great woman. . . .
April 30 [1885] - Hodgson came back from Madras. He has no doubt that all Theosophic marvels are and were a fraud from beginning to end. He thinks Mme. Blavatsky a remarkable woman, possibly working from motives of Russian patriotism and Russian pay to foment native discontent. He thinks Theosophy will go on, but that we may help to prevent people of education from being further duped. . . .
