Born, at Capetown, 1829. At school near Salisbury till 1841. In Ceylon (where his father was Chief Justice) with private tutor, 1841–46. Travelled on Continent with his parents, 1846–48. Returned with them to Ceylon and became private sec. to his father. To England with his mother, 1851. Student at Lincoln’s Inn, 1851. Began to study law at Edinburgh, 1852. Tour in Russia, winter of 1852–53. On staff of “Daily News,” 1853. In Canada, as Sec. to Lord Elgin, 1853–54. In Crimea during the War, 1855, as correspondent to the “Times.” In America, 1856. Sec. to Lord Elgin on the latter’s mission to China and Japan, 1857–59. Visit to Italy, 1860. First Sec. to Legation at Yeddo, June 1861; returned to England, wounded, same year. Started “The Owl,” with Sir A. Borthwick and others, 1864; contrib. to nos. 1–10. Frequent contributor to “Blackwood’s Mag.,” from 1865. M.P. for Stirling Burghs, 1865; resigned, 1867. To America, to join Thomas Lake Harris’s community at Brocton, 1867. His mother joined him there, 1868. Returned to England, 1870. Correspondent for “The Times” during Franco-Prussian War, 1870–72. Married (i.) Alice Le Strange, June, 1872. Returned to Brocton with wife and mother, 1873. Employed by Harris in commercial and financial business; his wife sent to California. In Palestine in connection with Jewish colonization there, 1879–80. Joined by his wife in England, 1880. Visit to Egypt with her, winter of 1880–81. To Brocton on account of illness of his mother, May 1881; she died soon afterwards. Rupture of relations with Harris. To Palestine with his wife, 1882; settled at Haifa. Wife died, 2 Jan. 1887. Visit to America, 1888. Married (ii.) Rosamond Dale Owen, 16 Aug. 1888. Died at Twickenham, 23 Dec. 1888. Works: “A Journey to Katmandu,” 1852; “The Russian Shores of the Black Sea,” 1853 (2nd edn. same year); “Minnesota and the Far West,” 1855; “The Transcaucasian Provinces the proper field of operation for a Christian Army,” 1855; “The Transcaucasian Campaign,” 1856; “Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan” (2 vols.), 1859; “Patriots and Filibusters,” 1860; “Universal Suffrage and Napoleon the Third,” 1860; “On the Present State of Political Parties in America,” 1866; “Piccadilly,” 1870 (2nd edn. same year); “The Land of Gilead,” 1880; “The Land of Khemi,” 1882; “Traits and Travesties,” 1882; “Altiora Peto,” 1883; “Sympneumata,” 1885; “Massollam,” 1886; “Episodes in a Life of Adventure,” 1887; “Haifa,” 1887; “Fashionable Philosophy,” 1887; “The Star in the East,” 1887; “Scientific Religion,” 1888. Life: by Mrs. Oliphant, 1891.

Personal

  New and unlooked-for developments have been vouchsafed to us since our marriage, chief among them a realization of the exquisite union awaiting humanity when all jealousies and divisions shall have been merged in the supreme desire to become one with our fellow-creatures, and through them with our God. We realize that our union, instead of separating my husband from the sainted wife whose influence overshadowed him as he wrote the pages of his book, has, in truth, bound him only the more closely, for she has become so atomically welded with me, that we, the wife in the unseen and the wife in the seen, have become as one; her life is poured through me as an instrument doubling my own affectional consciousness. Truly, when we come to realize that all sense of division between the fragments of God, called human beings, is an utterly false sense, then shall we be prepared for the in-pouring of the perfect, the universal life.

  He was one of the men who are never young. His spirit was indomitable, and even his bodily frame, though shaken by illness, still so elastic and capable of sudden recoveries, that to associate the idea of death with his wonderful personality was the most difficult thing in the world…. This man, by whose loss the world is so much the poorer, was an adventurer, traveller, a born statesman, a trained diplomatist, a keen and shrewd man of business. No man was keener to see an opportunity or an advantage, or more intent upon work and production; no man ever loved action and movement more completely, or had a more cordial, almost boyish, pleasure in being in the heart of all that was going on. Yet above all, and in the midst of all his perpetual business, his pleasures, his love of society, he was a visionary—one of the race to which the unseen is always more present than the palpable.

  He had held great employments, he had also been a day-labourer and a pedlar. Himself a gentleman of good Scottish descent, and finding his natural place in good society, he had friends alike among princes and beggars. To most people he appeared as a charming element in society, to many as a keen practical man of business, to some as a visionary fanatic, to a select few as an inspired prophet of the Lord, the founder of a new development of Christianity. But in whatever guise he might appear, no one could fail to feel that he was interesting. To him had been given, in unusually full measure, that mysterious indefinable charm the presence of which condones such serious faults, the absence of which goes so far towards neutralizing even transcendent virtues.

  Oliphant’s life seems a lost one, save as a beacon to warn others.

  If we are to consider his life a failure, so also must we consider the lives of all men and women who faithfully follow the light they have, unless that light should chance to guide them where they can lounge in easy chairs and sleep on beds of down.

  Though of British parentage, Laurence Oliphant was born in Africa, spent more than two-thirds of his life out of England, and never remained more than a year or two at a time in the land of his fathers. Travel was his education, travel was his livelihood, travel was his heaven, and to be kept from travel was his hell…. From thirty years on to nearly three-score, he remained the same rolling stone…. He appears to have been incapable of a generous enthusiasm for the great literary men of his age. His reading was always limited, and he had no correspondence with writers of note. We see, indeed, in his case the strange phenomenon of a prolific and much vaunted writer without any taste or appreciation for poetry or belles lettres. It was this lack of taste that made it possible for Oliphant to pin his faith to such an impostor as the author of “The Great Republic: A Poem of the Sun,” Thomas Lake Harris, whom he styled “the greatest poet of the age, as yet, alas! unknown to fame.” It was this same lack that enabled him to accept as poetry some doggerel rhymes he had himself produced, during his separation from his wife, under the alleged influence of a spiritual “counterpart” in Heaven. Nor was his taste in other departments of art superior to his taste in literature, as is proved by his excessive admiration for Russian architecture.

  His observations were sharp and severe, but his political doctrines were of unswerving rectitude, and his judgments on men and things were both caustic and infallible…. He was a man who could not submit to discipline in the ordinary business of life. He lost his temper if he received any orders, and he resigned at the first remark that interfered with his arrangements.

  His career as a whole, though brilliant in parts, was a melancholy waste of grand opportunities and a misuse of splendid talents…. At all stages of his career, Oliphant was a profoundly religious man; but his religion was not that of the majority; the system which he adopted for his own use did not wholly satisfy him, and he suffered from an abnormal development of one side of his nature. Even when under the baneful domination of Mr. Harris, he engaged in enterprises requiring a cool head and in adventures requiring a brave heart. He was a peculiar compound of mysticism as beautiful but as barren as moonshine, and of practical good sense; indeed, his business capacity was higher than his talent for philosophising. His most useful books are those telling of his explorations in the Holy Land; the most sensible of his actions were those which related to restoring its former prosperity and populousness to Palestine.

  Brilliant, versatile, and accomplished we all knew Oliphant to be, and yet there was some deep defect in his composition which prevented him from reaching the distinction to which his natural abilities, had they been accompanied with steadfastness of purpose, would undoubtedly have carried him. Whatever he undertook to do he did well, but when he had done it he had a tendency to fly off from that particular field of effort, and to take up something new. He was the very man, one might have supposed, to succeed in the diplomatic service; but somehow or other he allowed all his chances to slip through his fingers. He had not the requisite concentration of mind or sustained industry to bring him to the front at the bar, to which he once thought of devoting himself, and even the pursuit of literature he followed in an uncertain, irregular, spasmodic fashion.

  The charm of Oliphant’s alert and versatile intellect and sympathetic character was recognised by a wide circle of friends. It was felt not least by those who most regretted the strange religious developments which led to the waste of his powers and his enslavement to such a prophet as Harris. He was beloved for his boyish simplicity and the warmth of heart which appeared through all his illusions. Suggestions of insanity were, of course, made, but apparently without definite reasons. Remarkable talents without thorough training have thrown many minds off their balance, and Oliphant’s case is only exceptional for the singular combination of two apparently inconsistent careers. Till his last years, at any rate, his religious mysticism did not disqualify him for being also a shrewd financier, a charming man of the world, and a brilliant writer.

General

  “Piccadilly” has just enough of sketchy carelessness and improbability to pass for originality, and to lead many people into thinking that the author could do much greater things if he liked. How far “Altiora Peto” has complicated or dispelled this notion it is impossible to say, though it is said to have been favourably received. We are, therefore, the more bound to confess at once that we have found it entirely dull and uninteresting, both in detail and as a whole…. After searching diligently and anxiously we really cannot find a single thing to praise in this book, unless it be the grammar and spelling, and the big print and thick paper; but all that is a poor compliment. Of course, one feels that Mr. Oliphant is a practised writer, and a man of ability and culture, and that there is nothing to reprobate or make game of in his work. All the same, it is as clear as his print that he has no more idea of what a novel should be than a mummy, and that he never can and never will write a novel worth yawning over.

  He has taken little or no pains; he has insufficient knowledge of many subjects of which he treats; the book [“Haifa”] is scrappy, careless, and unconnected, being a mere series of hasty letters scribbled off for the columns of a New York newspaper, and reprinted without arrangement, condensation, or due revision; and yet, in spite of all these defects, it possesses the delightful and indescribable flavour of genius.

  By an obvious law of its evolutionary progress physical science has of late years passed into the region of the infinitesimally minute…. It is a field in which Mr. Oliphant’s imagination runs riot to an excess which I at least have never seen surpassed…. He explores the world of spirits with a self assurance which no materialist investigating the laws of matter could possibly rival.

  In 1888 he published “Scientific Religion,” perhaps the least read of his works, though it was the one which he valued himself the most. It contains the history of the opinions he finally reached. The style is difficult and somewhat repellent, and the ideas extremely hard of comprehension to ordinary readers, while it is difficult to understand the union of belief in the verbal inspiration of the canon, with profound distrust of the Churches which fixed that canon. Still there are passages of great beauty, and in many points the differences between his ideas and those of the Christian Churches are rather matters of phraseology than of dogma.

  But the generation, not only of his contemporaries but of their children, must be exhausted indeed before the name of Laurence Oliphant will cease to conjure up memories of all that was most brilliant in intellect, most tender in heart, most trenchant in attack, most eager to succour in life. There has been no such bold satirist, no such cynic philosopher, no such devoted enthusiast, no adventurer so daring and gay, no religious teacher so absolute and visionary, in this Victorian age, now beginning to round towards its end, and which holds in its long and brilliant roll no more attractive and interesting name.

  Oliphant’s failures, however, as a son, as a student, as a husband, as a lawyer, as a diplomatist, as a parliamentarian, as a religionist, as a business man, and as a colonizer, did not prevent him from being an agreeable talker and a clever writer of travels and social satire. Doctor O. W. Holmes is said to have thought him the most interesting man in England. “The Tender Recollections of Irene Macgillicuddy” and “The Autobiography of a Joint Stock Company” are humorously exaggerated sketches of traits popularly supposed by the English to be characteristically American. “Fashionable Philosophy” and “Piccadilly” treat British idols in the same spirit. It would be a mistake to suppose that any of Oliphant’s writings are destined to live, or to be read by posterity. The contemporary interest attaching to some of them was largely due to the fact that they were opportune, and of the nature of news touching localities such as the Crimea, to which the popular attention was turned. The interest was thus largely factitious, not inherent. Except in so far as they are bound up with “Blackwood’s Magazine,” copies of his works are seldom to be found in the bookstores or libraries.

  This extraordinary book [“Sympneumata”] was dictated by Alice, written out by Laurence—revealed to the woman, but communicated by the man. It was their confession of faith, but more perplexing than enlightening. General Gordon read the MS. on his way to Khartoum, and wished it written from a more Biblical point of view, as, though, he said, “it contained nothing that was not to be found in the Bible, yet few would recognise it, and it would frighten the majority.”… In his writings sometimes the one nature is in full possession, sometimes the other. In “The Autobiography of a Joint-Stock Company,” “The Tender Recollections of Irene Macgillicuddy,” “The Episodes of a Wandering Life,” “The Land of Gilead,” “Haifa,” &c., we have the bold satirist, the cynical philosopher, the boyish fun of the young attaché, or the observing traveller. In others, such as, “The Turkish Effendi,” “Sympneumata,” “Scientific Religion,” &c., we have the opposite side—the dreamer, the mystic, who can find no use for life but to “cast it before the feet of the human brotherhood in ceaseless and organic service.” Then we have “Piccadilly,” “The Reconstruction of the Sheepfolds,” “The Land of Khemi,” “Altiora Peto,” in which both natures intermingle. In “Piccadilly” we have keen satire mixed with the most serious exposition of the duty of living “the inner life.” In “The Sheepfolds,” he is in his most flippant mood, and yet the purport of it is to prove that there is “a dead silence on the part of the Church on the intricate problem of human life.” “The Land of Khemi” is a rather bald description of the country in which he was travelling, not written in his usual fascinating style, but towards the end bringing forward his peculiar views on the Egyptians and Buddhism.

  Oliphant was a man of brilliant literary ability, and he proved that his brain was a keen, and a true, and a cultured one, not only by the books he produced but by the intelligence he displayed in that most difficult of tasks, a newspaper war-correspondent. We have, of course, only to read his novel of “Piccadilly” to see that a strong religious vein ran through his mind, but one would have thought that in his pious moods he would have looked at religion from a very high standard, and have treated it in the most dignified fashion.

  His “Piccadilly,” very brightly written, is not a novel proper, but a satire directed against the various hypocrisies and corruptions of society. He had come, he says, to think that the world at large was a “lunatic asylum,” a common opinion among persons not themselves conspicuous for sanity. He mentions in it “the greatest poet of the age,” “Thomas Lake Harris,” author of “The Great Republic: a Poem of the Sun.” Harris is also typified as a mysterious prophet who meets the hero, and was, in fact, the head of a community in America. The creed appears to have been the usual mixture of scraps of misunderstood philosophy and science, with peculiar views about “physical sensations” caused by the life of Christ in man, and a theory that marriage should be a Platonic relation. Oliphant had also some belief in “spiritualism,” though he came to regard it as rather diabolical than divine.

  Among the various later-day mystics who have laid claim to supernatural revelations in regard to the life and being of man, that brilliant and energetic Englishman, Laurence Oliphant, holds conspicuous place by reason of his many gifts, his position in society, the superb self-sacrifice he showed in the pursuit of occult knowledge, and his devotion to high spiritual ideals. In his beautiful and accomplished wife, Alice L’Estrange, he found a devoted co-worker. Through them was given to the world the singular work so strangely entitled “Sympneumata.”… Through all his adventurous life, despite his literary ambitions, and beneath the polished exterior of a society man, Laurence Oliphant was ever of a deeply spiritual nature, finding no real happiness or solid satisfaction in either society, adventure, or gratified ambitions…. There is much in the book somewhat reasonable and truly inspiring and uplifting, especially in its portrayal of a grander humanity, strong, unselfish, pure, and intellectually great, filled with divinely tender love towards all in God’s universe.