‘Oh’ said Jack, ‘My father’s whiskey is very white, Sir, there’s more there than it looks’. ‘It’s not the look, it’s the taste’ said the King. ‘And you a Gordon Highlander!’19
The inevitable laughter must have rankled with White and the anger probably still lurked deep within him when, a couple of years later, he was swearing two young recruits in Aberdeen to ‘an allegiance to their liege Lord Edward, his heirs and successors’. This was all ‘irrespective of Lord Edward’s moral condition’, of which he did not approve, so it became the actual moment that precipitated White abandoning his military career.20
White at this stage of his life was living what can only be described as a sybaritic existence. He was the governor’s son with duties of the pleasantest kind and a licence to indulge in his passion for horses. As an old Wykehamist, a graduate of Sandhurst, a decorated war hero, on familiar terms with most of the military powers of the moment, including Kitchener himself, and clearly intelligent, he was set for a very successful career. He had dined with royalty and had become familiar with the affluent power-brokers that accompanied Edward. He was an ideal product and future custodian of the British Empire, the greatest socio-economic structure the world had ever seen. Although it would be another two years before he left the army and formally began to part ways with almost everything he had been bred for, White, according to his autobiography, had already abandoned the values of this society to pursue what he could not articulate.
Inner Life and the ‘Liqueur Sensation’
From a young age White displayed an inability to accept any instruction or diktat without questioning and examining the alternatives. Although his life took a course that seemed to have cancelled out his earlier misgivings and unease, and he had found himself as successful as any other young officer in his position, there lurked under the surface a rebelliousness or an unwillingness to accept the ready path laid out before him. This seeming perversity led him on a road to self-destruction. That is, of course, if the conventional criteria of success being wealth and fame are applied. White’s daemons appeared to urge him to pursue matters beyond the mundane; he had little interest in the social aspirations of his peers. R.B. McDowell, biographer of Alice Stopford Green, the nationalist historian, wrote that White ‘was in many ways a most unworldly man’ and this is probably as perceptive an observation as has been made about him.21 While in Gibraltar White had a transcendent experience which he maintained justified the path he took and somehow blessed his eccentricities despite his friends’ and family’s misgivings.
Displaying what must have been at times an unnerving certainty, White never shrank from the challenge of confronting himself, even in his most egregious behaviour. John Cowper Powys, commenting on a piece of White’s writing, now lost, said it was ‘the most honest attempt he had ever read of a man or woman attempting to explain themselves’.22 This seems to have been the hallmark of White from his time in Gibraltar. His autobiography is replete with musings over the conundrum that he saw himself to be. Unlike many autobiographies, White’s makes no attempt at justifying his actions, which he spelled out, sometimes in their sheer indefensible ugliness. It is doubtful, for example, that many other writers would recount the incident where he had an Indian whipped whose only crime was the irritation he caused White.23 A review of his autobiography in 1930 described it as ‘the most egotistical work which will be published this year’, arguing that
It would be difficult to admire Captain White. Probably he does not admire himself. But, despite certain shocking errors of taste, despite borderland vanity, and despite a blindness to the interests of others which simulates cruelty, there still emerges from this acute and witty monograph the shape of a man whom many have loved and followed, a figure not without grotesque heroism, and a soul that followed its star all dismayed.24
While some comments are disputable, the acuity of these observations leads one to suspect that the writer John Still had an insight into White based on more than the book itself. The next period of this ‘soul that followed its star all dismayed’ began in a wandering both geographical and psychological, that, for all his subsequent adventures, was primarily spiritual.
White’s enthrallment with Maria de las Mercedes Ana Luisa Carmen Dolores (Dollie) Mosley coincided with the first occurrence of the ‘liqueur sensation’ that he placed so much emphasis on for the rest of his life, or at least until the time of his autobiography in 1930. There are few references to it in his late letters, but it is not unreasonable to accept that as a seminal experience it served to give a coherence to his inner beliefs, which remained more or less consistent to the end. Although caution must be adopted by recalling that the only records of substance of his inner life were not written until he had reached the age of 50 or thereabouts, questioning their reliability too much would be to cavil unnecessarily.
White described this phenomenon for the first time as a ‘most pleasurable sensation in the middle of my chest, as if I had just drunk a strong liqueur’.25 It seems to have lasted at least an hour or more and reached some kind of intensity as he was reading a telegram about the Russo-Japanese War, which, oddly, was the topic that initially sparked the experience. Whatever it was, it served White as a satisfactory explanation for later behaviour that contributed to his reputation for incorrigibility; he believed it was the driving force that lead him ‘out of the army, to Canada, in to various prisons and awkward predicaments beyond number’.26 When he left India, barely avoiding a charge of desertion by getting the personal permission of Kitchener to return temporarily to Europe in order to pursue Dollie, White gave this sensation as the justification for what appeared to be a ‘mental aberration’. He developed it into a kind of personal spiritual guidance which, although not as dramatic as the ‘absolute faith […] that is reported of Joan of Arc’, still was ‘wonderful evidence of intelligent guidance’ beyond the ordinary. He did not lay claim to ‘actual clairaudience or clairvoyance. The impulse to action was always this sensation in my chest accompanied by a mental sensation of co-operation with a scientific law beyond my formulation or comprehension’.27
It is not within the ambit of this work to theorise on the nature of this experience of his, or the fact that he placed such credence in it, but undoubtedly it is a more common occurrence than is generally acknowledged. From the time of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) there has been a regular academic reporting of similar phenomena. White himself maintained that American transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman experienced this, as had others like the English poet, socialist, and mystic Edward Carpenter. He recorded his attempts to find references to it among the philosophers. Henri Bergson’s perspective on the higher intellect provided him with some insight into his ‘sensation’. He dismissed Richard Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness as too elitist, ‘confined to a handful of notorieties!’28 However, more recently, Alan Watts, Protestant clergyman turned Zen Buddhist, comments on Bucke in a manner that suggests similarities to White’s experience:
The most impressive fact in man’s spiritual, intellectual, and poetic experience has always been, for me, the universal prevalence of those astonishing moments of insight which Richard Bucke called ‘cosmic consciousness’. There is really no satisfactory name for this type of experience. To call it mystical is to confuse it with visions of another world, or of gods and angels. To call it spiritual or metaphysical is to suggest it is not also extremely concrete and physical, while the term ‘cosmic consciousness’ itself had the unpoetic flavour of occultist jargon. But from all historical times and cultures we have reports of this same unmistakable sensation emerging, as a rule, quite suddenly and unexpectedly and from no clearly understood cause.29
White’s penchant for religious conviction and experience lasted all his life, and towards the end, aware that he was dying, there is a continual stream of references to resources beyond the temporal. Characteristically, there are none of the more conventional pleas for relief for his terminal illness or expressions of confidence in being taken care of. He did not appear to believe that the spiritual had anything to do with his personal concerns, which must have been pressing, considering the pain he was enduring. He describes particularly unpleasant experiences to his niece, but without recourse to religion:
returning from […] Ballymena, having weathered the strain, as I thought, pretty well, I was suddenly seized with a violent fit of nose bleeding in Ballymena station.