Lake observes that ‘a trans-national analytic frame that connects the global to the local also serves to illuminate the subjective self-constitution of key individuals in the story’.[63] While drawn from the world, Deakin’s reading fed an intensified, inward-looking subjectivity—and fed an awareness that, as he observed in 1904, ‘I act alone, live alone and think alone’.[64] It was this emphatic solitude that stood in such contrast with his rapturous longing that humanity would achieve, as he hoped in 1911, a holistic empathy and unity, in all its various and inexhaustible creativeness ‘of the all in each, of the One in all, of the all in all’.
Bauman argues that fin de siècle modernism confronted modernity and its quest for holistic order and knowledge with its own impossibility.[65] Deakin tried to find in the diaspora of his imagination what he could not find in Australia. His struggles reflect the idea of mastery and certainty represented by liberal modernity and placed as a demand on the nation and on the self. Such a demanding self-discipline, and such a powerful transcendence, was not available in human experience, and in Deakin’s case was increasingly undermined by 1911 by ill health and failing memory, the clamouring demands of public duty and an intimidating accumulation of knowledge that defied comprehensive assimilation or analysis.
By October 1911, all the carefully accumulated wisdom that Deakin had stored in his mind and recorded in his reading lists was dissipating even as it seemed to him to open up ‘vast regions of liberties, possibilities and promise’:
Unhappily my whole memory…of the work of theosophists…and their resurrection of ancient texts and of the various gospels, all of which even the Koran have their mystical implications, has vanished except in results, inchoate indistinguishable as to source, & more or less transmuted by being heaped together in that loose bag which represents my mind. This very inapposite break away from my purpose when commencing to write tells its own story of my meandering fidelity.[66]
This meandering fidelity provided its own compelling story. On 15 October 1911, Deakin tried to recall some lines of poetry:
This morning waking in the peace of a Sunday it took me some time before I could recollect to whom I was indebted for the exquisite and apposite fragment of verse that floated into my consciousness ‘The peace that man did not make and cannot mar’—that was all I could recover even when I remembered Arnold’s ‘In Kensington Gardens’ as the source. Such a hopeless wreck is my immediately effective memory.[67]
Alfred Deakin could achieve peace, if only in fragments. Remembering Matthew Arnold, Deakin cast his mind back to a moment of imaginative familiarity, an Australian-born child of the British diaspora who identified with the poet strolling in London’s Kensington Gardens. Deakin and Arnold did not really have ‘place’ in common: they shared, as Arnold concluded the poem, the quest to live and to achieve peace before they died.
[63] Lake, Marilyn 2003, ‘White man’s country: the trans-national history of a national project’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 122, October, p. 360.
[64] Gabay, The Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin, p. 66.
[65] Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, ft. 1, p. 4.
[66] Deakin Papers, MSS1540/3/281, A5 red-spine notebook, 7 October 1911, NLA, p. 152.
[67] Ibid., p. 161.