Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

THE EXILE 51

then the results could be literally world-changing. This was the project which Graham was invited to join. He responded by trying to arrange introductions for Mitrinovic to various people of consequence with whom he had contact. One of these was the Earl of Sandwich, but Mitrinovi¢ “half-closed his eyes as if beginning to pull down the shutters of a shop, and he did not ask him to join his secret society.” Graham also tried, unsuccessfully, to arouse the interest of G.R.S. Meade, the theosophist and gnostic scholar, and Father Fynes Clinton, the rector of St. Magnus the Martyr.

Mitrinovié, for his part, sought to interest Patrick Geddes in his ideas and in the Blutbund initiative. Geddes was, in the late summer of 1915, engaged in organising a course at King’s College, London, on the problems of the war and the post-war period. The meeting between the two men took place over the dinner table at the flat of a young woman who planned to go to Serbia to work as a nurse and who was learning Serbian from Mitrinovi¢.27 The evening had been arranged by a mutual acquaintance, Philip Mairet, who was at the time employed by Geddes to design walldiagrams for his lectures. Geddes was renowned for having an opinion upon every subject under the sun and for his habit of taking any opportunity to pronounce his views at length. Geddes left early and remarked to Mairet as he went out, “Tell your friend that I shall be pleased to contradict him upon any subject he may choose.” Mitrinovié, for his part, enquired of the hostess as to the precise nature of Geddes’ fame. When told that Geddes had made his name as a scientist he sighed: “Ah, I see—a popular scientist.”2 Geddes returned to India shortly after this encounter. Paradoxically, when he returned, knighted but broken in health and ignored by the academics and intellectuals of Britain in 1931, it was to be Mitrinovi¢ who provided him with a platform and a ready made following in London in the form of the New Europe Group of which Geddes became the President. Philip Mairet was later to recall his first encounter with Mitrinovié, the man with whom he was to be intimately associated for over a decade: it had been at the Mestrovié exhibition at the Victoria and Albert where Mitrinovié had acted as a guide for Mairet and his party.

He was a little late, for which he apologised with the courtesy and charm of an accomplished diplomat. He was a tall dark handsome man, attired in the black frock coat of an official or a business executive, who spoke with a strong foreign accent but with noticeable freedom, fluency, and even eloquence. Beginning with the architectural model [Model of “Temple of Kossovo”], he plunged at once into a moving description of the popular traditions and aspirations that had inspired this monument and the specimens of sculpture grouped around it. These, however, were presented or interpreted as illustrations and symbols of