BOOK V.
THE EFFECTS OF THE ELIXIR.
CHAPTER 5.I.
Frommet's den Schleier aufzuheben,
Wo das nahe Schreckness droht?
Nur das Irrthum ist das Leben
Und das Wissen ist der Tod,
--Schiller, Kassandro.
Delusion is the life we live
And knowledge death; oh wherefore, then,
To sight the coming evils give
And lift the veil of Fate to Man?
Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust.
(Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast.)
...
Was stehst du so, und blickst erstaunt hinaus?
(Why standest thou so, and lookest out astonished?)
"Faust."
It will be remembered that we left Master Paolo by the bedside of
Glyndon; and as, waking from that profound slumber, the
recollections of the past night came horribly back to his mind,
the Englishman uttered a cry, and covered his face with his
hands.
"Good morrow, Excellency!" said Paolo, gayly. "Corpo di Bacco,
you have slept soundly!"
The sound of this man's voice, so lusty, ringing, and healthful,
served to scatter before it the phantasma that yet haunted
Glyndon's memory.
He rose erect in his bed. "And where did you find me? Why are
you here?"
"Where did I find you!" repeated Paolo, in surprise,--"in your
bed, to be sure. Why am I here!--because the Padrone bade me
await your waking, and attend your commands."
"The Padrone, Mejnour!--is he arrived?"
"Arrived and departed, signor. He has left this letter for you."
"Give it me, and wait without till I am dressed."
"At your service. I have bespoke an excellent breakfast: you
must be hungry. I am a very tolerable cook; a monk's son ought
to be! You will be startled at my genius in the dressing of
fish. My singing, I trust, will not disturb you. I always sing
while I prepare a salad; it harmonises the ingredients." And
slinging his carbine over his shoulder, Paolo sauntered from the
room, and closed the door.
Glyndon was already deep in the contents of the following
letter:--
"When I first received thee as my pupil, I promised Zanoni, if
convinced by thy first trials that thou couldst but swell, not
the number of our order, but the list of the victims who have
aspired to it in vain, I would not rear thee to thine own
wretchedness and doom,--I would dismiss thee back to the world.
I fulfil my promise. Thine ordeal has been the easiest that
neophyte ever knew. I asked for nothing but abstinence from the
sensual, and a brief experiment of thy patience and thy faith.
Go back to thine own world; thou hast no nature to aspire to
ours!
"It was I who prepared Paolo to receive thee at the revel. It
was I who instigated the old beggar to ask thee for alms. It was
I who left open the book that thou couldst not read without
violating my command. Well, thou hast seen what awaits thee at
the threshold of knowledge. Thou hast confronted the first foe
that menaces him whom the senses yet grasp and inthrall. Dost
thou wonder that I close upon thee the gates forever? Dost thou
not comprehend, at last, that it needs a soul tempered and
purified and raised, not by external spells, but by its own
sublimity and valour, to pass the threshold and disdain the foe?
Wretch! all my silence avails nothing for the rash, for the
sensual,--for him who desires our secrets but to pollute them to
gross enjoyments and selfish vice. How have the imposters and
sorcerers of the earlier times perished by their very attempt to
penetrate the mysteries that should purify, and not deprave!
They have boasted of the Philosopher's Stone, and died in rags;
of the immortal elixir, and sunk to their grave, grey before
their time. Legends tell you that the fiend rent them into
fragments. Yes; the fiend of their own unholy desires and
criminal designs! What they coveted, thou covetest; and if thou
hadst the wings of a seraph thou couldst soar not from the slough
of thy mortality. Thy desire for knowledge, but petulant
presumption; thy thirst for happiness, but the diseased longing
for the unclean and muddied waters of corporeal pleasure; thy
very love, which usually elevates even the mean, a passion that
calculates treason amidst the first glow of lust. THOU one of
us; thou a brother of the August Order; thou an Aspirant to the
Stars that shine in the Shemaia of the Chaldean lore! The eagle
can raise but the eaglet to the sun. I abandon thee to thy
twilight!
"But, alas for thee, disobedient and profane! thou hast inhaled
the elixir; thou hast attracted to thy presence a ghastly and
remorseless foe. Thou thyself must exorcise the phantom thou
hast raised. Thou must return to the world; but not without
punishment and strong effort canst thou regain the calm and the
joy of the life thou hast left behind. This, for thy comfort,
will I tell thee: he who has drawn into his frame even so little
of the volatile and vital energy of the aerial juices as thyself,
has awakened faculties that cannot sleep,--faculties that may
yet, with patient humility, with sound faith, and the courage
that is not of the body like thine, but of the resolute and
virtuous mind, attain, if not to the knowledge that reigns above,
to high achievement in the career of men. Thou wilt find the
restless influence in all that thou wouldst undertake. Thy
heart, amidst vulgar joys will aspire to something holier; thy
ambition, amidst coarse excitement, to something beyond thy
reach. But deem not that this of itself will suffice for glory.
Equally may the craving lead thee to shame and guilt. It is but
an imperfect and new-born energy which will not suffer thee to
repose. As thou directest it, must thou believe it to be the
emanation of thine evil genius or thy good.
"But woe to thee! insect meshed in the web in which thou hast
entangled limbs and wings! Thou hast not only inhaled the
elixir, thou hast conjured the spectre; of all the tribes of the
space, no foe is so malignant to man,--and thou hast lifted the
veil from thy gaze. I cannot restore to thee the happy dimness
of thy vision. Know, at least, that all of us--the highest and
the wisest--who have, in sober truth, passed beyond the
threshold, have had, as our first fearful task, to master and
subdue its grisly and appalling guardian. Know that thou CANST
deliver thyself from those livid eyes,--know that, while they
haunt, they cannot harm, if thou resistest the thoughts to which
they tempt, and the horror they engender. DREAD THEM MOST WHEN
THOU BEHOLDEST THEM NOT. And thus, son of the worm, we part!
All that I can tell thee to encourage, yet to warn and to guide,
I have told thee in these lines. Not from me, from thyself has
come the gloomy trial from which I yet trust thou wilt emerge
into peace. Type of the knowledge that I serve, I withhold no
lesson from the pure aspirant; I am a dark enigma to the general
seeker. As man's only indestructible possession is his memory,
so it is not in mine art to crumble into matter the immaterial
thoughts that have sprung up within thy breast. The tyro might
shatter this castle to the dust, and topple down the mountain to
the plain. The master has no power to say, 'Exist no more,' to
one THOUGHT that his knowledge has inspired. Thou mayst change
the thoughts into new forms; thou mayst rarefy and sublimate it
into a finer spirit,--but thou canst not annihilate that which
has no home but in the memory, no substance but the idea. EVERY
THOUGHT IS A SOUL! Vainly, therefore, would I or thou undo the
past, or restore to thee the gay blindness of thy youth. Thou
must endure the influence of the elixir thou hast inhaled; thou
must wrestle with the spectre thou hast invoked!"
The letter fell from Glyndon's hand. A sort of stupor succeeded
to the various emotions which had chased each other in the
perusal,--a stupor resembling that which follows the sudden
destruction of any ardent and long-nursed hope in the human
heart, whether it be of love, of avarice, of ambition. The
loftier world for which he had so thirsted, sacrificed, and
toiled, was closed upon him "forever," and by his own faults of
rashness and presumption. But Glyndon's was not of that nature
which submits long to condemn itself. His indignation began to
kindle against Mejnour, who owned he had tempted, and who now
abandoned him,--abandoned him to the presence of a spectre. The
mystic's reproaches stung rather than humbled him. What crime
had he committed to deserve language so harsh and disdainful?
Was it so deep a debasement to feel pleasure in the smile and the
eyes of Fillide? Had not Zanoni himself confessed love for
Viola; had he not fled with her as his companion? Glyndon never
paused to consider if there are no distinctions between one kind
of love and another. Where, too, was the great offence of
yielding to a temptation which only existed for the brave? Had
not the mystic volume which Mejnour had purposely left open, bid
him but "Beware of fear"? Was not, then, every wilful
provocative held out to the strongest influences of the human
mind, in the prohibition to enter the chamber, in the possession
of the key which excited his curiosity, in the volume which
seemed to dictate the mode by which the curiosity was to be
gratified? As rapidly these thoughts passed over him, he began
to consider the whole conduct of Mejnour either as a perfidious
design to entrap him to his own misery, or as the trick of an
imposter, who knew that he could not realise the great
professions he had made. On glancing again over the more
mysterious threats and warnings in Mejnour's letter, they seemed
to assume the language of mere parable and allegory,--the jargon
of the Platonists and Pythagoreans. By little and little, he
began to consider that the very spectra he had seen--even that
one phantom so horrid in its aspect--were but the delusions which
Mejnour's science had enable him to raise. The healthful
sunlight, filling up every cranny in his chamber, seemed to laugh
away the terrors of the past night. His pride and his resentment
nerved his habitual courage; and when, having hastily dressed
himself, he rejoined Paolo, it was with a flushed cheek and a
haughty step.
"So, Paolo," said he, "the Padrone, as you call him, told you to
expect and welcome me at your village feast?"
"He did so by a message from a wretched old cripple. This
surprised me at the time, for I thought he was far distant; but
these great philosophers make a joke of two or three hundred
leagues."
"Why did you not tell me you had heard from Mejnour?"
"Because the old cripple forbade me."
"Did you not see the man afterwards during the dance?"
"No, Excellency."
"Humph!"
"Allow me to serve you," said Paolo, piling Glyndon's plate, and
then filling his glass. "I wish, signor, now the Padrone is
gone,--not," added Paolo, as he cast rather a frightened and
suspicious glance round the room, "that I mean to say anything
disrespectful of him,--I wish, I say, now that he is gone, that
you would take pity on yourself, and ask your own heart what your
youth was meant for? Not to bury yourself alive in these old
ruins, and endanger body and soul by studies which I am sure no
saint could approve of."
"Are the saints so partial, then, to your own occupations, Master
Paolo?"
"Why," answered the bandit, a little confused, "a gentleman with
plenty of pistoles in his purse need not, of necessity, make it
his profession to take away the pistoles of other people! It is
a different thing for us poor rogues. After all, too, I always
devote a tithe of my gains to the Virgin; and I share the rest
charitably with the poor. But eat, drink, enjoy yourself; be
absolved by your confessor for any little peccadilloes and don't
run too long scores at a time,--that's my advice. Your health,
Excellency! Pshaw, signor, fasting, except on the days
prescribed to a good Catholic, only engenders phantoms."
"Phantoms!"
"Yes; the devil always tempts the empty stomach. To covet, to
hate, to thieve, to rob, and to murder,--these are the natural
desires of a man who is famishing. With a full belly, signor, we
are at peace with all the world. That's right; you like the
partridge! Cospetto! when I myself have passed two or three days
in the mountains, with nothing from sunset to sunrise but a black
crust and an onion, I grow as fierce as a wolf. That's not the
worst, too. In these times I see little imps dancing before me.
Oh, yes; fasting is as full of spectres as a field of battle."
Glyndon thought there was some sound philosophy in the reasoning
of his companion; and certainly the more he ate and drank, the
more the recollection of the past night and of Mejnour's
desertion faded from his mind. The casement was open, the breeze
blew, the sun shone,--all Nature was merry; and merry as Nature
herself grew Maestro Paolo. He talked of adventures, of travel,
of women, with a hearty gusto that had its infection. But
Glyndon listened yet more complacently when Paolo turned with an
arch smile to praises of the eye, the teeth, the ankles, and the
shape of the handsome Fillide.
This man, indeed, seemed the very personation of animal sensual
life. He would have been to Faust a more dangerous tempter than
Mephistopheles. There was no sneer on HIS lip at the pleasures
which animated his voice. To one awaking to a sense of the
vanities in knowledge, this reckless ignorant joyousness of
temper was a worse corrupter than all the icy mockeries of a
learned Fiend. But when Paolo took his leave, with a promise to
return the next day, the mind of the Englishman again settled
back to a graver and more thoughtful mood. The elixir seemed, in
truth, to have left the refining effects Mejnour had ascribed to
it. As Glyndon paced to and fro the solitary corridor, or,
pausing, gazed upon the extended and glorious scenery that
stretched below, high thoughts of enterprise and ambition--bright
visions of glory--passed in rapid succession through his soul.
"Mejnour denies me his science. Well," said the painter,
proudly, "he has not robbed me of my art."
What! Clarence Glyndon, dost thou return to that from which thy
career commenced? Was Zanoni right after all?
He found himself in the chamber of the mystic; not a vessel,--not
an herb! the solemn volume is vanished,--the elixir shall sparkle
for him no more! But still in the room itself seems to linger
the atmosphere of a charm. Faster and fiercer it burns within
thee, the desire to achieve, to create! Thou longest for a life
beyond the sensual!--but the life that is permitted to all
genius,--that which breathes through the immortal work, and
endures in the imperishable name.
Where are the implements for thine art? Tush!--when did the true
workman ever fail to find his tools? Thou art again in thine own
chamber,--the white wall thy canvas, a fragment of charcoal for
thy pencil. They suffice, at least, to give outline to the
conception that may otherwise vanish with the morrow.
The idea that thus excited the imagination of the artist was
unquestionably noble and august. It was derived from that
Egyptian ceremonial which Diodorus has recorded,--the Judgment of
the Dead by the Living (Diod., lib. i.): when the corpse, duly
embalmed, is placed by the margin of the Acherusian Lake; and
before it may be consigned to the bark which is to bear it across
the waters to its final resting-place, it is permitted to the
appointed judges to hear all accusations of the past life of the
deceased, and, if proved, to deprive the corpse of the rites of
sepulture.
Unconsciously to himself, it was Mejnour's description of this
custom, which he had illustrated by several anecdotes not to be
found in books, that now suggested the design to the artist, and
gave it reality and force. He supposed a powerful and guilty
king whom in life scarce a whisper had dared to arraign, but
against whom, now the breath was gone, came the slave from his
fetters, the mutilated victim from his dungeon, livid and squalid
as if dead themselves, invoking with parched lips the justice
that outlives the grave.
Strange fervour this, O artist! breaking suddenly forth from the
mists and darkness which the occult science had spread so long
over thy fancies,--strange that the reaction of the night's
terror and the day's disappointment should be back to thine holy
art! Oh, how freely goes the bold hand over the large outline!
How, despite those rude materials, speaks forth no more the
pupil, but the master! Fresh yet from the glorious elixir, how
thou givest to thy creatures the finer life denied to thyself!--
some power not thine own writes the grand symbols on the wall.
Behind rises the mighty sepulchre, on the building of which
repose to the dead the lives of thousands had been consumed.
There sit in a semicircle the solemn judges. Black and sluggish
flows the lake. There lies the mummied and royal dead. Dost
thou quail at the frown on his lifelike brow? Ha!--bravely done,
O artist!--up rise the haggard forms!--pale speak the ghastly
faces! Shall not Humanity after death avenge itself on Power?
Thy conception, Clarence Glyndon, is a sublime truth; thy design
promises renown to genius. Better this magic than the charms of
the volume and the vessel. Hour after hour has gone; thou hast
lighted the lamp; night sees thee yet at thy labour. Merciful
Heaven! what chills the atmosphere; why does the lamp grow wan;
why does thy hair bristle? There!--there!--there! at the
casement! It gazes on thee, the dark, mantled, loathsome thing!
There, with their devilish mockery and hateful craft, glare on
thee those horrid eyes!
He stood and gazed,--it was no delusion. It spoke not, moved
not, till, unable to bear longer that steady and burning look, he
covered his face with his hands. With a start, with a thrill, he
removed them; he felt the nearer presence of the nameless. There
it cowered on the floor beside his design; and lo! the figures
seemed to start from the wall! Those pale accusing figures, the
shapes he himself had raised, frowned at him, and gibbered. With
a violent effort that convulsed his whole being, and bathed his
body in the sweat of agony, the young man mastered his horror.
He strode towards the phantom; he endured its eyes; he accosted
it with a steady voice; he demanded its purpose and defied its
power.
And then, as a wind from a charnel, was heard its voice. What it
said, what revealed, it is forbidden the lips to repeat, the hand
to record. Nothing save the subtle life that yet animated the
frame to which the inhalations of the elixir had given vigour and
energy beyond the strength of the strongest, could have survived
that awful hour. Better to wake in the catacombs and see the
buried rise from their cerements, and hear the ghouls, in their
horrid orgies, amongst the festering ghastliness of corruption,
than to front those features when the veil was lifted, and listen
to that whispered voice!
...
The next day Glyndon fled from the ruined castle. With what
hopes of starry light had he crossed the threshold; with what
memories to shudder evermore at the darkness did he look back at
the frown of its time-worn towers!
