Zanoni

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ZANONI

BY

EDWARD BULWER LYTTON


(PLATE: "Thou art good and fair," said Viola. Drawn by P. Kauffmann,
etched by Deblois.)


DEDICATORY EPISTLE First prefixed to the Edition of 1845


TO

JOHN GIBSON, R.A., SCULPTOR.

In looking round the wide and luminous circle of our great living
Englishmen, to select one to whom I might fitly dedicate this work,--one
who, in his life as in his genius, might illustrate the principle I have
sought to convey; elevated by the ideal which he exalts, and
serenely dwelling in a glorious existence with the images born of his
imagination,--in looking round for some such man, my thoughts rested
upon you. Afar from our turbulent cabals; from the ignoble jealousy and
the sordid strife which degrade and acerbate the ambition of Genius,--in
your Roman Home, you have lived amidst all that is loveliest and least
perishable in the past, and contributed with the noblest aims, and in
the purest spirit, to the mighty heirlooms of the future. Your youth has
been devoted to toil, that your manhood may be consecrated to fame: a
fame unsullied by one desire of gold. You have escaped the two worst
perils that beset the artist in our time and land,--the debasing
tendencies of commerce, and the angry rivalries of competition. You have
not wrought your marble for the market,--you have not been tempted, by
the praises which our vicious criticism has showered upon exaggeration
and distortion, to lower your taste to the level of the hour; you
have lived, and you have laboured, as if you had no rivals but in the
dead,--no purchasers, save in judges of what is best. In the divine
priesthood of the beautiful, you have sought only to increase her
worshippers and enrich her temples. The pupil of Canova, you have
inherited his excellences, while you have shunned his errors,--yours his
delicacy, not his affectation. Your heart resembles him even more
than your genius: you have the same noble enthusiasm for your sublime
profession; the same lofty freedom from envy, and the spirit that
depreciates; the same generous desire not to war with but to serve
artists in your art; aiding, strengthening, advising, elevating the
timidity of inexperience, and the vague aspirations of youth. By
the intuition of a kindred mind, you have equalled the learning
of Winckelman, and the plastic poetry of Goethe, in the intimate
comprehension of the antique. Each work of yours, rightly studied, is in
itself a CRITICISM, illustrating the sublime secrets of the Grecian
Art, which, without the servility of plagiarism, you have contributed to
revive amongst us; in you we behold its three great and long-undetected
principles,--simplicity, calm, and concentration.

But your admiration of the Greeks has not led you to the bigotry of
the mere antiquarian, nor made you less sensible of the unappreciated
excellence of the mighty modern, worthy to be your countryman,--though
till his statue is in the streets of our capital, we show ourselves not
worthy of the glory he has shed upon our land. You have not suffered
even your gratitude to Canova to blind you to the superiority of
Flaxman. When we become sensible of our title-deeds to renown in that
single name, we may look for an English public capable of real patronage
to English Art,--and not till then.

I, artist in words, dedicate, then, to you, artist whose ideas speak in
marble, this well-loved work of my matured manhood. I love it not the
less because it has been little understood and superficially judged
by the common herd: it was not meant for them. I love it not the more
because it has found enthusiastic favorers amongst the Few. My affection
for my work is rooted in the solemn and pure delight which it gave me
to conceive and to perform. If I had graven it on the rocks of a desert,
this apparition of my own innermost mind, in its least-clouded moments,
would have been to me as dear; and this ought, I believe, to be the
sentiment with which he whose Art is born of faith in the truth and
beauty of the principles he seeks to illustrate, should regard his work.
Your serener existence, uniform and holy, my lot denies,--if my heart
covets. But our true nature is in our thoughts, not our deeds: and
therefore, in books--which ARE his thoughts--the author's character lies
bare to the discerning eye. It is not in the life of cities,--in the
turmoil and the crowd; it is in the still, the lonely, and more sacred
life, which for some hours, under every sun, the student lives (his
stolen retreat from the Agora to the Cave), that I feel there is between
us the bond of that secret sympathy, that magnetic chain, which unites
the everlasting brotherhood of whose being Zanoni is the type.

E.B.L. London, May, 1845.




INTRODUCTION.

One of the peculiarities of Bulwer was his passion for occult studies.
They had a charm for him early in life, and he pursued them with the
earnestness which characterised his pursuit of other studies. He
became absorbed in wizard lore; he equipped himself with magical
implements,--with rods for transmitting influence, and crystal balls
in which to discern coming scenes and persons; and communed with
spiritualists and mediums. The fruit of these mystic studies is seen in
"Zanoni" and "A strange Story," romances which were a labour of love to
the author, and into which he threw all the power he possessed,--power
re-enforced by multifarious reading and an instinctive appreciation
of Oriental thought. These weird stories, in which the author has
formulated his theory of magic, are of a wholly different type from his
previous fictions, and, in place of the heroes and villains of every
day life, we have beings that belong in part to another sphere, and that
deal with mysterious and occult agencies. Once more the old forgotten
lore of the Cabala is unfolded; the furnace of the alchemist, whose
fires have been extinct for centuries, is lighted anew, and the lamp
of the Rosicrucian re-illumined. No other works of the author,
contradictory as have been the opinions of them, have provoked such
a diversity of criticism as these. To some persons they represent
a temporary aberration of genius rather than any serious thought or
definite purpose; while others regard them as surpassing in bold and
original speculation, profound analysis of character, and thrilling
interest, all of the author's other works. The truth, we believe,
lies midway between these extremes. It is questionable whether the
introduction into a novel of such subjects as are discussed in these
romances be not an offence against good sense and good taste; but it
is as unreasonable to deny the vigour and originality of their author's
conceptions, as to deny that the execution is imperfect, and, at times,
bungling and absurd.

It has been justly said that the present half century has witnessed
the rise and triumphs of science, the extent and marvels of which even
Bacon's fancy never conceived, simultaneously with superstitions grosser
than any which Bacon's age believed. "The one is, in fact, the
natural reaction from the other. The more science seeks to exclude
the miraculous, and reduce all nature, animate and inanimate, to an
invariable law of sequences, the more does the natural instinct of man
rebel, and seek an outlet for those obstinate questionings, those 'blank
misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realised,' taking
refuge in delusions as degrading as any of the so-called Dark Ages." It
was the revolt from the chilling materialism of the age which inspired
the mystic creations of "Zanoni" and "A Strange Story." Of these works,
which support and supplement each other, one is the contemplation of our
actual life through a spiritual medium, the other is designed to show
that, without some gleams of the supernatural, man is not man, nor
nature nature.

In "Zanoni" the author introduces us to two human beings who have
achieved immortality: one, Mejnour, void of all passion or feeling,
calm, benignant, bloodless, an intellect rather than a man; the other,
Zanoni, the pupil of Mejnour, the representative of an ideal life in
its utmost perfection, possessing eternal youth, absolute power, and
absolute knowledge, and withal the fullest capacity to enjoy and to
love, and, as a necessity of that love, to sorrow and despair. By his
love for Viola Zanoni is compelled to descend from his exalted state,
to lose his eternal calm, and to share in the cares and anxieties of
humanity; and this degradation is completed by the birth of a child.
Finally, he gives up the life which hangs on that of another, in order
to save that other, the loving and beloved wife, who has delivered
him from his solitude and isolation. Wife and child are mortal, and to
outlive them and his love for them is impossible. But Mejnour, who is
the impersonation of thought,--pure intellect without affection,--lives
on.

Bulwer has himself justly characterised this work, in the Introduction,
as a romance and not a romance, as a truth for those who can comprehend
it, and an extravagance for those who cannot. The most careless or
matter-of-fact reader must see that the work, like the enigmatical
"Faust," deals in types and symbols; that the writer intends to suggest
to the mind something more subtle and impalpable than that which is
embodied to the senses. What that something is, hardly two persons will
agree. The most obvious interpretation of the types is, that in Zanoni
the author depicts to us humanity, perfected, sublimed, which lives
not for self, but for others; in Mejnour, as we have before said, cold,
passionless, self-sufficing intellect; in Glyndon, the young Englishman,
the mingled strength and weakness of human nature; in the heartless,
selfish artist, Nicot, icy, soulless atheism, believing nothing, hoping
nothing, trusting and loving nothing; and in the beautiful, artless
Viola, an exquisite creation, pure womanhood, loving, trusting and
truthful. As a work of art the romance is one of great power. It is
original in its conception, and pervaded by one central idea; but
it would have been improved, we think, by a more sparing use of the
supernatural. The inevitable effect of so much hackneyed diablerie--of
such an accumulation of wonder upon wonder--is to deaden the impression
they would naturally make upon us. In Hawthorne's tales we see with what
ease a great imaginative artist can produce a deeper thrill by a far
slighter use of the weird and the mysterious.

The chief interest of the story for the ordinary reader centres, not in
its ghostly characters and improbable machinery, the scenes in Mejnour's
chamber in the ruined castle among the Apennines, the colossal and
appalling apparitions on Vesuvius, the hideous phantom with its burning
eye that haunted Glyndon, but in the loves of Viola and the mysterious
Zanoni, the blissful and the fearful scenes through which they pass,
and their final destiny, when the hero of the story sacrifices his
own "charmed life" to save hers, and the Immortal finds the only true
immortality in death. Among the striking passages in the work are the
pathetic sketch of the old violinist and composer, Pisani, with his
sympathetic "barbiton" which moaned, groaned, growled, and laughed
responsive to the feelings of its master; the description of Viola's and
her father's triumph, when "The Siren," his masterpiece, is performed at
the San Carlo in Naples; Glyndon's adventure at the Carnival in Naples;
the death of his sister; the vivid pictures of the Reign of Terror in
Paris, closing with the downfall of Robespierre and his satellites; and
perhaps, above all, the thrilling scene where Zanoni leaves Viola asleep
in prison when his guards call him to execution, and she, unconscious of
the terrible sacrifice, but awaking and missing him, has a vision of the
procession to the guillotine, with Zanoni there, radiant in youth
and beauty, followed by the sudden vanishing of the headsman,--the
horror,--and the "Welcome" of her loved one to Heaven in a myriad of
melodies from the choral hosts above.

"Zanoni" was originally published by Saunders and Otley, London, in
three volumes 12mo., in 1842. A translation into French, made by M.
Sheldon under the direction of P. Lorain, was published in Paris in the
"Bibliotheque des Meilleurs Romans Etrangers."

W.M.




PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1853.

As a work of imagination, "Zanoni" ranks, perhaps, amongst the highest
of my prose fictions. In the Poem of "King Arthur," published many years
afterwards, I have taken up an analogous design, in the contemplation
of our positive life through a spiritual medium; and I have enforced,
through a far wider development, and, I believe, with more complete and
enduring success, that harmony between the external events which are
all that the superficial behold on the surface of human affairs, and the
subtle and intellectual agencies which in reality influence the conduct
of individuals, and shape out the destinies of the world. As man has two
lives,--that of action and that of thought,--so I conceive that work
to be the truest representation of humanity which faithfully delineates
both, and opens some elevating glimpse into the sublimest mysteries of
our being, by establishing the inevitable union that exists between
the plain things of the day, in which our earthly bodies perform their
allotted part, and the latent, often uncultivated, often invisible,
affinities of the soul with all the powers that eternally breathe and
move throughout the Universe of Spirit.

I refer those who do me the honour to read "Zanoni" with more attention
than is given to ordinary romance, to the Poem of "King Arthur," for
suggestive conjecture into most of the regions of speculative research,
affecting the higher and more important condition of our ultimate being,
which have engaged the students of immaterial philosophy in my own age.

Affixed to the "Note" with which this work concludes, and which treats
of the distinctions between type and allegory, the reader will find,
from the pen of one of our most eminent living writers, an ingenious
attempt to explain the interior or typical meanings of the work now
before him.




INTRODUCTION.

It is possible that among my readers there may be a few not unacquainted
with an old-book shop, existing some years since in the neighbourhood
of Covent Garden; I say a few, for certainly there was little enough to
attract the many in those precious volumes which the labour of a life
had accumulated on the dusty shelves of my old friend D--. There were to
be found no popular treatises, no entertaining romances, no histories,
no travels, no "Library for the People," no "Amusement for the Million."
But there, perhaps, throughout all Europe, the curious might discover
the most notable collection, ever amassed by an enthusiast, of the works
of alchemist, cabalist, and astrologer. The owner had lavished a fortune
in the purchase of unsalable treasures. But old D-- did not desire to
sell. It absolutely went to his heart when a customer entered his shop:
he watched the movements of the presumptuous intruder with a vindictive
glare; he fluttered around him with uneasy vigilance,--he frowned, he
groaned, when profane hands dislodged his idols from their niches. If
it were one of the favourite sultanas of his wizard harem that attracted
you, and the price named were not sufficiently enormous, he would not
unfrequently double the sum. Demur, and in brisk delight he snatched the
venerable charmer from your hands; accede, and he became the picture of
despair,--nor unfrequently, at the dead of night, would he knock at your
door, and entreat you to sell him back, at your own terms, what you had
so egregiously bought at his. A believer himself in his Averroes and
Paracelsus, he was as loth as the philosophers he studied to communicate
to the profane the learning he had collected.

It so chanced that some years ago, in my younger days, whether of
authorship or life, I felt a desire to make myself acquainted with
the true origin and tenets of the singular sect known by the name of
Rosicrucians. Dissatisfied with the scanty and superficial accounts to
be found in the works usually referred to on the subject, it struck
me as possible that Mr. D--'s collection, which was rich, not only in
black-letter, but in manuscripts, might contain some more accurate and
authentic records of that famous brotherhood,--written, who knows?
by one of their own order, and confirming by authority and detail the
pretensions to wisdom and to virtue which Bringaret had arrogated to the
successors of the Chaldean and Gymnosophist. Accordingly I repaired to
what, doubtless, I ought to be ashamed to confess, was once one of
my favourite haunts. But are there no errors and no fallacies, in the
chronicles of our own day, as absurd as those of the alchemists of old?
Our very newspapers may seem to our posterity as full of delusions as
the books of the alchemists do to us; not but what the press is the air
we breathe,--and uncommonly foggy the air is too!

On entering the shop, I was struck by the venerable appearance of a
customer whom I had never seen there before. I was struck yet more
by the respect with which he was treated by the disdainful collector.
"Sir," cried the last, emphatically, as I was turning over the leaves of
the catalogue,--"sir, you are the only man I have met, in five-and-forty
years that I have spent in these researches, who is worthy to be my
customer. How--where, in this frivolous age, could you have acquired
a knowledge so profound? And this august fraternity, whose doctrines,
hinted at by the earliest philosophers, are still a mystery to the
latest; tell me if there really exists upon the earth any book,
any manuscript, in which their discoveries, their tenets, are to be
learned?"

At the words, "august fraternity," I need scarcely say that my attention
had been at once aroused, and I listened eagerly for the stranger's
reply.

"I do not think," said the old gentleman, "that the masters of the
school have ever consigned, except by obscure hint and mystical parable,
their real doctrines to the world. And I do not blame them for their
discretion."

Here he paused, and seemed about to retire, when I said, somewhat
abruptly, to the collector, "I see nothing, Mr. D--, in this catalogue
which relates to the Rosicrucians!"

"The Rosicrucians!" repeated the old gentleman, and in his turn he
surveyed me with deliberate surprise. "Who but a Rosicrucian could
explain the Rosicrucian mysteries! And can you imagine that any members
of that sect, the most jealous of all secret societies, would themselves
lift the veil that hides the Isis of their wisdom from the world?"

"Aha!" thought I, "this, then, is 'the august fraternity' of which
you spoke. Heaven be praised! I certainly have stumbled on one of the
brotherhood."

"But," I said aloud, "if not in books, sir, where else am I to obtain
information? Nowadays one can hazard nothing in print without authority,
and one may scarcely quote Shakespeare without citing chapter and verse.
This is the age of facts,--the age of facts, sir."

"Well," said the old gentleman, with a pleasant smile, "if we meet
again, perhaps, at least, I may direct your researches to the proper
source of intelligence." And with that he buttoned his greatcoat,
whistled to his dog, and departed.

It so happened that I did meet again with the old gentleman, exactly
four days after our brief conversation in Mr. D--'s bookshop. I was
riding leisurely towards Highgate, when, at the foot of its classic
hill, I recognised the stranger; he was mounted on a black pony, and
before him trotted his dog, which was black also.

If you meet the man whom you wish to know, on horseback, at the
commencement of a long hill, where, unless he has borrowed a friend's
favourite hack, he cannot, in decent humanity to the brute creation,
ride away from you, I apprehend that it is your own fault if you have
not gone far in your object before you have gained the top. In short, so
well did I succeed, that on reaching Highgate the old gentleman invited
me to rest at his house, which was a little apart from the village; and
an excellent house it was,--small, but commodious, with a large garden,
and commanding from the windows such a prospect as Lucretius would
recommend to philosophers: the spires and domes of London, on a clear
day, distinctly visible; here the Retreat of the Hermit, and there the
Mare Magnum of the world.

The walls of the principal rooms were embellished with pictures of
extraordinary merit, and in that high school of art which is so little
understood out of Italy. I was surprised to learn that they were all
from the hand of the owner. My evident admiration pleased my new friend,
and led to talk upon his part, which showed him no less elevated in his
theories of art than an adept in the practice. Without fatiguing
the reader with irrelevant criticism, it is necessary, perhaps, as
elucidating much of the design and character of the work which these
prefatory pages introduce, that I should briefly observe, that he
insisted as much upon the connection of the arts, as a distinguished
author has upon that of the sciences; that he held that in all works of
imagination, whether expressed by words or by colours, the artist of the
higher schools must make the broadest distinction between the real and
the true,--in other words, between the imitation of actual life, and the
exaltation of Nature into the Ideal.

"The one," said he, "is the Dutch School, the other is the Greek."

"Sir," said I, "the Dutch is the most in fashion."

"Yes, in painting, perhaps," answered my host, "but in literature--"

"It was of literature I spoke. Our growing poets are all for simplicity
and Betty Foy; and our critics hold it the highest praise of a work of
imagination, to say that its characters are exact to common life, even
in sculpture--"

"In sculpture! No, no! THERE the high ideal must at least be essential!"

"Pardon me; I fear you have not seen Souter Johnny and Tam O'Shanter."

"Ah!" said the old gentleman, shaking his head, "I live very much out of
the world, I see. I suppose Shakespeare has ceased to be admired?"

"On the contrary; people make the adoration of Shakespeare the excuse
for attacking everybody else. But then our critics have discovered that
Shakespeare is so REAL!"

"Real! The poet who has never once drawn a character to be met with in
actual life,--who has never once descended to a passion that is false,
or a personage who is real!"

I was about to reply very severely to this paradox, when I perceived
that my companion was growing a little out of temper. And he who wishes
to catch a Rosicrucian, must take care not to disturb the waters. I
thought it better, therefore, to turn the conversation.

"Revenons a nos moutons," said I; "you promised to enlighten my
ignorance as to the Rosicrucians."

"Well!" quoth he, rather sternly; "but for what purpose? Perhaps you
desire only to enter the temple in order to ridicule the rites?"

"What do you take me for! Surely, were I so inclined, the fate of the
Abbe de Villars is a sufficient warning to all men not to treat idly
of the realms of the Salamander and the Sylph. Everybody knows how
mysteriously that ingenious personage was deprived of his life, in
revenge for the witty mockeries of his 'Comte de Gabalis.'"

"Salamander and Sylph! I see that you fall into the vulgar error, and
translate literally the allegorical language of the mystics."

With that the old gentleman condescended to enter into a very
interesting, and, as it seemed to me, a very erudite relation, of the
tenets of the Rosicrucians, some of whom, he asserted, still existed,
and still prosecuted, in august secrecy, their profound researches into
natural science and occult philosophy.

"But this fraternity," said he, "however respectable and
virtuous,--virtuous I say, for no monastic order is more severe in the
practice of moral precepts, or more ardent in Christian faith,--this
fraternity is but a branch of others yet more transcendent in the powers
they have obtained, and yet more illustrious in their origin. Are you
acquainted with the Platonists?"

"I have occasionally lost my way in their labyrinth," said I. "Faith,
they are rather difficult gentlemen to understand."

"Yet their knottiest problems have never yet been published. Their
sublimest works are in manuscript, and constitute the initiatory
learning, not only of the Rosicrucians, but of the nobler brotherhoods
I have referred to. More solemn and sublime still is the knowledge to
be gleaned from the elder Pythagoreans, and the immortal masterpieces of
Apollonius."

"Apollonius, the imposter of Tyanea! are his writings extant?"

"Imposter!" cried my host; "Apollonius an imposter!"

"I beg your pardon; I did not know he was a friend of yours; and if
you vouch for his character, I will believe him to have been a very
respectable man, who only spoke the truth when he boasted of his power
to be in two places at the same time."