Zanoni

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It was to this state that Mejnour evidently sought to bring the
neophyte, and in this elementary initiation the mystic was like every
more ordinary sage. For he who seeks to DISCOVER must first reduce
himself into a kind of abstract idealism, and be rendered up, in solemn
and sweet bondage, to the faculties which CONTEMPLATE and IMAGINE.

Glyndon noticed that, in their rambles, Mejnour often paused, where the
foliage was rifest, to gather some herb or flower; and this reminded him
that he had seen Zanoni similarly occupied. "Can these humble children
of Nature," said he one day to Mejnour,--"things that bloom and wither
in a day, be serviceable to the science of the higher secrets? Is there
a pharmacy for the soul as well as the body, and do the nurslings of the
summer minister not only to human health but spiritual immortality?"

"If," answered Mejnour, "a stranger had visited a wandering tribe before
one property of herbalism was known to them; if he had told the savages
that the herbs which every day they trampled under foot were endowed
with the most potent virtues; that one would restore to health a brother
on the verge of death; that another would paralyse into idiocy their
wisest sage; that a third would strike lifeless to the dust their most
stalwart champion; that tears and laughter, vigour and disease, madness
and reason, wakefulness and sleep, existence and dissolution, were
coiled up in those unregarded leaves,--would they not have held him a
sorcerer or a liar? To half the virtues of the vegetable world mankind
are yet in the darkness of the savages I have supposed. There are
faculties within us with which certain herbs have affinity, and over
which they have power. The moly of the ancients is not all a fable."

The apparent character of Mejnour differed in much from that of Zanoni;
and while it fascinated Glyndon less, it subdued and impressed him
more. The conversation of Zanoni evinced a deep and general interest for
mankind,--a feeling approaching to enthusiasm for art and beauty. The
stories circulated concerning his habits elevated the mystery of his
life by actions of charity and beneficence. And in all this there
was something genial and humane that softened the awe he created, and
tended, perhaps, to raise suspicions as to the loftier secrets that he
arrogated to himself. But Mejnour seemed wholly indifferent to all the
actual world. If he committed no evil, he seemed equally apathetic to
good. His deeds relieved no want, his words pitied no distress. What
we call the heart appeared to have merged into the intellect. He moved,
thought, and lived like some regular and calm abstraction, rather than
one who yet retained, with the form, the feelings and sympathies of his
kind.

Glyndon once, observing the tone of supreme indifference with which he
spoke of those changes on the face of earth which he asserted he had
witnessed, ventured to remark to him the distinction he had noted.

"It is true," said Mejnour, coldly. "My life is the life that
contemplates,--Zanoni's is the life that enjoys: when I gather the herb,
I think but of its uses; Zanoni will pause to admire its beauties."

"And you deem your own the superior and the loftier existence?"

"No. His is the existence of youth,--mine of age. We have cultivated
different faculties. Each has powers the other cannot aspire to. Those
with whom he associates live better,--those who associate with me know
more."

"I have heard, in truth," said Glyndon, "that his companions at Naples
were observed to lead purer and nobler lives after intercourse with
Zanoni; yet were they not strange companions, at the best, for a sage?
This terrible power, too, that he exercises at will, as in the death of
the Prince di --, and that of the Count Ughelli, scarcely becomes the
tranquil seeker after good."

"True," said Mejnour, with an icy smile; "such must ever be the error of
those philosophers who would meddle with the active life of mankind. You
cannot serve some without injuring others; you cannot protect the good
without warring on the bad; and if you desire to reform the faulty, why,
you must lower yourself to live with the faulty to know their faults.
Even so saith Paracelsus, a great man, though often wrong. ('It is as
necessary to know evil things as good; for who can know what is good
without the knowing what is evil?' etc.--Paracelsus, 'De Nat. Rer.,'
lib. 3.) Not mine this folly; I live but in knowledge,--I have no life
in mankind!"

Another time Glyndon questioned the mystic as to the nature of that
union or fraternity to which Zanoni had once referred.

"I am right, I suppose," said he, "in conjecturing that you and himself
profess to be the brothers of the Rosy Cross?"

"Do you imagine," answered Mejnour, "that there were no mystic and
solemn unions of men seeking the same end through the same means before
the Arabians of Damus, in 1378, taught to a wandering German the secrets
which founded the Institution of the Rosicrucians? I allow, however,
that the Rosicrucians formed a sect descended from the greater and
earlier school. They were wiser than the Alchemists,--their masters are
wiser than they."

"And of this early and primary order how many still exist?"

"Zanoni and myself."

"What, two only!--and you profess the power to teach to all the secret
that baffles Death?"

"Your ancestor attained that secret; he died rather than survive the
only thing he loved. We have, my pupil, no arts by which we CAN PUT
DEATH OUT OF OUR OPTION, or out of the will of Heaven. These walls may
crush me as I stand. All that we profess to do is but this,--to find
out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the
blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventives to the effects of
time. This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood.
In our order we hold most noble,--first, that knowledge which elevates
the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body. But the mere art
(extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour
and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret, which I
will only hint to thee at present, by which HEAT, or CALORIC, as ye
call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle
of life, can be made its perpetual renovater,--these I say, would not
suffice for safety. It is ours also to disarm and elude the wrath of
men, to turn the swords of our foes against each other, to glide (if
not incorporeal) invisible to eyes over which we can throw a mist and
darkness. And this some seers have professed to be the virtue of a stone
of agate. Abaris placed it in his arrow. I will find you an herb in yon
valley that will give a surer charm than the agate and the arrow. In one
word, know this, that the humblest and meanest products of Nature are
those from which the sublimest properties are to be drawn."

"But," said Glyndon, "if possessed of these great secrets, why
so churlish in withholding their diffusion? Does not the false or
charlatanic science differ in this from the true and indisputable,--that
the last communicates to the world the process by which it attains its
discoveries; the first boasts of marvellous results, and refuses to
explain the causes?"

"Well said, O Logician of the Schools; but think again. Suppose we were
to impart all our knowledge to all mankind indiscriminately,--alike to
the vicious and the virtuous,--should we be benefactors or scourges?
Imagine the tyrant, the sensualist, the evil and corrupted being
possessed of these tremendous powers; would he not be a demon let loose
on earth? Grant that the same privilege be accorded also to the good;
and in what state would be society? Engaged in a Titan war,--the good
forever on the defensive, the bad forever in assault. In the present
condition of the earth, evil is a more active principle than good, and
the evil would prevail. It is for these reasons that we are not only
solemnly bound to administer our lore only to those who will not misuse
and pervert it, but that we place our ordeal in tests that purify
the passions and elevate the desires. And Nature in this controls and
assists us: for it places awful guardians and insurmountable barriers
between the ambition of vice and the heaven of the loftier science."

Such made a small part of the numerous conversations Mejnour held
with his pupil,--conversations that, while they appeared to address
themselves to the reason, inflamed yet more the fancy. It was the very
disclaiming of all powers which Nature, properly investigated, did
not suffice to create, that gave an air of probability to those which
Mejnour asserted Nature might bestow.

Thus days and weeks rolled on; and the mind of Glyndon, gradually fitted
to this sequestered and musing life, forgot at last the vanities and
chimeras of the world without.

One evening he had lingered alone and late upon the ramparts, watching
the stars as, one by one, they broke upon the twilight. Never had he
felt so sensibly the mighty power of the heavens and the earth upon man;
how much the springs of our intellectual being are moved and acted upon
by the solemn influences of Nature. As a patient on whom, slowly and by
degrees, the agencies of mesmerism are brought to bear, he acknowledged
to his heart the growing force of that vast and universal magnetism
which is the life of creation, and binds the atom to the whole. A
strange and ineffable consciousness of power, of the SOMETHING GREAT
within the perishable clay, appealed to feelings at once dim and
glorious,--like the faint recognitions of a holier and former being. An
impulse, that he could not resist, led him to seek the mystic. He would
demand, that hour, his initiation into the worlds beyond our world,--he
was prepared to breathe a diviner air. He entered the castle, and strode
the shadowy and starlit gallery which conducted to Mejnour's apartment.



CHAPTER 4.III.

Man is the eye of things.--Euryph, "de Vit. Hum."

...There is, therefore, a certain ecstatical or transporting
power, which, if at any time it shall be excited or stirred up by
an ardent desire and most strong imagination, is able to conduct
the spirit of the more outward even to some absent and
far-distant object.--Von Helmont.

The rooms that Mejnour occupied consisted of two chambers communicating
with each other, and a third in which he slept. All these rooms
were placed in the huge square tower that beetled over the dark and
bush-grown precipice. The first chamber which Glyndon entered was empty.
With a noiseless step he passed on, and opened the door that admitted
into the inner one. He drew back at the threshold, overpowered by a
strong fragrance which filled the chamber: a kind of mist thickened the
air rather than obscured it, for this vapour was not dark, but resembled
a snow-cloud moving slowly, and in heavy undulations, wave upon wave
regularly over the space. A mortal cold struck to the Englishman's
heart, and his blood froze. He stood rooted to the spot; and as his eyes
strained involuntarily through the vapour, he fancied (for he could not
be sure that it was not the trick of his imagination) that he saw dim,
spectre-like, but gigantic forms floating through the mist; or was it
not rather the mist itself that formed its vapours fantastically into
those moving, impalpable, and bodiless apparitions? A great painter
of antiquity is said, in a picture of Hades, to have represented the
monsters that glide through the ghostly River of the Dead, so artfully,
that the eye perceived at once that the river itself was but a spectre,
and the bloodless things that tenanted it had no life, their forms
blending with the dead waters till, as the eye continued to gaze, it
ceased to discern them from the preternatural element they were supposed
to inhabit. Such were the moving outlines that coiled and floated
through the mist; but before Glyndon had even drawn breath in this
atmosphere--for his life itself seemed arrested or changed into a kind
of horrid trance--he felt his hand seized, and he was led from that room
into the outer one. He heard the door close,--his blood rushed again
through his veins, and he saw Mejnour by his side. Strong convulsions
then suddenly seized his whole frame,--he fell to the ground insensible.
When he recovered, he found himself in the open air in a rude balcony of
stone that jutted from the chamber, the stars shining serenely over the
dark abyss below, and resting calmly upon the face of the mystic, who
stood beside him with folded arms.

"Young man," said Mejnour, "judge by what you have just felt, how
dangerous it is to seek knowledge until prepared to receive it. Another
moment in the air of that chamber and you had been a corpse."

"Then of what nature was the knowledge that you, once mortal like
myself, could safely have sought in that icy atmosphere, which it was
death for me to breathe? Mejnour," continued Glyndon, and his wild
desire, sharpened by the very danger he had passed, once more animated
and nerved him, "I am prepared at least for the first steps. I come to
you as of old the pupil to the Hierophant, and demand the initiation."

Mejnour passed his hand over the young man's heart,--it beat loud,
regularly, and boldly. He looked at him with something almost like
admiration in his passionless and frigid features, and muttered, half
to himself, "Surely, in so much courage the true disciple is found at
last." Then, speaking aloud, he added, "Be it so; man's first initiation
is in TRANCE. In dreams commences all human knowledge; in dreams
hovers over measureless space the first faint bridge between spirit and
spirit,--this world and the worlds beyond! Look steadfastly on yonder
star!"

Glyndon obeyed, and Mejnour retired into the chamber, from which there
then slowly emerged a vapour, somewhat paler and of fainter odour than
that which had nearly produced so fatal an effect on his frame. This,
on the contrary, as it coiled around him, and then melted in thin spires
into the air, breathed a refreshing and healthful fragrance. He still
kept his eyes on the star, and the star seemed gradually to fix and
command his gaze. A sort of languor next seized his frame, but without,
as he thought, communicating itself to the mind; and as this crept over
him, he felt his temples sprinkled with some volatile and fiery essence.
At the same moment a slight tremor shook his limbs and thrilled through
his veins. The languor increased, still he kept his gaze upon the star,
and now its luminous circumference seemed to expand and dilate. It
became gradually softer and clearer in its light; spreading wider and
broader, it diffused all space,--all space seemed swallowed up in it.
And at last, in the midst of a silver shining atmosphere, he felt as if
something burst within his brain,--as if a strong chain were broken; and
at that moment a sense of heavenly liberty, of unutterable delight, of
freedom from the body, of birdlike lightness, seemed to float him
into the space itself. "Whom, now upon earth, dost thou wish to see?"
whispered the voice of Mejnour. "Viola and Zanoni!" answered Glyndon, in
his heart; but he felt that his lips moved not.

Suddenly at that thought,--through this space, in which nothing save one
mellow translucent light had been discernible,--a swift succession
of shadowy landscapes seemed to roll: trees, mountains, cities, seas,
glided along like the changes of a phantasmagoria; and at last,
settled and stationary, he saw a cave by the gradual marge of an ocean
shore,--myrtles and orange-trees clothing the gentle banks. On a height,
at a distance, gleamed the white but shattered relics of some ruined
heathen edifice; and the moon, in calm splendour, shining over all,
literally bathed with its light two forms without the cave, at whose
feet the blue waters crept, and he thought that he even heard them
murmur. He recognised both the figures. Zanoni was seated on a fragment
of stone; Viola, half-reclining by his side, was looking into his face,
which was bent down to her, and in her countenance was the expression of
that perfect happiness which belongs to perfect love. "Wouldst thou hear
them speak?" whispered Mejnour; and again, without sound, Glyndon inly
answered, "Yes!" Their voices then came to his ear, but in tones that
seemed to him strange; so subdued were they, and sounding, as it were,
so far off, that they were as voices heard in the visions of some holier
men from a distant sphere.

"And how is it," said Viola, "that thou canst find pleasure in listening
to the ignorant?"

"Because the heart is never ignorant; because the mysteries of the
feelings are as full of wonder as those of the intellect. If at times
thou canst not comprehend the language of my thoughts, at times also I
hear sweet enigmas in that of thy emotions."

"Ah, say not so!" said Viola, winding her arm tenderly round his neck,
and under that heavenly light her face seemed lovelier for its blushes.
"For the enigmas are but love's common language, and love should solve
them. Till I knew thee,--till I lived with thee; till I learned to
watch for thy footstep when absent: yet even in absence to see
thee everywhere!--I dreamed not how strong and all-pervading is the
connection between nature and the human soul!...

"And yet," she continued, "I am now assured of what I at first
believed,--that the feelings which attracted me towards thee at first
were not those of love. I know THAT, by comparing the present with the
past,--it was a sentiment then wholly of the mind or the spirit! I could
not hear thee now say, 'Viola, be happy with another!'"

"And I could not now tell thee so! Ah, Viola, never be weary of assuring
me that thou art happy!"

"Happy while thou art so. Yet at times, Zanoni, thou art so sad!"

"Because human life is so short; because we must part at last; because
yon moon shines on when the nightingale sings to it no more! A little
while, and thine eyes will grow dim, and thy beauty haggard, and these
locks that I toy with now will be grey and loveless."

"And thou, cruel one!" said Viola, touchingly, "I shall never see the
signs of age in thee! But shall we not grow old together, and our eyes
be accustomed to a change which the heart shall not share!"

Zanoni sighed. He turned away, and seemed to commune with himself.

Glyndon's attention grew yet more earnest.

"But were it so," muttered Zanoni; and then looking steadfastly at
Viola, he said, with a half-smile, "Hast thou no curiosity to learn more
of the lover thou once couldst believe the agent of the Evil One?"

"None; all that one wishes to know of the beloved one, I know--THAT THOU
LOVEST ME!"

"I have told thee that my life is apart from others. Wouldst thou not
seek to share it?"

"I share it now!"

"But were it possible to be thus young and fair forever, till the world
blazes round us as one funeral pyre!"

"We shall be so, when we leave the world!"

Zanoni was mute for some moments, and at length he said,--

"Canst thou recall those brilliant and aerial dreams which once visited
thee, when thou didst fancy that thou wert preordained to some fate
aloof and afar from the common children of the earth?"

"Zanoni, the fate is found."

"And hast thou no terror of the future?"

"The future! I forget it! Time past and present and to come reposes
in thy smile. Ah, Zanoni, play not with the foolish credulities of my
youth! I have been better and humbler since thy presence has dispelled
the mist of the air. The future!--well, when I have cause to dread it, I
will look up to heaven, and remember who guides our fate!"

As she lifted her eyes above, a dark cloud swept suddenly over the
scene. It wrapped the orange-trees, the azure ocean, the dense sands;
but still the last images that it veiled from the charmed eyes of
Glyndon were the forms of Viola and Zanoni. The face of the one rapt,
serene, and radiant; the face of the other, dark, thoughtful, and locked
in more than its usual rigidness of melancholy beauty and profound
repose.

"Rouse thyself," said Mejnour; "thy ordeal has commenced! There are
pretenders to the solemn science who could have shown thee the
absent, and prated to thee, in their charlatanic jargon, of the secret
electricities and the magnetic fluid of whose true properties they know
but the germs and elements. I will lend thee the books of those glorious
dupes, and thou wilt find, in the dark ages, how many erring steps have
stumbled upon the threshold of the mighty learning, and fancied they
had pierced the temple. Hermes and Albert and Paracelsus, I knew ye all;
but, noble as ye were, ye were fated to be deceived. Ye had not souls
of faith, and daring fitted for the destinies at which ye aimed! Yet
Paracelsus--modest Paracelsus--had an arrogance that soared higher than
all our knowledge. Ho, ho!--he thought he could make a race of men from
chemistry; he arrogated to himself the Divine gift,--the breath of life.
(Paracelsus, 'De Nat. Rer.,' lib. i.)

"He would have made men, and, after all, confessed that they could be but
pygmies! My art is to make men above mankind. But you are impatient of
my digressions. Forgive me. All these men (they were great dreamers, as
you desire to be) were intimate friends of mine. But they are dead and
rotten. They talked of spirits,--but they dreaded to be in other company
than that of men. Like orators whom I have heard, when I stood by the
Pnyx of Athens, blazing with words like comets in the assembly, and
extinguishing their ardour like holiday rockets when they were in the
field. Ho, ho! Demosthenes, my hero-coward, how nimble were thy heels
at Chaeronea! And thou art impatient still! Boy, I could tell thee such
truths of the past as would make thee the luminary of schools. But thou
lustest only for the shadows of the future. Thou shalt have thy wish.
But the mind must be first exercised and trained. Go to thy room, and
sleep; fast austerely, read no books; meditate, imagine, dream, bewilder
thyself if thou wilt. Thought shapes out its own chaos at last. Before
midnight, seek me again!"



CHAPTER 4.IV.

It is fit that we who endeavour to rise to an elevation so
sublime, should study first to leave behind carnal affections,
the frailty of the senses, the passions that belong to matter;
secondly, to learn by what means we may ascend to the climax of
pure intellect, united with the powers above, without which never
can we gain the lore of secret things, nor the magic that effects
true wonders.--Tritemius "On Secret Things and Secret Spirits."

It wanted still many minutes of midnight, and Glyndon was once more in
the apartment of the mystic. He had rigidly observed the fast ordained
to him; and in the rapt and intense reveries into which his excited
fancy had plunged him, he was not only insensible to the wants of the
flesh,--he felt above them.

Mejnour, seated beside his disciple, thus addressed him:--

"Man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance. Man's natural tendency
is to egotism. Man, in his infancy of knowledge, thinks that all
creation was formed for him. For several ages he saw in the countless
worlds that sparkle through space like the bubbles of a shoreless ocean
only the petty candles, the household torches, that Providence had
been pleased to light for no other purpose but to make the night more
agreeable to man. Astronomy has corrected this delusion of human vanity;
and man now reluctantly confesses that the stars are worlds larger and
more glorious than his own,--that the earth on which he crawls is a
scarce visible speck on the vast chart of creation. But in the small as
in the vast, God is equally profuse of life. The traveller looks upon
the tree, and fancies its boughs were formed for his shelter in the
summer sun, or his fuel in the winter frosts. But in each leaf of these
boughs the Creator has made a world; it swarms with innumerable races.
Each drop of the water in yon moat is an orb more populous than a
kingdom is of men. Everywhere, then, in this immense design, science
brings new life to light. Life is the one pervading principle, and even
the thing that seems to die and putrify but engenders new life, and
changes to fresh forms of matter. Reasoning, then, by evident analogy:
if not a leaf, if not a drop of water, but is, no less than yonder star,
a habitable and breathing world,--nay, if even man himself is a world to
other lives, and millions and myriads dwell in the rivers of his blood,
and inhabit man's frame as man inhabits earth, commonsense (if your
schoolmen had it) would suffice to teach that the circumfluent infinite
which you call space--the countless Impalpable which divides earth
from the moon and stars--is filled also with its correspondent and
appropriate life. Is it not a visible absurdity to suppose that being is
crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space?
The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it
knows no spot where something of life does not breathe. In the very
charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation. Is that true?
Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the Infinite itself,
is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to the one design of
universal being than the dead carcass of a dog, than the peopled leaf,
than the swarming globule? The microscope shows you the creatures on the
leaf; no mechanical tube is yet invented to discover the nobler and more
gifted things that hover in the illimitable air. Yet between these last
and man is a mysterious and terrible affinity. And hence, by tales and
legends, not wholly false nor wholly true, have arisen from time to
time, beliefs in apparitions and spectres. If more common to the earlier
and simpler tribes than to the men of your duller age, it is but that,
with the first, the senses are more keen and quick. And as the savage
can see or scent miles away the traces of a foe, invisible to the gross
sense of the civilised animal, so the barrier itself between him and
the creatures of the airy world is less thickened and obscured. Do you
listen?"