YES, the hermit of Gouda was the vicar of Gouda, and knew it not, so
absolute was his seclusion.
My reader is aware that the moment the phrenzy of his passion passed, he
was seized with remorse for having been betrayed into it. But perhaps
only those who have risen as high in religious spirit as he had, and
suddenly fallen, can realize the terror at himself that took possession
of him. He felt like one whom self-confidence had betrayed to the very
edge of a precipice. "Ah, good Jerome," he cried, "how much better you
knew me than I knew myself! How bitter yet wholesome was your
admonition!"
Accustomed to search his own heart, he saw at once that the true cause
of his fury was Margaret. "I love her better than God," said he,
despairingly, "better than the Church. From such a love what can spring
to me, or to her?" He shuddered at the thought. "Let the strong battle
temptation; 'tis for the weak to flee. And who is weaker than I have
shown myself? What is my penitence, my religion? A pack of cards built
by degrees into a fair-seeming structure: and lo! one breath of earthly
love, and it lies in the dust. I must begin again: and on a surer
foundation." He resolved to leave Holland at once, and spend years of
his life in some distant convent before returning to it. By that time
the temptations of earthly passion would be doubly baffled; an older,
and a better, monk, he should be more master of his earthly affections,
and Margaret, seeing herself abandoned, would marry, and love another.
The very anguish this last thought cost him showed the self-searcher and
self-denier, that he was on the path of religious duty.
But in leaving her for his immortal good and hers, he was not to neglect
her temporal weal. Indeed, the sweet thought he could make her
comfortable for life, and rich in this world's goods, which she was not
bound to despise, sustained him in the bitter struggle it cost him to
turn his back on her without one kind word or look. "Oh, what will she
think of me?" he groaned. "Shall I not seem to her of all creatures the
most heartless, inhuman? but so best: ay, better she should hate me,
miserable that I am. Heaven is merciful, and giveth my broken heart this
comfort; I can make that villain restore her own, and she shall never
lose another true lover by poverty. Another? Ah me! ah me! God and the
saints to mine aid!"
How he fared on this errand has been related. But first, as you may
perhaps remember, he went at night to shrive the hermit of Gouda. He
found him dying, and never left him till he had closed his eyes and
buried him beneath the floor of the little oratory attached to his cell.
It was the peaceful end of a stormy life. The hermit had been a soldier,
and even now carried a steel corselet next his skin, saying he was now
Christ's soldier as he had been Satan's. When Clement had shriven him
and prayed by him, he, in his turn, sought counsel of one who was dying
in so pious a frame. The hermit advised him to be his successor in this
peaceful retreat. "His had been a hard fight against the world, the
flesh, and the devil, and he had never thoroughly baffled them till he
retired into the citadel of Solitude."
These words and the hermit's pious and peaceful death, which speedily
followed, and set as it were the seal of immortal truth on them, made a
deep impression upon Clement. Nor in his case had they any prejudice to
combat; the solitary recluse was still profoundly revered in the Church,
whether immured as an anchorite, or anchoress, in some cave or cell
belonging to a monastery, or hidden in the more savage but laxer
seclusion of the independent hermitage. And Clement knew more about the
hermits of the Church than most divines at his time of life; he had read
much thereon at the monastery near Tergou; had devoured their lives with
wonder and delight in the manuscripts of the Vatican, and conversed
earnestly about them with the mendicant friars of several nations.
Before Printing these friars were the great circulators of those local
annals and biographies which accumulated in the convents of every land.
Then, his teacher, Jerome, had been three years an anchorite on the
heights of Camaldoli, where for more than four centuries the Thebaid had
been revived; and Jerome, cold and curt on most religious themes, was
warm with enthusiasm on this one. He had pored over the annals of St.
John Baptist's abbey, round about which the hermits' caves were
scattered, and told him the names of many a noble, and many a famous
warrior, who had ended his days there a hermit, and of many a bishop and
archbishop who had passed from the see to the hermitage, or from the
hermitage to the see. Among the former the archbishop of Ravenna; among
the latter Pope Victor the Ninth. He told him too, with grim delight, of
their multifarious austerities, and how each hermit set himself to find
where he was weakest, and attacked himself without mercy or remission
till there, even there, he was strongest. And how seven times in the
twenty-four hours, in thunder, rain, or snow, by daylight, twilight,
moonlight or torchlight, the solitaries flocked from distant points,
over rugged precipitous ways, to worship in the convent church; at
matins, at prime, tierce, sexte, nones, vespers, and complin. He even,
under eager questioning, described to him the persons of famous
anchorites he had sung the Psalter and prayed with there; the only
intercourse their vows allowed, except with special permission. Moncata,
Duke of Moncata and Cardova, and Hidalgo of Spain, who in the flower of
his youth had retired thither from the pomps, vanities, and pleasures of
the world; Father John Baptist of Novara, who had led armies to battle,
but was now a private soldier of Christ; Cornelius, Samuel, and
Sylvanus. This last, when the great Duchess de' Medici obtained the
Pope's leave, hitherto refused, to visit Camaldoli, went down and met
her at the first wooden cross, and there, surrounded as she was with
courtiers and flatterers, remonstrated with her and persuaded her, and
warned her, not to profane that holy mountain, where no woman for so
many centuries had placed her foot; and she, awed by the place and the
man, retreated with all her captains, soldiers, courtiers, and pages,
from that one hoary hermit. At Basle Clement found fresh materials,
especially with respect to German and English anchorites; and he had
even prepared a "Catena Eremitarum" from the year of our Lord 250, when
Paul of Thebes commenced his ninety years of solitude, down to the year
1470. He called them _Angelorum amici et animalium_, _i. e._,
FRIENDS OF ANGELS AND ANIMALS.
Thus, though in those days he never thought to be a recluse, the road
was paved, so to speak: and when the dying hermit of Gouda blessed the
citadel of Solitude, where he had fought the good fight and won it, and
invited him to take up the breastplate of faith, that now fell off his
own shrunken body, Clement said within himself: "Heaven itself led my
foot hither to this end." It struck him too, as no small coincidence,
that his patron, St. Bavon, was a hermit, and an austere one, a
cuirassier[D] of the solitary cell.
As soon as he was reconciled to Ghysbrecht Van Swieten, he went eagerly
to his new abode, praying Heaven it might not have been already occupied
in these three days. The fear was not vain; these famous dens never
wanted a human tenant long. He found the rude stone door ajar; then he
made sure he was too late; he opened the door and went softly in. No;
the cell was vacant, and there were the hermit's great ivory crucifix,
his pens, ink, seeds, and memento mori, a skull; his cilice of hair, and
another of bristles; his well-worn sheepskin pelisse and hood, his
hammer, chisel, and psaltery, &c. Men and women had passed that way, but
none had ventured to intrude, far less to steal. Faith and simplicity
had guarded that keyless door more securely than the houses of the laity
were defended by their gates like a modern jail, and thick iron bars at
every window, and the gentry by moat, bastion, chevaux de frise, and
portcullis.
As soon as Clement was fairly in the cell there was a loud flap, and a
flutter, and down came a great brown owl from a corner, and whirled out
of the window, driving the air cold on Clement's face. He started and
shuddered.
Was this seeming owl something diabolical? trying to deter him from his
soul's good? On second thoughts, might it not be some good spirit the
hermit had employed to keep the cell for him, perhaps the hermit
himself? Finally he concluded that it was just an owl; and that he would
try and make friends with it.
He kneeled down and inaugurated his new life with prayer.
* * * * *
Clement had not only an earthly passion to quell, the power of which
made him tremble for his eternal weal, but he had a penance to do for
having given way to ire, his besetting sin, and cursed his own brothers.
He looked round this roomy cell furnished with so many comforts, and
compared it with the pictures in his mind of the hideous place, eremus
in eremo, a desert in a desert, where holy Jerome, hermit, and the
Plutarch of hermits had wrestled with sickness, temptation, and despair,
four mortal years; and with the inaccessible and thorny niche, a hole in
a precipice, where the boy hermit Benedict buried himself and lived
three years on the pittance the good monk Romanus could spare him from
his scanty commons; and subdivided that mouthful with his friend, a
raven; and the hollow tree of his patron St. Bavon, and the earthly
purgatory at Fribourg, where lived a nameless saint in a horrid cavern,
his eyes chilled with perpetual gloom, and his ears stunned with an
eternal waterfall; and the pillar on which St. Simeon Stylita existed
forty-five years, and the destina, or stone box, of St. Dunstan, where
like Hilarion in his bulrush hive, sepulchro potius quam domu, he could
scarce sit, stand or lie; and the living tombs, sealed with lead, of
Thais, and Christina, and other recluses; and the damp dungeon of St.
Alred. These and scores more of the dismal dens in which true hermits
had worn out their wasted bodies on the rock, and the rock under their
sleeping bodies, and their praying knees, all came into his mind, and he
said to himself, "This sweet retreat is for safety of the soul; but what
for penance? Jesu aid me against faults to come; and for the fault I
rue, face of man I will not see for a twelvemonth and a day." He had
famous precedents in his eye even for this last and unusual severity. In
fact the original hermit of this very cell was clearly under the same
vow. Hence the two apertures through which he was spoken to, and
replied.
Adopting, in other respects, the uniform rule of hermits and anchorites,
he divided his day into the seven offices, ignoring the petty accidents
of light and dark, creations both of Him to whom he prayed so
unceasingly. He learned the psalter by heart, and in all the intervals
of devotion, not occupied by broken slumbers, he worked hard with his
hands. No article of the hermit's rule was more strict or more ancient
than this. And here his self-imposed penance embarrassed him, for what
work could he do, without being seen, that should benefit his
neighbours? for the hermit was to labour _for himself_ in those cases
only where his subsistence depended on it. Now Clement's modest needs
were amply supplied by the villagers.
On moonlight nights he would steal out like a thief, and dig some poor
man's garden on the outskirts of the village. He made baskets and
dropped them slily at humble doors.
And since he could do nothing for the bodies of those who passed by his
cell in daytime, he went out in the dead of the night with his hammer
and his chisel, and carved moral and religious sentences all down the
road upon the sandstone rocks. "Who knows?" said he, "often a chance
shaft striketh home. Oh, sore heart, comfort thou the poor and bereaved
with holy words of solace in their native tongue; for _he_ said well,
''tis clavis ad corda plebis.'" Also he remembered the learned Colonna
had told him of the written mountains in the east where kings had
inscribed their victories. "What," said Clement, "are they so wise,
those Eastern monarchs, to engrave their warlike glory upon the rock,
making a blood bubble endure so long as earth; and shall I leave the
rocks about me silent on the King of Glory, at whose word they were, and
at whose breath they shall be dust? Nay, but these stones shall speak to
weary wayfarers of eternal peace, and of the Lamb, whose frail, and
afflicted, yet happy servant worketh them among."
Now at this time the inspired words that have consoled the poor and the
afflicted for so many ages, were not yet printed in Dutch, so that these
sentences of gold from the holy Evangelists came like fresh oracles from
heaven, or like the dew on parched flowers; and the poor hermit's
written rocks softened a heart or two, and sent the heavy laden singing
on their way.[E]
These holy oracles that seemed to spring up around him like magic; his
prudent answers through his window to such as sought ghostly counsel;
and above all, his invisibility, soon gained him a prodigious
reputation. This was not diminished by the medical advice they now and
then extorted from him, sore against his will, by tears and entreaties;
for if the patients got well, they gave the holy hermit the credit, and
if not, they laid all the blame on the devil. I think he killed nobody,
for his remedies were "womanish and weak." Sage, and wormwood, sion,
hyssop, borage, spikenard, dog's-tongue, our Lady's mantle, feverfew,
and Faith, and all in small quantities except the last.
Then his abstinence, sure sign of a saint. The eggs and milk they
brought him at first he refused with horror. Know ye not the hermit's
rule is bread, or herbs, and water? Eggs, they are birds in disguise;
for when the bird dieth then the egg rotteth. As for milk, it is little
better than white blood. And when they brought him too much bread he
refused it. Then they used to press it on him. "Nay, holy father; give
the overplus to the poor."
"You who go among the poor can do that better. Is bread a thing to fling
haphazard from an hermit's window?" And to those who persisted after
this: "To live on charity, yet play Sir Bountiful, is to lie with the
right hand. Giving another's to the poor, I should beguile them of their
thanks, and cheat thee the true giver. Thus do thieves, whose boast it
is they bleed the rich into the lap of the poor. Occasio avaritiæ nomen
pauperum."
When nothing else would convince the good souls, this piece of Latin
always brought them round. So would a line of Virgil's Æneid.
This great reputation of sanctity was all external. Inside the cell was
a man who held the hermit of Gouda as cheap as dirt.
"Ah!" said he, "I cannot deceive myself; I cannot deceive God's animals.
See the little birds, how coy they be! I feed and feed them and long for
their friendship, yet will they never come within, nor take my hand, by
lighting on't. For why? No Paul, no Benedict, no Hugh of Lincoln, no
Columbia, no Guthlac bides in this cell. Hunted doe flieth not hither,
for here is no Fructuosus, nor Aventine, nor Albert of Suabia: nor e'en
a pretty squirrel cometh from the wood hard by for the acorns I have
hoarded; for here abideth no Columban. The very owl that was here hath
fled. They are not to be deceived; I have a Pope's word for that; Heaven
rest his soul."
Clement had one advantage over her, whose image in his heart he was bent
on destroying.
He had suffered and survived the pang of bereavement; and the mind
cannot quite repeat such anguish. Then he had built up a habit of
looking on her as dead. After that strange scene in the church and
churchyard of St. Laurens, that habit might be compared to a structure
riven by a thunderbolt. It was shattered, but stones enough stood to
found a similar habit on; to look on her as dead _to him_.
And, by severe subdivision of his time and thoughts, by unceasing
prayers, and manual labour, he did, in about three months, succeed in
benumbing the earthly half of his heart.
But, lo! within a day or two of this first symptom of mental peace
returning slowly, there descended upon his mind a horrible despondency.
Words cannot utter it; for words never yet painted a likeness of
despair. Voices seemed to whisper in his ear, "Kill thyself, kill! kill!
kill!"
And he longed to obey the voices; for life was intolerable. He wrestled
with his dark enemy with prayers and tears; he prayed God but to vary
his temptation. "Oh let mine enemy have power to scourge me with red-hot
whips, to tear me leagues and leagues over rugged places by the hair of
my head, as he has served many a holy hermit, that yet baffled him at
last; to fly on me like a raging lion; to gnaw me with a serpent's
fangs: any pain, any terror, but this horrible gloom of the soul that
shuts me from all light of Thee and of the saints."
And now a freezing thought crossed him. What if the triumphs of the
powers of darkness over Christian souls in desert places, had been
suppressed; and only their defeats recorded, or at least in full: for
dark hints were scattered about antiquity that now first began to grin
at him with terrible meaning.
"THEY WANDERED IN THE DESERT AND PERISHED BY SERPENTS," said an ancient
father, of hermits that went into solitude, "and were seen no more." And
another at a more recent epoch, wrote: "Vertunter ad melancoliam;" "they
turn to gloomy madness." These two statements were they not one? for the
ancient fathers never spoke with regret of the death of the body. No,
the hermits so lost were perished souls, and the serpents were
diabolical[F] thoughts, the natural brood of solitude.
St. Jerome went into the desert with three companions; one fled in the
first year; two died: how? The single one that lasted, was a gigantic
soul with an iron body.
The cotemporary who related this made no comment; expressed no wonder.
What then if here was a glimpse of the true proportion in every age, and
many souls had always been lost in solitude for one gigantic mind and
iron body that survived this terrible ordeal.
The darkened recluse now cast his despairing eyes over antiquity to see
what weapons the Christian arsenal contained, that might befriend him.
The greatest of all was prayer. Alas! it was a part of his malady to be
unable to pray with true fervour. The very system of mechanical
supplication he had for months carried out so severely by rule had
rather checked than fostered his power of originating true prayer.
He prayed louder than ever, but the heart hung back cold and gloomy, and
let the words go up alone.
"Poor wingless prayers," he cried; "you will not get half way to
heaven."
A fiend of this complexion had been driven out of King Saul by music.
Clement took up the hermit's psaltery, and with much trouble mended the
strings and tuned it.
No, he could not play it. His soul was so out of tune. The sounds jarred
on it, and made him almost mad.
"Ah, wretched me!" he cried. "Saul had a saint to play to him. He was
not alone with the spirits of darkness; but here is no sweet bard of
Israel to play to me; I, lonely, with crushed heart, on which a black
fiend sitteth mountain high, must make the music to uplift that heart to
heaven; it may not be." And he grovelled on the earth weeping and
tearing his hair.
VERTEBATUR AD MELANCHOLIAM.
FOOTNOTES:
[D] "Loricatus," vide Ducange, in voce
[E] It requires now-a-days a strong effort of the imagination to realize
the effect on poor people who had never seen them before, of such
sentences as this: "Blessed are the poor," &c.
[F] The primitive writer was so interpreted by others besides Clement;
and, in particular by Peter of Blois, a divine of the twelfth century,
whose comment is noteworthy, as he himself was a forty-year hermit.