And Abaris, so far from esteeming Pythagoras, who taught these
things, a necromancer or wizard, rather revered and admired him
as something divine.--Iamblich., “Vit. Pythag.”
The attendants whom Mejnour had engaged for his strange abode were such
as might suit a philosopher of few wants. An old Armenian whom Glyndon
recognised as in the mystic’s service at Naples, a tall, hard-featured
woman from the village, recommended by Maestro Paolo, and two
long-haired, smooth-spoken, but fierce-visaged youths from the
same place, and honoured by the same sponsorship, constituted
the establishment. The rooms used by the sage were commodious and
weather-proof, with some remains of ancient splendour in the faded
arras that clothed the walls, and the huge tables of costly marble and
elaborate carving. Glyndon’s sleeping apartment communicated with a kind
of belvedere, or terrace, that commanded prospects of unrivalled beauty
and extent, and was separated on the other side by a long gallery, and
a flight of ten or a dozen stairs, from the private chambers of the
mystic. There was about the whole place a sombre and yet not displeasing
depth of repose. It suited well with the studies to which it was now to
be appropriated.
For several days Mejnour refused to confer with Glyndon on the subjects
nearest to his heart.
“All without,” said he, “is prepared, but not all within; your own
soul must grow accustomed to the spot, and filled with the surrounding
nature; for Nature is the source of all inspiration.”
With these words Mejnour turned to lighter topics. He made the
Englishman accompany him in long rambles through the wild scenes
around, and he smiled approvingly when the young artist gave way to the
enthusiasm which their fearful beauty could not have failed to rouse in
a duller breast; and then Mejnour poured forth to his wondering pupil
the stores of a knowledge that seemed inexhaustible and boundless. He
gave accounts the most curious, graphic, and minute of the various races
(their characters, habits, creeds, and manners) by which that fair land
had been successively overrun. It is true that his descriptions could
not be found in books, and were unsupported by learned authorities; but
he possessed the true charm of the tale-teller, and spoke of all with
the animated confidence of a personal witness. Sometimes, too, he would
converse upon the more durable and the loftier mysteries of Nature with
an eloquence and a research which invested them with all the colours
rather of poetry than science. Insensibly the young artist found himself
elevated and soothed by the lore of his companion; the fever of his wild
desires was slaked. His mind became more and more lulled into the divine
tranquillity of contemplation; he felt himself a nobler being, and in
the silence of his senses he imagined that he heard the voice of his
soul.
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.