Produced by Andrew Heath and David Widger
A STRANGE STORY
By Edward Bulwer Lytton
(Lord Lytton)
PREFACE.
Of the many illustrious thinkers whom the schools of France have
contributed to the intellectual philosophy of our age, Victor Cousin,
the most accomplished, assigns to Maine de Biran the rank of the most
original.
In the successive developments of his own mind, Maine de Biran may,
indeed, be said to represent the change that has been silently at
work throughout the general mind of Europe since the close of the
last century. He begins his career of philosopher with blind faith in
Condillac and Materialism. As an intellect severely conscientious in the
pursuit of truth expands amidst the perplexities it revolves, phenomena
which cannot be accounted for by Condillac’s sensuous theories open
to his eye. To the first rudimentary life of man, the animal life,
“characterized by impressions, appetites, movements, organic in their
origin and ruled by the Law of Necessity,” (1) he is compelled to add,
“the second, or human life, from which Free-will and Self-consciousness
emerge.” He thus arrives at the union of mind and matter; but still a
something is wanted,--some key to the marvels which neither of these
conditions of vital being suffices to explain. And at last the grand
self-completing Thinker attains to the Third Life of Man in Man’s Soul.
“There are not,” says this philosopher, towards the close of his last
and loftiest work,--“there are not only two principles opposed to
each other in Man,--there are three. For there are in him three
lives and three orders of faculties. Though all should be in accord
and in harmony between the sensitive and the active faculties
which constitute Man, there would still be a nature superior, a
third life which would not be satisfied; which would make felt
(ferait sentir) the truth that there is another happiness, another
wisdom, another perfection, at once above the greatest human
happiness, above the highest wisdom, or intellectual and moral
perfection of which the human being is susceptible.” (2)
Now, as Philosophy and Romance both take their origin in the Principle
of Wonder, so in the “Strange Story” submitted to the Public it will be
seen that Romance, through the freest exercise of its wildest vagaries,
conducts its bewildered hero towards the same goal to which Philosophy
leads its luminous Student, through far grander portents of Nature, far
higher visions of Supernatural Power, than Fable can yield to Fancy.
That goal is defined in these noble words:--
“The relations (rapports) which exist between the elements and the
products of the three lives of Man are the subjects of meditation,
the fairest and finest, but also the most difficult. The Stoic
Philosophy shows us all which can be most elevated in active life;
but it makes abstraction of the animal nature, and absolutely fails
to recognize all which belongs to the life of the spirit.
Its practical morality is beyond the forces of humanity. Christianity
alone embraces the whole Man. It dissimulates none of the sides of
his nature, and avails itself of his miseries and his weakness in
order to conduct him to his end in showing him all the want that he
has of a succor more exalted.” (3)
In the passages thus quoted, I imply one of the objects for which this
tale has been written; and I cite them, with a wish to acknowledge one
of those priceless obligations which writings the lightest and most
fantastic often incur to reasoners the most serious and profound.
But I here construct a romance which should have, as a romance, some
interest for the general reader. I do not elaborate a treatise submitted
to the logic of sages. And it is only when “in fairy fiction drest” that
Romance gives admission to “truths severe.”
I venture to assume that none will question my privilege to avail
myself of the marvellous agencies which have ever been at the legitimate
command of the fabulist.
To the highest form of romantic narrative, the Epic, critics, indeed,
have declared that a supernatural machinery is indispensable. That the
Drama has availed itself of the same license as the Epic, it would be
unnecessary to say to the countrymen of Shakspeare, or to the generation
that is yet studying the enigmas of Goethe’s “Faust.” Prose Romance has
immemorially asserted, no less than the Epic or the Drama, its heritage
in the Realm of the Marvellous. The interest which attaches to the
supernatural is sought in the earliest Prose Romance which modern times
take from the ancient, and which, perhaps, had its origin in the lost
Novels of Miletus; (4) and the right to invoke such interest has, ever
since, been maintained by Romance through all varieties of form
and fancy,--from the majestic epopee of “Telemaque” to the graceful
fantasies of “Undine,” or the mighty mockeries of “Gulliver’s Travels”
down to such comparatively commonplace elements of wonder as yet
preserve from oblivion “The Castle of Otranto” and “The Old English
Baron.”
Now, to my mind, the true reason why a supernatural agency is
indispensable to the conception of the Epic, is that the Epic is the
highest and the completest form in which Art can express either Man or
Nature, and that without some gleams of the supernatural, Man is not man
nor Nature, nature.
It is said, by a writer to whom an eminent philosophical critic justly
applies the epithets of “pious and profound:” (5)
“Is it unreasonable to confess that we believe in God, not by reason
of the Nature which conceals Him, but by reason of the Supernatural
in Man which alone reveals and proves Him to exist?... Man reveals
God: for Man, by his intelligence, rises above Nature; and in virtue
of this intelligence is conscious of himself as a power not only
independent of, but opposed to, Nature, and capable of resisting,
conquering, and controlling her.”(6)
If the meaning involved in the argument, of which I have here made but
scanty extracts, be carefully studied, I think that we shall find
deeper reasons than the critics who dictated canons of taste to the last
century discovered,--why the supernatural is indispensable to the Epic,
and why it is allowable to all works of imagination, in which Art looks
on Nature with Man’s inner sense of a something beyond and above her.
But the Writer who, whether in verse or prose, would avail himself of
such sources of pity or terror as flow from the Marvellous, can only
attain his object in proportion as the wonders he narrates are of a kind
to excite the curiosity of the age he addresses.
In the brains of our time, the faculty of Causation is very markedly
developed. People nowadays do not delight in the Marvellous according to
the old childlike spirit. They say in one breath, “Very extraordinary!”
and in the next breath ask, “How do you account for it?” If the Author
of this work has presumed to borrow from science some elements of
interest for Romance, he ventures to hope that no thoughtful reader--and
certainly no true son of science--will be disposed to reproach him. In
fact, such illustrations from the masters of Thought were essential to
the completion of the purpose which pervades the work.
That purpose, I trust, will develop itself in proportion as the story
approaches the close; and whatever may appear violent or melodramatic
in the catastrophe, will, perhaps, be found, by a reader capable of
perceiving the various symbolical meanings conveyed in the story,
essential to the end in which those meanings converge, and towards which
the incidents that give them the character and interest of of fiction,
have been planned and directed from the commencement.
Of course, according to the most obvious principles of art, the narrator
of a fiction must be as thoroughly in earnest as if he were the narrator
of facts. One could not tell the most extravagant fairy-tale so as to
rouse and sustain the attention of the most infantine listener, if the
tale were told as if the taleteller did not believe in it. But when the
reader lays down this “Strange Story,” perhaps he will detect, through
all the haze of romance, the outlines of these images suggested to his
reason: Firstly, the image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as
the Materialist had conceived it; secondly, the image of Intellect,
obstinately separating all its inquiries from the belief in the
spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all kinds of
perplexity and resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation before it
settles at last into the simple faith which unites the philosopher and
the infant; and thirdly, the image of the erring but pure-thoughted
visionary, seeking over-much on this earth to separate soul from mind,
till innocence itself is led astray by a phantom, and reason is lost in
the space between earth and the stars. Whether in these pictures there
be any truth worth the implying, every reader must judge for himself;
and if he doubt or deny that there be any such truth, still, in the
process of thought which the doubt or denial enforces, he may chance on
a truth which it pleases himself to discover.
“Most of the Fables of AEsop,”--thus says Montaigne in his
charming essay “Of Books”(7)--“have several senses and meanings, of
which the Mythologists choose some one that tallies with the fable.
But for the most part ‘t is only what presents itself at the first
view, and is superficial; there being others more lively, essential,
and internal, into which they had not been able to penetrate;
and”--adds Montaigne--“the case is the very same with me.”
(1) OEuvres inedites de Maine de Biran, vol. i. See introduction.
(2) OEuvres inedites de Maine de Biran, vol. iii. p. 546
(Anthropologie).
(3) OEuvres inedites de Maine de Biran, vol. iii. p. 524.
(4) “The Golden Ass” of Apuleius.
(5) Sir William Hamilton: Lectures on Metaphysics, p. 40.
(6) Jacobi: Von der Gottlichen Dingen; Werke, p. 424-426.
(7) Translation, 1776, Yol. ii. p. 103.
CHAPTER I.
In the year 18-- I settled as a physician at one of the wealthiest of
our great English towns, which I will designate by the initial L----.
I was yet young, but I had acquired some reputation by a professional
work, which is, I believe, still amongst the received authorities on the
subject of which it treats. I had studied at Edinburgh and at Paris, and
had borne away from both those illustrious schools of medicine whatever
guarantees for future distinction the praise of professors may concede
to the ambition of students. On becoming a member of the College of
Physicians, I made a tour of the principal cities of Europe, taking
letters of introduction to eminent medical men, and gathering from many
theories and modes of treatment hints to enlarge the foundations of
unprejudiced and comprehensive practice. I had resolved to fix my
ultimate residence in London. But before this preparatory tour was
completed, my resolve was changed by one of those unexpected events
which determine the fate man in vain would work out for himself. In
passing through the Tyro, on my way into the north of Italy, I found in
a small inn, remote from medical attendance, an English traveller seized
with acute inflammation of the lungs, and in a state of imminent danger.
I devoted myself to him night and day; and, perhaps more through careful
nursing than active remedies, I had the happiness to effect his complete
recovery. The traveller proved to be Julius Faber, a physician of great
distinction, contented to reside, where he was born, in the provincial
city of L----, but whose reputation as a profound and original
pathologist was widely spread, and whose writings had formed no
unimportant part of my special studies. It was during a short holiday
excursion, from which he was about to return with renovated vigour, that
he had been thus stricken down. The patient so accidentally met with
became the founder of my professional fortunes. He conceived a warm
attachment for me,--perhaps the more affectionate because he was a
childless bachelor, and the nephew who would succeed to his wealth
evinced no desire to succeed to the toils by which the wealth had been
acquired. Thus, having an heir for the one, he had long looked about for
an heir to the other, and now resolved on finding that heir in me.
So when we parted Dr. Faber made me promise to correspond with him
regularly, and it was not long before he disclosed by letter the
plans he had formed in my favour. He said that he was growing old;
his practice was beyond his strength; he needed a partner; he was not
disposed to put up to sale the health of patients whom he had learned to
regard as his children: money was no object to him, but it was an object
close at his heart that the humanity he had served, and the reputation
he had acquired, should suffer no loss in his choice of a successor. In
fine, he proposed that I should at once come to L---- as his partner,
with the view of succeeding to his entire practice at the end of two
years, when it was his intention to retire.
The opening into fortune thus afforded to me was one that rarely
presents itself to a young man entering upon an overcrowded profession;
and to an aspirant less allured by the desire of fortune than the hope
of distinction, the fame of the physician who thus generously offered
to me the inestimable benefits of his long experience and his cordial
introduction was in itself an assurance that a metropolitan practice is
not essential to a national renown.
I went, then, to L----, and before the two years of my partnership had
expired, my success justified my kind friend’s selection, and far more
than realized my own expectations. I was fortunate in effecting
some notable cures in the earliest cases submitted to me, and it is
everything in the career of a physician when good luck wins betimes for
him that confidence which patients rarely accord except to lengthened
experience. To the rapid facility with which my way was made, some
circumstances apart from professional skill probably contributed. I was
saved from the suspicion of a medical adventurer by the accidents of
birth and fortune. I belonged to an ancient family (a branch of the once
powerful border-clan of the Fenwicks) that had for many generations held
a fair estate in the neighbourhood of Windermere. As an only son I had
succeeded to that estate on attaining my majority, and had sold it to
pay off the debts which had been made by my father, who had the costly
tastes of an antiquary and collector. The residue on the sale insured me
a modest independence apart from the profits of a profession; and as I
had not been legally bound to defray my father’s debts, so I obtained
that character for disinterestedness and integrity which always in
England tends to propitiate the public to the successes achieved by
industry or talent. Perhaps, too, any professional ability I might
possess was the more readily conceded, because I had cultivated with
assiduity the sciences and the scholarship which are collaterally
connected with the study of medicine. Thus, in a word, I established
a social position which came in aid of my professional repute, and
silenced much of that envy which usually embitters and sometimes impedes
success.
Dr. Faber retired at the end of the two years agreed upon. He went
abroad; and being, though advanced in years, of a frame still robust,
and habits of mind still inquiring and eager, he commenced a lengthened
course of foreign travel, during which our correspondence, at first
frequent, gradually languished, and finally died away.
I succeeded at once to the larger part of the practice which the labours
of thirty years had secured to my predecessor. My chief rival was a
Dr. Lloyd, a benevolent, fervid man, not without genius, if genius be
present where judgment is absent; not without science, if that may be
science which fails in precision,--one of those clever desultory men
who, in adopting a profession, do not give up to it the whole force and
heat of their minds. Men of that kind habitually accept a mechanical
routine, because in the exercise of their ostensible calling their
imaginative faculties are drawn away to pursuits more alluring.
Therefore, in their proper vocation they are seldom bold or
inventive,--out of it they are sometimes both to excess. And when they
do take up a novelty in their own profession they cherish it with an
obstinate tenacity, and an extravagant passion, unknown to those quiet
philosophers who take up novelties every day, examine them with the
sobriety of practised eyes, to lay down altogether, modify in part, or
accept in whole, according as inductive experiment supports or destroys
conjecture.
Dr. Lloyd had been esteemed a learned naturalist long before he was
admitted to be a tolerable physician. Amidst the privations of his
youth he had contrived to form, and with each succeeding year he had
perseveringly increased, a zoological collection of creatures, not
alive, but, happily for the beholder, stuffed or embalmed. From what I
have said, it will be truly inferred that Dr. Lloyd’s early career as
a physician had not been brilliant; but of late years he had gradually
rather aged than worked himself into that professional authority and
station which time confers on a thoroughly respectable man whom no one
is disposed to envy, and all are disposed to like.
Now in L---- there were two distinct social circles,--that of the
wealthy merchants and traders, and that of a few privileged families
inhabiting a part of the town aloof from the marts of commerce, and
called the Abbey Hill. These superb Areopagites exercised over the wives
and daughters of the inferior citizens to whom all of L----, except the
Abbey Hill, owed its prosperity, the same kind of mysterious influence
which the fine ladies of May Fair and Belgravia are reported to hold
over the female denizens of Bloomsbury and Marylebone.
Abbey Hill was not opulent; but it was powerful by a concentration
of its resources in all matters of patronage. Abbey Hill had its own
milliner and its own draper, its own confectioner, butcher, baker, and
tea-dealer; and the patronage of Abbey Hill was like the patronage
of royalty,--less lucrative in itself than as a solemn certificate of
general merit. The shops on which Abbey Hill conferred its custom
were certainly not the cheapest, possibly not the best; but they were
undeniably the most imposing. The proprietors were decorously pompous,
the shopmen superciliously polite. They could not be more so if they had
belonged to the State, and been paid by a public which they benefited
and despised. The ladies of Low Town (as the city subjacent to the Hill
had been styled from a date remote in the feudal ages) entered those
shops with a certain awe, and left them with a certain pride. There they
had learned what the Hill approved; there they had bought what the Hill
had purchased. It is much in this life to be quite sure that we are in
the right, whatever that conviction may cost us. Abbey Hill had been
in the habit of appointing, amongst other objects of patronage, its own
physician. But that habit had fallen into disuse during the latter years
of my predecessor’s practice. His superiority over all other medical
men in the town had become so incontestable, that, though he was
emphatically the doctor of Low Town, the head of its hospitals and
infirmaries, and by birth related to its principal traders, still as
Abbey Hill was occasionally subject to the physical infirmities of
meaner mortals, so on those occasions it deemed it best not to push
the point of honour to the wanton sacrifice of life. Since Low Town
possessed one of the most famous physicians in England, Abbey Hill
magnanimously resolved not to crush him by a rival. Abbey Hill let him
feel its pulse.
When my predecessor retired, I had presumptuously expected that the Hill
would have continued to suspend its normal right to a special physician,
and shown to me the same generous favour it had shown to him, who had
declared me worthy to succeed to his honours. I had the more excuse for
this presumption because the Hill had already allowed me to visit a fair
proportion of its invalids, had said some very gracious things to me
about the great respectability of the Fenwick family, and sent me some
invitations to dinner, and a great many invitations to tea.
But my self-conceit received a notable check. Abbey Hill declared that
the time had come to reassert its dormant privilege; it must have a
doctor of its own choosing,--a doctor who might, indeed, be permitted
to visit Low Town from motives of humanity or gain, but who must
emphatically assert his special allegiance to Abbey Hill by fixing
his home on that venerable promontory. Miss Brabazon, a spinster of
uncertain age but undoubted pedigree, with small fortune but high nose,
which she would pleasantly observe was a proof of her descent from
Humphrey Duke of Gloucester (with whom, indeed, I have no doubt, in
spite of chronology, that she very often dined), was commissioned to
inquire of me diplomatically, and without committing Abbey Hill too much
by the overture, whether I would take a large and antiquated mansion, in
which abbots were said to have lived many centuries ago, and which was
still popularly styled Abbots’ House, situated on the verge of the Hill,
as in that case the “Hill” would think of me.
“It is a large house for a single man, I allow,” said Miss Brabazon,
candidly; and then added, with a sidelong glance of alarming sweetness,
“but when Dr. Fenwick has taken his true position (so old a family!)
amongst us, he need not long remain single, unless he prefer it.”
I replied, with more asperity than the occasion called for, that I had
no thought of changing my residence at present, and if the Hill wanted
me, the Hill must send for me.
Two days afterwards Dr. Lloyd took Abbots’ House, and in less than a
week was proclaimed medical adviser to the Hill. The election had been
decided by the fiat of a great lady, who reigned supreme on the sacred
eminence, under the name and title of Mrs. Colonel Poyntz.
“Dr. Fenwick,” said this lady, “is a clever young man and a gentleman,
but he gives himself airs,--the Hill does not allow any airs but its
own. Besides, he is a new comer: resistance to new comers, and, indeed,
to all things new, except caps and novels, is one of the bonds that keep
old established societies together. Accordingly, it is by my advice that
Dr. Lloyd has taken Abbots’ House; the rent would be too high for his
means if the Hill did not feel bound in honour to justify the trust he
has placed in its patronage. I told him that all my friends, when they
were in want of a doctor, would send for him; those who are my friends
will do so. What the Hill does, plenty of common people down there will
do also,--so that question is settled!” And it was settled.
Dr. Lloyd, thus taken by the hand, soon extended the range of his visits
beyond the Hill, which was not precisely a mountain of gold to doctors,
and shared with myself, though in a comparatively small degree, the much
more lucrative practice of Low Town.
I had no cause to grudge his success, nor did I. But to my theories of
medicine his diagnosis was shallow, and his prescriptions obsolete. When
we were summoned to a joint consultation, our views as to the proper
course of treatment seldom agreed. Doubtless he thought I ought to have
deferred to his seniority in years; but I held the doctrine which youth
deems a truth and age a paradox,--namely, that in science the young men
are the practical elders, inasmuch as they are schooled in the latest
experiences science has gathered up, while their seniors are cramped by
the dogmas they were schooled to believe when the world was some decades
the younger.
Meanwhile my reputation continued rapidly to advance; it became more
than local; my advice was sought even by patients from the metropolis.
That ambition, which, conceived in early youth, had decided my career
and sweetened all its labours,--the ambition to take a rank and leave
a name as one of the great pathologists to whom humanity accords a
grateful, if calm, renown,--saw before it a level field and a certain
goal.
I know not whether a success far beyond that usually attained at the age
I had reached served to increase, but it seemed to myself to justify,
the main characteristic of my moral organization,--intellectual pride.
Though mild and gentle to the sufferers under my care, as a necessary
element of professional duty, I was intolerant of contradiction from
those who belonged to my calling, or even from those who, in general
opinion, opposed my favourite theories. I had espoused a school of
medical philosophy severely rigid in its inductive logic. My creed was
that of stern materialism. I had a contempt for the understanding of men
who accepted with credulity what they could not explain by reason. My
favourite phrase was “common-sense.” At the same time I had no prejudice
against bold discovery, and discovery necessitates conjecture, but
I dismissed as idle all conjecture that could not be brought to a
practical test.
As in medicine I had been the pupil of Broussais, so in metaphysics I
was the disciple of Condillac. I believed with that philosopher that
“all our knowledge we owe to Nature; that in the beginning we can
only instruct ourselves through her lessons; and that the whole art of
reasoning consists in continuing as she has compelled us to commence.”
Keeping natural philosophy apart from the doctrines of revelation, I
never assailed the last; but I contended that by the first no accurate
reasoner could arrive at the existence of the soul as a third principle
of being equally distinct from mind and body. That by a miracle man
might live again, was a question of faith and not of understanding. I
left faith to religion, and banished it from philosophy. How define with
a precision to satisfy the logic of philosophy what was to live again?
The body? We know that the body rests in its grave till by the process
of decomposition its elemental parts enter into other forms of
matter. The mind? But the mind was as clearly the result of the bodily
organization as the music of the harpsichord is the result of the
instrumental mechanism. The mind shared the decrepitude of the body in
extreme old age, and in the full vigour of youth a sudden injury to the
brain might forever destroy the intellect of a Plato or a Shakspeare.
But the third principle,--the soul,--the something lodged within the
body, which yet was to survive it? Where was that soul hidden out of
the ken of the anatomist? When philosophers attempted to define it, were
they not compelled to confound its nature and its actions with those
of the mind? Could they reduce it to the mere moral sense, varying
according to education, circumstances, and physical constitution? But
even the moral sense in the most virtuous of men may be swept away by
a fever. Such at the time I now speak of were the views I held,--views
certainly not original nor pleasing; but I cherished them with as fond a
tenacity as if they had been consolatory truths of which I was the
first discoverer. I was intolerant to those who maintained opposite
doctrines,--despised them as irrational, or disliked them as
insincere. Certainly if I had fulfilled the career which my ambition
predicted,--become the founder of a new school in pathology, and summed
up my theories in academical lectures,--I should have added another
authority, however feeble, to the sects which circumscribe the interest
of man to the life that has its close in his grave.
Possibly that which I have called my intellectual pride was more
nourished than I should have been willing to grant by the self-reliance
which an unusual degree of physical power is apt to bestow. Nature had
blessed me with the thews of an athlete. Among the hardy youths of
the Northern Athens I had been preeminently distinguished for feats
of activity and strength. My mental labours, and the anxiety which
is inseparable from the conscientious responsibilities of the medical
profession, kept my health below the par of keen enjoyment, but had in
no way diminished my rare muscular force. I walked through the crowd
with the firm step and lofty crest of the mailed knight of old, who
felt himself, in his casement of iron, a match against numbers. Thus the
sense of a robust individuality, strong alike in disciplined reason
and animal vigour, habituated to aid others, needing no aid for itself,
contributed to render me imperious in will and arrogant in opinion. Nor
were such defects injurious to me in my profession; on the contrary,
aided as they were by a calm manner, and a presence not without that
kind of dignity which is the livery of self-esteem, they served to
impose respect and to inspire trust.