Months upon months have rolled on since the night in which Lilian had
watched for my coming amidst the chilling airs--under the haunting moon.
I have said that from the date of that night her health began gradually
to fail, but in her mind there was evidently at work some slow
revolution. Her visionary abstractions were less frequent; when they
occurred, less prolonged. There was no longer in her soft face that
celestial serenity which spoke her content in her dreams, but often a
look of anxiety and trouble. She was even more silent than before; but
when she did speak, there were now evident some struggling gleams of
memory. She startled us, at times, by a distinct allusion to the
events and scenes of her early childhood. More than once she spoke
of commonplace incidents and mere acquaintances at L----. At last
she seemed to recognize Mrs. Ashleigh as her mother; but me, as Allen
Fenwick, her betrothed, her bridegroom, no! Once or twice she spoke
to me of her beloved as of a stranger to myself, and asked me not to
deceive her--should she ever see him again? There was one change in
this new phase of her state that wounded me to the quick. She had
always previously seemed to welcome my presence; now there were hours,
sometimes days together, in which my presence was evidently painful to
her. She would become agitated when I stole into her room, make signs to
me to leave her, grow yet more disturbed if I did not immediately obey,
and become calm again when I was gone.
Faber sought constantly to sustain my courage and administer to my hopes
by reminding me of the prediction he had hazarded,--namely, that through
some malady to the frame the reason would be ultimately restored.
He said, “Observe! her mind was first roused from its slumber by the
affectionate, unconquered impulse of her heart. You were absent; the
storm alarmed her, she missed you,--feared for you. The love within
her, not alienated, though latent, drew her thoughts into definite
human tracks. And thus, the words that you tell me she uttered when
you appeared before her were words of love, stricken, though as yet
irregularly, as the winds strike the harp-strings from chords of
awakened memory. The same unwonted excitement, together with lengthened
exposure to the cold night-air, will account for the shock to her
physical system, and the languor and waste of strength by which it has
been succeeded.”
“Ay, and the Shadow that we both saw within the threshold. What of
that?”
“Are there no records on evidence, which most physicians of very
extended practice will perhaps allow that their experience more or
less tend to confirm--no records of the singular coincidences between
individual impressions which are produced by sympathy? Now, whether you
or your Lilian were first haunted by this Shadow I know not. Perhaps
before it appeared to you in the wizard’s chamber it had appeared to
her by the Monks’ Well. Perhaps, as it came to you in the prison, so it
lured her through the solitudes, associating its illusory guidance with
dreams of you. And again, when she saw it within your threshold, your
fantasy, so abruptly invoked, made you see with the eyes of your Lilian!
Does this doctrine of sympathy, though by that very mystery you two
loved each other at first,--though, without it, love at first sight were
in itself an incredible miracle,--does, I say, this doctrine of sympathy
seem to you inadmissible? Then nothing is left for us but to revolve the
conjecture I before threw out. Have certain organizations like that of
Margrave the power to impress, through space, the imaginations of those
over whom they have forced a control? I know not. But if they have, it
is not supernatural; it is but one of those operations in Nature so rare
and exceptional, and of which testimony and evidence are so imperfect
and so liable to superstitious illusions, that they have not yet been
traced--as, if truthful, no doubt they can be, by the patient genius of
science--to one of those secondary causes by which the Creator ordains
that Nature shall act on Man.”
By degrees I became dissatisfied with my conversations with Faber. I
yearned for explanations; all guesses but bewildered me more. In his
family, with one exception, I found no congenial association. His nephew
seemed to me an ordinary specimen of a very trite human nature,--a young
man of limited ideas, fair moral tendencies, going mechanically right
where not tempted to wrong. The same desire of gain which had urged him
to gamble and speculate when thrown in societies rife with such example,
led him, now in the Bush, to healthful, industrious, persevering labour.
“Spes fovet agricolas,” says the poet; the same Hope which entices
the fish to the hook impels the plough of the husband-man. The
young farmer’s young wife was somewhat superior to him; she had more
refinement of taste, more culture of mind, but, living in his life, she
was inevitably levelled to his ends and pursuits; and, next to the babe
in the cradle, no object seemed to her so important as that of guarding
the sheep from the scab and the dingoes. I was amazed to see how quietly
a man whose mind was so stored by life and by books as that of Julius
Faber--a man who had loved the clash of conflicting intellects, and
acquired the rewards of fame--could accommodate himself to the cabined
range of his kinsfolks’ half-civilized existence, take interest in their
trivial talk, find varying excitement in the monotonous household of a
peasant-like farmer. I could not help saying as much to him once. “My
friend,” replied the old man, “believe me that the happiest art of
intellect, however lofty, is that which enables it to be cheerfully at
home with the Real!”
The only one of the family in which Faber was domesticated in whom I
found an interest, to whose talk I could listen without fatigue, was the
child Amy. Simple though she was in language, patient of labour as the
most laborious, I recognized in her a quiet nobleness of sentiment,
which exalted above the commonplace the acts of her commonplace life.
She had no precocious intellect, no enthusiastic fancies, but she had an
exquisite activity of heart. It was her heart that animated her sense
of duty, and made duty a sweetness and a joy. She felt to the core
the kindness of those around her; exaggerated, with the warmth of her
gratitude, the claims which that kindness imposed. Even for the blessing
of life, which she shared with all creation, she felt as if singled
out by the undeserved favour of the Creator, and thus was filled with
religion, because she was filled with love.
My interest in this child was increased and deepened by my saddened and
not wholly unremorseful remembrance of the night on which her sobs had
pierced my ear,--the night from which I secretly dated the mysterious
agencies that had wrenched from their proper field and career both my
mind and my life. But a gentler interest endeared her to my thoughts
in the pleasure that Lilian felt in her visits, in the affectionate
intercourse that sprang up between the afflicted sufferer and the
harmless infant. Often when we failed to comprehend some meaning
which Lilian evidently wished to convey to us--we, her mother and her
husband--she was understood with as much ease by Amy, the unlettered
child, as by Faber, the gray-haired thinker.
“How is it,--how is it?” I asked, impatiently and jealously, of Faber.
“Love is said to interpret where wisdom fails, and you yourself talk
of the marvels which sympathy may effect between lover and beloved; yet
when, for days together, I cannot succeed in unravelling Lilian’s wish
or her thought--and her own mother is equally in fault--you or
Amy, closeted alone with her for five minutes, comprehend and are
comprehended.”
“Allen,” answered Faber, “Amy and I believe in spirit; and she, in whom
mind is dormant but spirit awake, feels in such belief a sympathy which
she has not, in that respect, with yourself, nor even with her mother.
You seek only through your mind to conjecture hers. Her mother has sense
clear enough where habitual experience can guide it, but that sense is
confused, and forsakes her when forced from the regular pathway in which
it has been accustomed to tread. Amy and I through soul guess at soul,
and though mostly contented with earth, we can both rise at times into
heaven. We pray.”
“Alas!” said I, half mournfully, half angrily, “when you thus speak of
Mind as distinct from Soul, it was only in that Vision which you bid
me regard as the illusion of a fancy stimulated by chemical vapours,
producing on the brain an effect similar to that of opium or the
inhalation of the oxide gas, that I have ever seen the silver spark of
the Soul distinct from the light of the Mind. And holding, as I do, that
all intellectual ideas are derived from the experiences of the body,
whether I accept the theory of Locke, or that of Condillac, or that into
which their propositions reach their final development in the wonderful
subtlety of Hume, I cannot detect the immaterial spirit in the material
substance,--much less follow its escape from the organic matter in which
the principle of thought ceases with the principle of life. When the
metaphysician, contending for the immortality of the thinking faculty,
analyzes Mind, his analysis comprehends the mind of the brute, nay, of
the insect, as well as that of man. Take Reid’s definition of Mind, as
the most comprehensive which I can at the moment remember: ‘By the mind
of a man we understand that in him which thinks, remembers, reasons, and
wills.(1) But this definition only distinguishes the mind of man from
that of the brute by superiority in the same attributes, and not by
attributes denied to the brute. An animal, even an insect, thinks,
remembers, reasons, and wills.(1) Few naturalists will now support the
doctrine that all the mental operations of brute or insect are to
be exclusively referred to instincts; and, even if they do, the word
‘instinct’ is a very vague word,--loose and large enough to cover an
abyss which our knowledge has not sounded. And, indeed, in proportion as
an animal like the dog becomes cultivated by intercourse, his instincts
grow weaker, and his ideas formed by experience (namely, his mind), more
developed, often to the conquest of the instincts themselves. Hence,
with his usual candour, Dr. Abercrombie--in contending ‘that everything
mental ceases to exist after death, when we know that everything
corporeal continues to exist, is a gratuitous assumption contrary to
every rule of philosophical inquiry’--feels compelled, by his reasoning,
to admit the probability of a future life even to the lower animals.
His words are: ‘To this anode of reasoning it has been objected that it
would go to establish an immaterial principle in the lower animals which
in them exhibits many of the phenomena of mind. I have only to answer,
Be it so. There are in the lower animals many of the phenomena of
mind, and with regard to these, we also contend that they are entirely
distinct from anything we know of the properties of matter, which is all
that we mean, or can mean, by being immaterial.’(2) Am I then driven to
admit that if man’s mind is immaterial and imperishable, so also is that
of the ape and the ant?”
“I own,” said Faber, with his peculiar smile, arch and genial, “that if
I were compelled to make that admission, it would not shock my pride.
I do not presume to set any limit to the goodness of the Creator; and
should be as humbly pleased as the Indian, if in--
“‘yonder sky,
My faithful dog should bear me company.’
“You are too familiar with the works of that Titan in wisdom and error,
Descartes, not to recollect the interesting correspondence between the
urbane philosopher and our combative countryman, Henry More,(3) on this
very subject; in which certainly More has the best of it when Descartes
insists on reducing what he calls the soul (l’ame) of brutes into the
same kind of machines as man constructs from inorganized matter. The
learning, indeed, lavished on the insoluble question involved in
the psychology of the inferior animals is a proof at least of the
all-inquisitive, redundant spirit of man.(4) We have almost a literature
in itself devoted to endeavours to interpret the language of brutes.(5)
Dupont de Nemours has discovered that dogs talk in vowels, using only
two consonants, G, Z, when they are angry. He asserts that cats
employ the same vowels as dogs; but their language is more affluent in
consonants, including M, N, B, R, V, F. How many laborious efforts have
been made to define and to construe the song of the nightingale! One
version of that song, by Beckstein, the naturalist, published in 1840,
I remember to have seen. And I heard a lady, gifted with a singularly
charming voice, chant the mysterious vowels with so exquisite a pathos,
that one could not refuse to believe her when she declared that she
fully comprehended the bird’s meaning, and gave to the nightingale’s
warble the tender interpretation of her own woman’s heart.
“But leaving all such discussions to their proper place amongst the
Curiosities of Literature, I come in earnest to the question you have
so earnestly raised; and to me the distinction between man and the
lower animals in reference to a spiritual nature designed for a future
existence, and the mental operations whose uses are bounded to an
existence on earth, seems ineffaceably clear. Whether ideas or even
perceptions be innate or all formed by experience is a speculation
for metaphysicians, which, so far as it affects the question of as
immaterial principle, I am quite willing to lay aside. I can well
understand that a materialist may admit innate ideas in Man, as he
must admit them in the instinct of brutes, tracing them to hereditary
predispositions. On the other hand, we know that the most devout
believers in our spiritual nature have insisted, with Locke, in denying
any idea, even of the Deity, to be innate.
“But here comes my argument. I care not how ideas are formed,--the
material point is, how are the capacities to receive ideas formed? The
ideas may all come from experience, but the capacity to receive the
ideas must be inherent. I take the word ‘capacity’ as a good plain
English word, rather than the more technical word ‘receptivity,’
employed by Kant. And by capacity I mean the passive power(6) to
receive ideas, whether in man or in any living thing by which ideas
are received. A man and an elephant is each formed with capacities to
receive ideas suited to the several places in the universe held by each.
“The more I look through Nature the more I find that on all varieties
of organized life is carefully bestowed the capacity to receive the
impressions, be they called perceptions or ideas, which are adapted to
the uses each creature is intended to derive from them. I find, then,
that Man alone is endowed with the capacity to receive the ideas of
a God, of Soul, of Worship, of a Hereafter. I see no trace of such a
capacity in the inferior races; nor, however their intelligence may be
refined by culture, is such capacity ever apparent in them.
“But wherever capacities to receive impressions are sufficiently general
in any given species of creature to be called universal to that species,
and yet not given to another species, then, from all analogy throughout
Nature, those capacities are surely designed by Providence for the
distinct use and conservation of the species to which they are given.
“It is no answer to me to say that the inherent capacities thus bestowed
on Man do not suffice in themselves to make him form right notions of
a Deity or a Hereafter; because it is plainly the design of Providence
that Man must learn to correct and improve all his notions by his
own study and observation. He must build a hut before he can build a
Parthenon; he must believe with the savage or the heathen before he
can believe with the philosopher or Christian. In a word, in all his
capacities, Man has only given to him, not the immediate knowledge of
the Perfect, but the means to strive towards the Perfect. And thus one
of the most accomplished of modern reasoners, to whose lectures you must
have listened with delight, in your college days, says well:--
“‘Accordingly the sciences always studied with keenest interest are
those in a state of progress and uncertainty; absolute certainty and
absolute completion would be the paralysis of any study, and the last
worst calamity that could befall Man, as he is at present
constituted, would be that full and final possession of speculative
truth which he now vainly anticipates as the consummation of his
intellectual happiness.’(7)
“Well, then, in all those capacities for the reception of impressions
from external Nature which are given to Man and not to the brutes, I see
the evidence of Man’s Soul. I can understand why the inferior animal
has no capacity to receive the idea of a Deity and of Worship--simply
because the inferior animal, even if graciously admitted to a future
life, may not therein preserve the sense of its identity. I can
understand even why that sympathy with each other which we men possess
and which constitutes the great virtue we emphatically call Humanity,
is not possessed by the lesser animals (or, at least, in a very rare and
exceptional degree) even where they live in communities, like beavers,
or bees, or ants; because men are destined to meet, to know, and to love
each other in the life to come, and the bond between the brute ceases
here.
“Now the more, then, we examine the inherent capacities bestowed
distinctly and solely on Man, the more they seem to distinguish him from
the other races by their comprehension of objects beyond his life upon
this earth.
“‘Man alone,’ says Muller, ‘can conceive abstract notions; and it is in
abstract notions--such as time, space, matter, spirit, light, form,
quantity, essence--that man grounds, not only all philosophy, all
science, but all that practically improves one generation for the
benefit of the next.’
“And why? Because all these abstract notions unconsciously lead the mind
away from the material into the immaterial,--from the present into the
future. But if Man ceases to exist when he disappears in the grave, you
must be compelled to affirm that he is the only creature in existence
whom Nature or Providence has condescended to deceive and cheat by
capacities for which there are no available objects. How nobly and how
truly has Chalmers said:--
“‘What inference shall we draw from this remarkable law in Nature that
there is nothing waste and nothing meaningless in the feelings and
faculties wherewith living creatures are endowed? For each desire
there is a counterpart object; for each faculty there is room and
opportunity for exercise either in the present or the coming
futurity. Now, but for the doctrine of immortality, Man would be an
exception to this law,-he would stand forth as an anomaly in Nature,
with aspirations in his heart for which the universe had no antitype
to offer, with capacities of understanding and thought that never
were to be followed by objects of corresponding greatness through the
whole history of his being!
............
“‘With the inferior animals there is a certain squareness of
adjustment, if we may so term it, between each desire and its
correspondent gratification. The one is evenly met by the other, and
there is a fulness and definiteness of enjoyment up to the capacity
of enjoyment. Not so with Man, who, both from the vastness of his
propensities and the vastness of his powers, feels himself chained
and beset in a field too narrow for him. He alone labours under the
discomfort of an incongruity between his circumstances and his
powers; and unless there be new circumstances awaiting him in a more
advanced state of being, he, the noblest of Nature’s products here,
would turn out to be the greatest of her failures.’(8)
“This, then, I take to be the proof of Soul in Man, not that he has a
mind--because, as you justly say, inferior animals have that, though
in a lesser degree--but because he has the capacities to comprehend, as
soon as he is capable of any abstract ideas whatsoever, the very truths
not needed for self-conservation on earth, and therefore not given to
yonder ox and opossum,--namely, the nature of Deity, Soul, Hereafter.
And in the recognition of these truths, the Human society, that excels
the society of beavers, bees, and ants, by perpetual and progressive
improvement on the notions inherited from its progenitors, rests its
basis. Thus, in fact, this world is benefited for men by their belief
in the next, while the society of brutes remains age after age the same.
Neither the bee nor the beaver has, in all probability, improved since
the Deluge.
“But inseparable from the conviction of these truths is the impulse of
prayer and worship. It does not touch my argument when a philosopher of
the school of Bolingbroke or Lucretius says, ‘that the origin of prayer
is in Man’s ignorance of the phenomena of Nature.’ That it is fear or
ignorance which, ‘when rocked the mountains or when groaned the ground,
taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray.’ My answer is, the brutes
are much more forcibly impressed by natural phenomena than Man is; the
bird and the beast know before you and I do when the mountain will rock
and the ground groan, and their instinct leads them to shelter; but it
does not lead them to prayer. If my theory be right that Soul is to be
sought not in the question whether mental ideas be innate or formed by
experience, by the sense, by association or habit, but in the inherent
capacity to receive ideas, then, the capacity bestowed on Man alone,
to be impressed by Nature herself with the idea of a Power superior to
Nature, with which Power he can establish commune, is a proof that to
Man alone the Maker has made Nature itself proclaim His existence,--that
to Man alone the Deity vouchsafes the communion with Himself which comes
from prayer.”
“Even were this so,” said I, “is not the Creator omniscient? If
all-wise, all-foreseeing? If all-foreseeing, all-pre-ordaining? Can the
prayer of His creature alter the ways of His will?”
“For the answer to a question,” returned Faber, “which is not
unfrequently asked by the clever men of the world, I ought to refer you
to the skilled theologians who have so triumphantly carried the reasoner
over that ford of doubt which is crossed every day by the infant. But
as we have not their books in the wilderness, I am contented to draw my
reply as a necessary and logical sequence from the propositions I have
sought to ground on the plain observation of Nature. I can only guess
at the Deity’s Omniscience, or His modes of enforcing His power by the
observation of His general laws; and of all His laws, I know of none
more general than the impulse which bids men pray,--which makes Nature
so act, that all the phenomena of Nature we can conceive, however
startling and inexperienced, do not make the brute pray, but there
is not a trouble that can happen to Man, but what his impulse is to
pray,--always provided, indeed, that he is not a philosopher. I say not
this in scorn of the philosopher, to whose wildest guess our obligations
are infinite, but simply because for all which is impulsive to Man,
there is a reason in Nature which no philosophy can explain away. I do
not, then, bewilder myself by seeking to bind and limit the Omniscience
of the Deity to my finite ideas. I content myself with supposing that
somehow or other, He has made it quite compatible with His Omniscience
that Man should obey the impulse which leads him to believe that, in
addressing a Deity, he is addressing a tender, compassionate, benignant
Father, and in that obedience shall obtain beneficial results. If that
impulse be an illusion, then we must say that Heaven governs the earth
by a lie; and that is impossible, because, reasoning by analogy, all
Nature is truthful,--that is, Nature gives to no species instincts
or impulses which are not of service to it. Should I not be a shallow
physician if, where I find in the human organization a principle or
a property so general that I must believe it normal to the healthful
conditions of that organization, I should refuse to admit that Nature
intended it for use? Reasoning by all analogy, must I not say the
habitual neglect of its use must more or less injure the harmonious
well-being of the whole human system? I could have much to add upon
the point in dispute by which the creed implied in your question would
enthrall the Divine mercy by the necessities of its Divine wisdom, and
substitute for a benignant Deity a relentless Fate. But here I should
exceed my province. I am no theologian. Enough for me that in all
my afflictions, all my perplexities, an impulse, that I obey as an
instinct, moves me at once to prayer. Do I find by experience that the
prayer is heard, that the affliction is removed, the doubt is solved?
That, indeed, would be presumptuous to say. But it is not presumptuous
to think that by the efficacy of prayer my heart becomes more fortified
against the sorrow, and my reason more serene amidst the doubt.”
I listened, and ceased to argue. I felt as if in that solitude, and
in the pause of my wonted mental occupations, my intellect was growing
languid, and its old weapons rusting in disuse. My pride took alarm. I
had so from my boyhood cherished the idea of fame, and so glorified the
search after knowledge, that I recoiled in dismay from the thought that
I had relinquished knowledge, and cut myself off from fame. I resolved
to resume my once favourite philosophical pursuits, re-examine and
complete the Work to which I had once committed my hopes of renown; and,
simultaneously, a restless desire seized me to communicate, though but
at brief intervals, with other minds than those immediately within my
reach,--minds fresh from the old world, and reviving the memories of
its vivid civilization. Emigrants frequently passed my doors, but I had
hitherto shrunk from tendering the hospitalities so universally accorded
in the colony. I could not endure to expose to such rough strangers my
Lilian’s mournful affliction, and that thought was not less intolerable
to Mrs. Ashleigh. I now hastily constructed a log-building a few hundred
yards from the house, and near the main track taken by travellers
through the spacious pastures. I transported to this building my books
and scientific instruments. In an upper story I placed my telescopes and
lenses, my crucibles and retorts. I renewed my chemical experiments; I
sought to invigorate my mind by other branches of science which I had
hitherto less cultured,--meditated new theories on Light and Colour,
collected specimens in Natural History, subjected animalcules to my
microscope, geological fossils to my hammer. With all these quickened
occupations of thought, I strove to distract myself from sorrow, and
strengthen my reason against the illusion of my fantasy. The Luminous
Shadow was not seen again on my wall, and the thought of Margrave
himself was banished.
In this building I passed many hours of each day; more and more
earnestly plunging my thoughts into depths of abstract study, as
Lilian’s unaccountable dislike to my presence became more and more
decided. When I thus ceased to think that my life cheered and comforted
hers, my heart’s occupation was gone. I had annexed to the apartment
reserved for myself in the log-hut a couple of spare rooms, in which I
could accommodate passing strangers. I learned to look forward to their
coming with interest, and to see them depart with regret; yet, for
the most part, they were of the ordinary class of colonial
adventurers,--bankrupt tradesmen, unlucky farmers, forlorn mechanics,
hordes of unskilled labourers, now and then a briefless barrister, or a
sporting collegian who had lost his all on the Derby. One day, however,
a young man of education and manners that unmistakably proclaimed the
cultured gentleman of Europe, stopped at my door. He was a cadet of
a noble Prussian family, which for some political reasons had settled
itself in Paris; there he had become intimate with young French nobles,
and living the life of a young French noble had soon scandalized his
German parents, forestalled his slender inheritance, and been compelled
to fly his father’s frown and his tailor’s bills. All this he told me
with a lively frankness which proved how much the wit of a German can
be quickened in the atmosphere of Paris. An old college friend, of birth
inferior to his own, had been as unfortunate in seeking to make money as
this young prodigal had been an adept in spending it. The friend, a
few years previously, had accompanied other Germans in a migration to
Australia, and was already thriving; the spendthrift noble was on his
way to join the bankrupt trader, at a German settlement fifty miles
distant from my house. This young man was unlike any German I ever met.
He had all the exquisite levity by which the well-bred Frenchman gives
to the doctrines of the Cynic the grace of the Epicurean. He owned
himself to be good for nothing with an elegance of candour which not
only disarmed censure, but seemed to challenge admiration; and, withal,
the happy spendthrift was so inebriate with hope,--sure that he should
be rich before he was thirty. How and wherefore rich, he could have
no more explained than I can square the circle. When the grand serious
German nature does Frenchify itself, it can become so extravagantly
French!
I listened, almost enviously, to this light-hearted profligate’s babble,
as we sat by my rude fireside,--I, sombre man of science and sorrow,
he, smiling child of idleness and pleasure, so much one of Nature’s
courtier-like nobles, that there, as he smoked his villanous pipe, in
his dust-soiled shabby garments, and with his ruffianly revolver stuck
into his belt, I would defy the daintiest Aristarch who ever presided as
critic over the holiday world not to have said, “There smiles the
genius beyond my laws, the born darling of the Graces, who in every
circumstance, in every age, like Aristippus, would have socially
charmed; would have been welcome to the orgies of a Caesar or a Clodius,
to the boudoirs of a Montespan or a Pompadour; have lounged through the
Mulberry Gardens with a Rochester and a Buckingham, or smiled from the
death-cart, with a Richelieu and a Lauzun, a gentleman’s disdain of a
mob!”
I was so thinking as we sat, his light talk frothing up from his
careless lips, when suddenly from the spray and the sparkle of that
light talk was flung forth the name of Margrave.
“Margrave!” I exclaimed. “Pardon me. What of him?”
“What of him! I asked if, by chance, you knew the only Englishman I ever
had the meanness to envy?”
“Perhaps you speak of one person, and I thought of another.”
“Pardieu, my dear host, there can scarcely be two Margraves! The one of
whom I speak flashed like a meteor upon Paris, bought from a prince of
the Bourse a palace that might have lodged a prince of the blood-royal,
eclipsed our Jew bankers in splendour, our jeunesse doree in good looks
and hair-brain adventures, and, strangest of all, filled his salons with
philosophers and charlatans, chemists and spirit-rappers; insulting the
gravest dons of the schools by bringing them face to face with the most
impudent quacks, the most ridiculous dreamers,--and yet, withal, himself
so racy and charming, so bon prince, so bon enfant! For six months he
was the rage at Paris: perhaps he might have continued to be the rage
there for six years, but all at once the meteor vanished as suddenly as
it had flashed. Is this the Margrave whom you know?”
“I should not have thought the Margrave whom I knew could have
reconciled his tastes to the life of cities.”
“Nor could this man: cities were too tame for him. He has gone to some
far-remote wilds in the East,--some say in search of the Philosopher’s
Stone; for he actually maintained in his house a Sicilian adventurer,
who, when at work on that famous discovery, was stifled by the fumes of
his own crucible. After that misfortune, Margrave took Paris in disgust,
and we lost him.”
“So this is the only Englishman whom you envy! Envy him? Why?”
“Because he is the only Englishman I ever met who contrived to be rich
and yet free from the spleen; I envied him because one had only to look
at his face and see how thoroughly he enjoyed the life of which your
countrymen seem to be so heartily tired. But now that I have satisfied
your curiosity, pray satisfy mine. Who and what is this Englishman?”
“Who and what was he supposed at Paris to be?”
“Conjectures were numberless. One of your countrymen suggested that
which was the most generally favoured. This gentleman, whose name I
forget, but who was one of those old roues who fancy themselves young
because they live with the young, no sooner set eyes upon Margrave, than
he exclaimed, ‘Louis Grayle come to life again, as I saw him forty-four
years ago! But no--still younger, still handsomer--it must be his son!”
“Louis Grayle, who was said to be murdered at Aleppo?”
“The same. That strange old man was enormously rich; but it seems that
he hated his lawful heirs, and left behind him a fortune so far below
that which he was known to possess that he must certainly have disposed
of it secretly before his death. Why so dispose of it, if not to enrich
some natural son, whom, for private reasons, he might not have wished
to acknowledge, or point out to the world by the signal bequest of
his will? All that Margrave ever said of himself and the source of his
wealth confirmed this belief. He frankly proclaimed himself a natural
son, enriched by a father whose name he knew not nor cared to know.”
“It is true. And Margrave quitted Paris for the East. When?”
“I can tell you the date within a day or two, for his flight preceded
mine by a week; and, happily, all Paris was so busy in talking of it,
that I slipped away without notice.”
And the Prussian then named a date which it thrilled me to hear, for
it was in that very month, and about that very day, that the Luminous
Shadow had stood within my threshold.
The young count now struck off into other subjects of talk: nothing more
was said of Margrave. An hour or two afterwards he went on his way, and
I remained long gazing musingly on the embers of the dying glow on my
hearth.
(1) “Are intelligence and instinct, thus differing in their relative
proportion in man as compared with all other animals, yet the same in
kind and manner of operation in both? To this question we must give
at once an affirmative answer. The expression of Cuvier, regarding the
faculty of reasoning in lower animals, ‘Leur intelligence execute des
operations du meme genre,’ is true in its full sense. We can in no
manner define reason so as to exclude acts which are at every moment
present to our observation, and which we find in many instances to
contravene the natural instincts of the species. The demeanour and acts
of the dog in reference to his master, or the various uses to which
he is put by man, are as strictly logical as those we witness in the
ordinary transactions of life.”--Sir Henry Holland, chapters on “Mental
Physiology,” p. 220.
The whole of the chapter on Instincts and Habits in this work should
be read in connection with the passage just quoted. The work itself, at
once cautious and suggestive, is not one of the least obligations which
philosophy and religion alike owe to the lucubrations of English medical
men.
(2) Abercrombie’s Intellectual Powers, p. 26. (15th Edition.)
(3) OEuvres de Descartes, vol. x. p. 178, et seq. (Cousin’s Edition.)
(4) M. Tissot the distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Dijon, in his
recent work, “La Vie dans l’Homme,” p. 255, gives a long and illustrious
list of philosophers who assign a rational soul (ame) to the inferior
animals, though he truly adds, “that they have not always the courage of
their opinion.”
(5) Some idea of the extent of research and imagination bestowed on this
subject may be gleaned from the sprightly work of Pierquin de Gemblouz,
“Idiomologie des Animaux,” published at Paris, 1844.
(6) “Faculty is active power: capacity is passive power.”--Sir W.
Hamilton: Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. i. p.178.
(7) Sir W. Hamilton’s “Lectures,” vol. i. p. 10.
(8) Chalmers, “Bridgewater Treatise,” vol. ii. pp. 28, 30. Perhaps I
should observe, that here and elsewhere in the dialogues between Faber
and Fenwick, it has generally been thought better to substitute the
words of the author quoted for the mere outline or purport of the
quotation which memory afforded to the interlocutor.