Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 52225-h.htm or 52225-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/52225/pg52225-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52225/52225-h.zip)
Note: Images of the original pages are available through
the Google Books Library Project. See
https://books.google.com/books?id=9g9EAAAAYAAJ
Transcriber's note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
The o-e ligature is represented by [oe].
THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY
by
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Translated by Lafcadio Hearn
Illustrations by Odilon Redon
(Added especially for this PG e-book.)
The Alice Harriman Company
New York and Seattle
1910
INTRODUCTION
It was at some period between 1875 and 1876 that Lafcadio Hearn--still
a "cub" reporter on a daily paper in Cincinnati--began his translation
of Flaubert's "Temptation of St. Anthony." The definitive edition of
the work, over which the author had laboured for thirty years, had
appeared in 1874.
Hearn was, in his early youth, singularly indifferent to the work of
the Englishmen of the Victorian period. Though he knew the English
masterpieces of that epoch, their large, unacademic freedom of manner
awakened no echoes in his spirit. His instinctive taste was for the
exquisite in style: for "that peculiar kneading, heightening, and
recasting" which Matthew Arnold thought necessary for perfection.
Neither did the matter, more than the manner of the Victorians appeal
to him. The circumstances of his life had at so many points set him
out of touch with his fellows that the affectionate mockery of
Thackeray's pictures of English society were alien to his interest.
The laughing heartiness of Dickens' studies of the man in the street
hardly touched him. Browning's poignant analyses of souls were too
rudely robust of manner to move him. Before essaying journalism Hearn
had served for a while as an assistant in the Public Library, and
there he had found and fallen under the spell, of the great Frenchman
of the Romantic School of the '30's--that period of rich flowering of
the Gallic genius. Gautier's tales of ancient weirdnesses fired his
imagination. The penetrating subtleties of his verse woke in the boy
the felicitous emotions which the virtuoso knows in handling cameos
and enamellings by hands which have long been dust. So, also, Hugo's
revivals of the passions and terrors of the mediæval world stirred the
young librarian's eager interest. But most of all his spirit leapt
to meet the tremendous drama of the "Temptation." He comprehended at
once its large significance, its great import, and in his enthusiastic
recognition of its value and meaning he set at once about giving it a
language understood of the people of his own tongue.
Tunison tells of the little shy, shabby, half-blind boy--the long
dull day of police reporting done--labouring at his desk into the
small hours, with the flickering gas jet whistling overhead, and his
myopic eyes bent close to the papers which he covered with beautiful,
almost microscopic characters--escaping thus from the crass, raw world
about him to delicately and painstakingly turn into English stories
of Cleopatra's cruel, fantastic Egyptian Night's Entertainment.
Withdrawing himself to transliterate tales of pallid beautiful vampires
draining the veins of ardent boys: of lovely faded ghosts of great
ladies descending from shadowy tapestries to coquette with romantic
dreamers; or to find an English voice for the tragedy of the soul of
the Alexandrian cenobite.
It was in such dreams and labours that he found refuge from the
environment that was so antipathetic to his tastes, and in his
immersion in the works of these virtuosos of words, in his passionate
search for equivalents of the subtle nuances of their phrases, he
developed his own style. A style full of intricate assonances, of a
texture close woven and iridescent.
"One of Cleopatra's Night's"--a translation of some of Gautier's tales
of glamour--was issued in 1882, but at "The Temptation of St. Anthony"
the publishers altogether balked. The manuscript could not achieve even
so much as a reading. America had in the '70's just begun to emerge
from that state of provincial propriety in which we were accused of
clothing even our piano legs in pantelettes. The very name of the work
was sufficient to start modest shivers down the spine of all well
regulated purveyors of books. It was largely due to the painters'
conceptions of the nature of the hermit's trials that the story of
Saint Anthony's spiritual struggle aroused instinctive terrors in all
truly modest natures. The painters--who so dearly love to display their
skill in drawing legs and busts--had been wont to push the poor old
saint into the obscure of the background, and fill all the foreground
with ladies of obviously the very lightest character, in garments
still lighter, if possible. What had reputable American citizens to do
with such as these jades? More especially such jades as seen through
a French imagination! That Flaubert had brushed aside the gross and
jejune conceptions of the painters the publishers would not even take
the pains to learn.
It is amusing now to recall the nervous, timid proprieties of those
days. At the time Hearn failed to see the laughable side of it. He was
then too young and earnest, too passionate and too melancholy to have a
sense of its humours.
He had brought his unfinished manuscript from Cincinnati to New
Orleans, and had continued to work upon it in strange lodgings in
gaunt, old half-ruined Creole houses; at the tables of odd little
French cafés, or among the queer dishes in obscure Spanish and Chinese
restaurants. He had snatched minutes for it amidst the reading and
clipping of exchanges in a newspaper office; had toiled drippingly
over it in the liquifying heats of tropic nights; had arisen from the
"inexpungable langours" of yellow fever to complete its last astounding
pages.
I can remember applauding, with ardent youthful sympathy, his tirades
against the stultifying influence of blind puritanism upon American
literature. I recall his scornful mocking at the inconsistency which
complacently accepted the vulgar seduction, and the theatrical Brocken
revels of Faust, while shrinking piously from Flaubert's grim story of
the soul of man struggling to answer the riddle of the universe. He
had however an almost equal contempt for the author's countrymen, who
received with eager interest and pleasure the deliberate analysis--in
_Madame Bovary_--of a woman's degradation and ruin, while they yawned
over the amazing history of humanity's tremendous spiritual adventures.
Hearn's own sensitiveness shrank in pain from the cold insight which
uncovered layer by layer the brutal squalour of a woman's moral
disintegration. But he was moved and astounded by the revelation, in
St. Anthony, of the tragedy and pathos of man's long search for some
body of belief or philosophy by which he could explain to himself
the strange great phenomena of life and death, and the inscrutable
cruelties of Nature. The young translator was filled with a sort of
astonished despair at his inability to make others see the book as
he did--not realizing, in his youthful impatience, that the average
mind clings to the concrete, and is puzzled and terrified by outlines
of thought too large for its range of vision; that the commonplace
intelligence cannot "see the wood for the trees," and becomes confused
and over-weighted when confronted with the huge outlines of so great a
picture as that drawn by Flaubert in his masterpiece.
There were many points of resemblance between Lafcadio Hearn and the
grandson of the French veterinary. A resemblance rather in certain
qualities of the spirit than in social conditions and physical
endowments. Flaubert, born in 1821, was the son of a surgeon. His
father was long connected with the Hôtel Dieu of Rouen, in which the
boy was born, and in which he lived until his eighteenth year, when he
went to Paris to study law. One of the friends of his early Parisian
days describes him as "a young Greek. Tall, supple, and as graceful as
an athlete. He was charming, _mais un peu farouche._ Quite unconscious
of his physical and mental gifts; very careless of the impression he
produced, and entirely indifferent to formalities. His dress consisted
of a red flannel shirt, trousers of heavy blue cloth, and a scarf of
the same colour drawn tight about his slender waist. His hat was worn
'any how' and often he abandoned it altogether. When I spoke to him of
fame or influence.... he seemed superbly indifferent. He had no desire
for glory or gain.... What was lacking in his nature was an interest in
_les choses extérieures, choses utiles._" ...
One who saw him in 1879 found the young Greek athlete--now close upon
sixty, and having in the interval created some of the great classics
of French literature--"a huge man, a tremendous old man. His long,
straggling gray hair was brushed back. His red face was that of a
soldier, or a sheik--divided by drooping white moustaches. A trumpet
was his voice, and he gesticulated freely ... the colour of his eyes a
bit of faded blue sky."
The study of the law did not hold Flaubert long. It was one of those
_choses extérieures, choses utiles_ to which he was so profoundly
indifferent. Paris bored him. He longed for Rouen, and for his little
student chamber. There he had lain upon his bed whole days at a time;
apparently as lazy as a lizard; smoking, dreaming; pondering the large,
inchoate, formless dreams of youth.
In 1845 his father died, and in the following year he lost his sister
Caroline, whom he had passionately loved, and for whom he grieved
all his life. He rejoined his mother, and they established themselves
at Croisset, near Rouen, upon a small inherited property. It was an
agreeable house, pleasantly situated in sight of the Seine. Flaubert
nourished with pleasure a local legend that Pascal had once inhabited
the old Croisset homestead, and that the Abbé Prevost had written
_Manon Lescaut_ within its walls. Near the house--now gone--he built
for himself a pavilion to serve as a study, and in this he spent the
greater portion of the following thirty-four years in passionate,
unremitting labour.
He made a voyage to Corsica in his youth; one to Brittany, with Maxime
du Camp, in 1846; and spent some months in Egypt, Palestine, Turkey,
and Greece in 1849. This Oriental experience gave him the most intense
pleasure, and was the germ of _Salammbo_, and of the _Temptation of St.
Anthony._ He never repeated it, though he constantly talked of doing
so. He nursed a persistent, but unrealized dream of going as far as
Ceylon, whose ancient name, Taprobana, he was never weary of repeating;
utterance of its melifluous syllables becoming a positive _tic_
with him. Despite these yearnings he remained at home. Despite his
full-blooded physique he would take no more exercise than his terrace
afforded, or an occasional swim in the Seine. He smoked incessantly,
and for months at a stretch worked fifteen hours out of the twenty-four
at his desk. Three hundred volumes might be annotated for a page of
facts. He would write twenty pages, and reduce these by exquisite
concisions, by fastidious rejections to three; would search for hours
for the one word that perfectly conveyed the colour of his thought, and
would--as in the case of the _Temptation_--wait fifteen years for a
sense of satisfaction with a manuscript before allowing it to see the
light. To Maxime du Camp, who urged him to hasten the completion of his
book in order to take advantage of a favourable opportunity, he wrote
angrily:
"Tu me parais avoir à mon endroit un tic ou vice rédhibitoire. Il
ne m'embête pas; n'aie aucune crainte; mon parti est pris là-dessus
depuis long temps. Je te dirai seulement que tous ces mots; _se
dépêcher, c'est le moment, place prise, se poser, ..._ sont pour moi un
vocabulaire vide de sens...."
In one of his letters he says that on occasion he worked violently for
eight hours to achieve one page. He endeavoured never to repeat a word
in that page, and tried to force every phrase to respond to a rhythmic
law. Guy do Maupassant, his nephew and pupil, says that to ensure this
rhythm Flaubert "prenait sa feuille de papier, relevait à la hauteur du
regard et, s'appuyant sur un coude, déclaimait, d'une voix mordant et
haute. Il écoutait la rythme de sa prose, s'arrêtait comme pour saisir
une sonorité fuyant, combinait les tons, éloignait les assonances,
disposait les virgules avec conscience, commes les haltes d'un long
chemin." ...
Flaubert said himself, "une phrase est viable quand elle correspond
à toutes les nécessités de respiration. Je sais qu'elle est bonne
lorsqu'elle peut être lu tout haut."
Henry Irving used to say of himself that it was necessary he should
work harder than other actors because nature had dowered him with
flexibility of neither voice nor feature, and Faguet says that Flaubert
was forced to this excessive toil and incessant watchfulness because
he did not write well naturally. Nevertheless Flaubert's work did not
smell of the lamp. Whatever shape his ideas may have worn at birth
when full grown they moved with large classic grace and freedom,
simple, sincere, and beautiful in form. François Coppée calls him "the
Beethoven of French prose."
So conscientious a workman, so laborious and self-sacrificing an artist
had a natural attraction for Lafcadio Hearn, who even in boyhood began
to feel his vocation as "a literary monk." The whole tendency of his
tastes prepared him to understand the true importance of Flaubert's
masterpiece, fitted him especially of all living writers to turn that
masterpiece into its true English equivalent. The two men had much in
common. Both were proud and timid. Both had a fundamental indifference
to _choses extérieures, choses utiles._ Both were realists of the soul.
Actions interested each but slightly; the emotions from which actions
sprung very much. To both stupidity was even more antipathetic than
wickedness, because each realized that nearly all cruelty and vice have
their germ in ignorance and stupidity rather than in innate rascality.
Flaubert declared, with a sort of rage, that "la bêtise entre dans
mes pores." He might too have been speaking for Hearn when he said
that the grotesque, the strange, and the monstrous had for him an
inexplicable charm. "It corresponds," he says, "to the intimate needs
of my nature--it does not cause me to laugh, but to dream long dreams."
Hearn, however, mixed with this triste interest a quality that Flaubert
seemed almost wholly to lack--a great tenderness for all things humble,
feeble, ugly and helpless. Both from childhood were curious of poignant
sensations, of the sad, the mysterious and the exotic. And for both the
tropics had an irresistible fascination. Flaubert says, in one of his
letters:
"I carry with me the melancholy of the barbaric races, with their
instincts of migration, and their innate distaste of life, which forced
them to quit their homes in order to escape from themselves. They loved
the sun, all those barbarians who came to die in Italy; they had a
frenzied aspiration toward the light, toward the blue skies, toward an
ardent existence.... Think that perhaps I will never see China, will
never be rocked to sleep by the cadenced footsteps of camels ... will
never see the shine of a tiger's eyes in the forest.... You can treat
all this as little worthy of pity, but I suffer so much when I think of
it ... as of something lamentable and irremediable."
This is the nostalgia for the strange, for the unaccustomed, that all
born wanderers know. Fate arranges it for many of them that their lives
shall be uneventful, passed in dull, provincial narrowness; but behind
these bars the clipped wings of their spirit are always flutteringly
spread for flight. They know not what they seek, what desire drives
them, but a sense of "the great adventure" unachieved keeps them
restless until they die. It is such as these, these _voyageurs
empassionés_, when condemned by fortune to a static existence--who find
their outlet in mental wanderings amid the unusual, the grotesque,
and the monstrous. Hearn and Flaubert both were at heart nomads,
seekers of the unaccustomed; stretching toward immensities of space
and time, toward the ghostly, the hidden, the unrealized. Like that
wild fantastic _Chimera_ of the "Temptation" each such soul declares
"_je cherche des parfums nouveaux, des fleurs plus large, des plaisirs
inéprouvés._"
Flaubert was but twenty-six when the first suggestion of his
masterpiece came to him. For _La Tentation de St. Antoine_, it is
coming to be understood, is his masterpiece; is one of the greatest
literary achievements of the French mind. _Madame Bovary_ is more
widely famous and popular, but Flaubert himself always deeply resented
this preference, and was always astonished at the comparative
indifference of the world to the "Temptation." He, too, found it
difficult to realize how hardly the average mind is awakened to an
interest in the incorporeal; how surely cosmic generalizations escape
the grasp of the commonplace intelligence.
Wagner waited a lifetime before the world was dragged reluctantly and
resentfully up to a point from which it could discern the superiority
of the tremendous finale of the Götterdämmerung to the Christmas-card
chorus of angels chanting "_Âme chaste et pure_" to the beatified
Marguerite. The whole prodigious structure of Wagner's dramatic and
musical thought might have remained a mere adumbration in the soul of
one German had chance not set a mad genius upon the throne of Bavaria.
The bourgeoisie would--lacking this royal bullying--have continued to
prefer Goethe and Gounod. Flaubert's great work unfortunately failed of
such patronage.
It was in 1845 that an old picture by Breughel, seen at Genoa, first
inspired Flaubert to attempt the story of St. Anthony. He sought
out an engraving of this conception of Peter the Younger (surnamed
"Hell-Breughel" for his fondness for such subjects), hung it on his
walls at Croisset, and after three years of brooding upon it began,
May 24, 1848, _La Tentation de St. Antoine._ In twelve months he had
finished the first draught of the work, which bulked to 540 pages. It
was laid aside for "Bovary," and a second version of the "Temptation"
was completed in 1856, but this time the manuscript had been reduced
to 193 pages, and the "blazing phrases, the jewelled words, the
turbulence, the comedy, the mysticism" of the first version had been
superseded by a larger, more dramatic conception. In 1872 he made still
a new draught, and by this time it had shrunk to 136 pages. He even
then eliminated three chapters, and finally gave to the world in 1874
"this wonderful coloured panorama of philosophy, this Gulliver-like
travelling amid the master ideas of the antique and early Christian
worlds."
Faguet says, "In its primitive and legendary state the temptation
of St. Anthony was nothing more than the story of a recluse tempted
by the Devil through the flesh, by all the artifices at the Devil's
disposal. In the definite thought of Flaubert the temptation of St.
Anthony has become man's soul tempted by all the illusions of human
thought and imagination. St. Anthony to the eyes of the first naive
hagiologists is a second Adam, seduced by woman, who was inspired by
Satan. St. Anthony conceived by Flaubert is a more thoughtful Faust; a
Faust incapable of irony, not a Faust who could play with illusions and
with himself--secretly persuaded that he could withdraw when he chose
to give himself the trouble to do so--rather a Faust who approached,
accosted, caressed all possible forms of universal illusions."
Flaubert's studies for the "Temptation" were tremendous. For nearly
thirty years he touched and retouched, altered, enlarged, condensed.
He kneaded into its substance the knowledge, incessantly sought, of
all religions and philosophies; of all the forms man's speculations
had taken in his endless endeavours to explain to himself Life and
Fate; humanity's untiring, passionate effort to find the meaning of its
mysterious origin and purpose, and final destiny. How terrible, how
naive, how fantastic, bloody, grovelling, and outrageous were most of
the solutions accepted, the gigantic panorama of the book startlingly
sets forth. What gory agonies, what mystic exaltations, what dark
cruelties, frenzied abandons, and inhuman self denials have marked
those puzzled gropings for light and truth are revealed as by lightning
flashes in the crowding scenes of the epic. For the Temptation of St.
Anthony is an epic. Not a drama of man's actions, as all previous
epics have been, but a drama of the soul. All its movement is in the
adventure and conflict of the spirit. St. Anthony remains always in
the one place, almost as moveless as a mirror. His vision--clarified
of the sensual and the actual by his fastings and macerations--becomes
like the surface of an unruffled lake. A lake reflecting the aberrant
forms of thoughts that, like clouds, drift between man and the infinite
depths of knowledge. Clouds of illusion forever changing, melting,
fusing; assuming forms grotesque, monstrous, intolerable; until at
last the writhing mists of speculation and ignorance are drunk up
by the widening light of wisdom and the fogs and phantasms vanish,
leaving his consciousness aware, in poignant ecstasy, of the cloudless
deeps of truth. The temptation of the flesh is but a passing episode.
An eidolon of Sheba's queen offers him luxury, wealth, voluptuous
beauty, power, dainty delights of eye and palate in vain. Man has never
found his most dangerous seductions in the appetites. More lamentable
disintegration has grown from his attempts to pierce beyond the
body's veil. The parched and tortured saint is whirled by vertiginous
visions through cycles of man's straining efforts to know why, whence,
whither. He assists at the rites of Mithira, the prostrations of
serpent-and-devil-worshippers, worshippers of fire, of light, of the
Greeks' deified forces of nature; of the northern enthronement of brute
force and war. He is swept by the soothing breath of Quietism, plunges
into every heresy and philosophy, sees the orgies, the flagellations,
the self mutilations, the battles and furies of sects, each convinced
that it has found the answer at last to the Great Question, and
endeavouring to constrain the rest of humanity to accept the answer.
He meets the Sphinx--embodied interrogation--and the Chimera--the
simulacrum of the fantasies of the imagination--dashing madly about the
stolid querist.
Lucifer--spirit of doubt of all dogmatic solutions--mounts with Anthony
into illimitable space. They rise beyond these struggles and furies
into the cold uttermost of the universe; among innumerable worlds;
worlds yet vaguely forming in the womb of time, newly come to birth,
lustily grown to maturity; worlds dying, decaying, crumbling again into
atomic dust. Overcome by the intolerable Vast, Anthony sinks once more
to his cell, and Lucifer, who has shown him the macrocosm, opens to
him the equal immensity of the microcosm. Makes him see the swarming
life that permeates the seas, the earth and atmosphere, the incredible
numerousness of the invisible lives that people every drop of water,
every grain of sand, every breath of air. The unity of life dawns upon
him, and his heart, withered by dubiety, melts into joyousness and
peace. As the day dawns in gold he beholds the face of Christ.
Flaubert's Lucifer has no relation to the jejune Devil of
man's early conception of material evil, nor does he resemble
Goethe's Mephistopheles; embodiment of the Eighteenth Century's
spirit of sneering disbeliefs and negation. He is rather our own
tempter--Science. He is the spirit of Knowledge: Nature itself calling
us to look into the immensities and read just our dogmas by this new
and terrible widening of our mental and moral horizons. This last
experience of the Saint reproduces the spiritual experiences of the
modern man; cast loose from his ancient moorings, and yet finding at
last in his new knowledge a truer conception of the brotherhood of all
life in all its forms, and seeing still, in the growing light, the
benignant eyes of God.
It is not remarkable that Flaubert resented the banality, the dull
grossness of the reception of his work, or that Hearn shared his
amazement and bitterness. Even yet the world wakes but slowly to the
true character of this masterpiece; this epic wrought with so great
a care and patience, so instinct with genius, dealing perhaps more
profoundly than any other mind has ever done with the Great Adventure
of humanity's eternal search for Truth.
ELIZABETH BISLAND.
ARGUMENT
FRAILTY
Sunset in the desert. Enfeebled by prolonged fasting, the hermit
finds himself unable to concentrate his mind upon holy things. His
thoughts wonder; memories of youth evoke regrets that his relaxed will
can no longer find strength to suppress,--and, remembrance begetting
remembrance, his fancy leads him upon dangerous ground. He dreams of
his flight from home,--of Ammonaria, his sister's playmate,--of his
misery in the waste,--his visit to Alexandria with the blind monk
Didymus,--the unholy sights of the luxurious city.
Involuntarily he yields to the nervous dissatisfaction growing upon
him. He laments his solitude, his joylessness, his poverty, the
obscurity of his life; grace departs from him; hope burns low within
his heart. Suddenly revolting against his weakness, he seeks refuge
from distraction in the study of the Scriptures.
Vain effort! An invisible hand turns the leaves, placing perilous
texts before his eyes. He dreams of the Maccabees slaughtering
their enemies, and desires that he might do likewise with the
Arians of Alexandria;--he becomes inspired with admiration of King
Nebuchadnezzar;--he meditates voluptuously upon the visit of Sheba's
queen of Solomon;--discovers a text in the Acts of the Apostles
antagonistic to principles of monkish ascetism,--indulges in reveries
regarding the riches of Biblical kings and holy men. The Tempter comes
to tempt him with evil hallucinations for which the Saint's momentary
frailty has paved the way; and with the Evil One come also
THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS
Phantom gold is piled up to excite Covetousness; shadowy banquets
appear to evoke Gluttony. The scene shifts to aid the temptations of
Anger and of Pride....
Anthony finds himself in Alexandria, at the head of a wild army of
monks slaughtering the heretics and the pagans, without mercy for
age or sex. In fantastic obedience to the course of his fancy while
reading the Scriptures a while before, and like an invisible echo of
his evil thoughts, the scene changes again. Alexandria is transformed
into Constantinople.
Anthony finds himself the honoured of the Emperor. He beholds the
vast circus in all its splendour, the ocean of faces, the tumult of
excitement. Simultaneously he beholds his enemies degraded to the
condition of slaves, toiling in the stables of Constantine. He feels
joy in the degradation of the Fathers of Nicæa. Then all is transformed.
It is no longer the splendour of Constantinople he beholds under the
luminosity of a Greek day; but the prodigious palace of Nebuchadnezzar
by night. He beholds the orgies, the luxuries, the abominations;--and
the spirit of Pride enters triumphantly into him as the spirit of
Nebuchadnezzar....
Awaking as from a dream, he finds himself again before his hermitage.
A vast caravan approaches, halts; and the Queen of Sheba descends to
tempt the Saint with the deadliest of all temptations. Her beauty is
enhanced by oriental splendour of adornment; her converse is a song of
withcraft. The Saint remains firm.... The Seven Deadly Sins depart
from him.
THE HERESIARCHS
But now the tempter assumes a subtler form. Under the guise of a former
disciple of Anthony,--Hilarion,--the demon, while pretending to seek
instruction, endeavours to poison the mind of Anthony with hatred of
the fathers of the church. He repeats all the scandals amassed by
ecclesiastical intriguers, all the calumnies created by malice;--he
cites texts only to foment doubt, and quotes the evangels only to
make confusion. Under the pretext of obtaining mental enlightenment
from the wisest of men, he induces Anthony to enter with him into
a spectral basilica, wherein are assembled all the Heresiarchs of
the third century. The hermit is confounded by the multitude of
tenets,--horrified by the blasphemies and abominations of Elkes,
Corpocrates, Valentinus, Manes, Cerdo,--disgusted by the perversions of
the Paternians, Marcosians, Montanists, Serptians,--bewildered by the
apocryphal Gospels of Eve and of Judas, of the Lord, and of Thomas.
And Hilarion grows taller.
THE MARTYRS
Anthony finds himself in the dungeons of a vast amphitheatre, among
Christians condemned to the wild beasts. By this hallucination the
tempter would prove to the Saint that martyrdom is not always suffered
for purest motives. Anthony finds the martyrs possessed by bigotry and
insincerity. He sees many compelled to die against their will; many
who would forswear their faith could it avail them aught. He beholds
heretics die for their heterodoxy more nobly than orthodox believers.
And he finds himself transported to the tombs of the martyrs. He
witnesses the meetings of Christian women at the sepulchres. He beholds
the touching ceremonies of prayer, change into orgies,--lamentations
give place to amorous dalliance.
THE MAGICIANS
Then the Tempter seeks to shake Anthony's faith in the excellence
and evidence of miracles. He assumes the form of a Hindoo Brahmin,
terminating a life of wondrous holiness by self-cremation;--he appears
as Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre,--as Appollonius of Tyans, greatest of
all thaumaturgists, who claims superiority to Christ. All the marvels
related by Philostratus are embodied in the converse of Apollonius and
Damis.
THE GODS
Hilarion reappears taller than ever, growing more gigantic in
proportion to the increasing weakness of the Saint. Standing beside
Anthony he evokes all the deities of the antique world. They defile
before him in a marvellous panorama:--Gods of Egypt and India, Chaldea
and Hellas, Babylon and Ultima Thule,--monstrous and multiform, phallic
and ithyphallic, fantastic or obscene. Some intoxicate by their beauty;
others appall by their foulness. The Buddha recounts the story of his
wondrous life; Venus displays the rounded daintiness of her nudity;
Isis utters awful soliloquy. Lastly the phantom of Jehovah appears, as
the shadow of a god passing away forever.
Suddenly the stature of Hilarion towers to the stars; he assumes the
likeness and luminosity of Lucifer; he announces himself as
SCIENCE
And Anthony is lifted upon mighty wings and borne away beyond the
world, above the solar system, above the starry arch of the Milky Way.
All future discoveries of Astronomy are revealed to him. He is tempted
by the revelation of innumerable worlds,--by the refutation of all
his previous ideas of the nature of the Universe,--by the enigmas of
infinity,--by all the marvels that conflict with faith. Even in the
night of immensity the demon renews the temptation of reason: Anthony
wavers upon the verge of pantheism.
LUST AND DEATH
Anthony abandoned by the spirit of Science comes to himself in the
desert. Then the Tempter returns under a two-fold aspect: as the
Spirit of Lust and the Spirit of Destruction. The latter urges him to
suicide,--the former to indulgence of sense. They inspire him with
strong fancies of palingenesis, of the illusion of death, of the
continuity of life. The pantheistic temptation intensified.
THE MONSTERS
Anthony in reveries meditates upon the monstrous symbols painted upon
the walls of certain ancient temples. Could he know their meaning
he might learn also something of the secret lien between Matter and
Thought. Forthwith a phantasmagoria of monsters commence to pass before
his eyes:--the Sphinx and the Chimera, the Blemmyes and Astomi, the
Cynocephali and all creatures of mythologie creation. He beholds the
fabulous beings of Oriental imagining,--the abnormities described
by Pliny and Herodotus, the fantasticalities to be later adopted by
heraldry,--the grotesqueries of future medieval illumination made
animate;--the goblinries and foulnesses of superstitious fancy,--the
Witches' Sabbath of abominations.
METAMORPHOSIS
The multitude of monsters melts away; the land changes into an Ocean;
the creatures of the briny abysses appear. And the waters in turn
also change; seaweeds are transformed to herbs, forests of coral
give place to forests of trees, polypous life changes to vegetation.
Metals crystallize; frosts effloresce; plants become living things,
inanimate matter takes animate form, monads vibrate, the pantheism of
nature makes itself manifest. Anthony feels a delirious desire to unite
himself with the Spirit of Universal Being....
The vision vanishes. The sun arises. The face of Christ is revealed.
The temptation has passed; Anthony kneels in prayer.
L. H.
THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY
_It is in the Thebaid at the summit of a mountain, upon a platform,
rounded off into the form of a demilune, and enclosed by huge stones._
_The Hermit's cabin appears in the background. It is built of mud and
reeds, it is flat-roofed and doorless. A pitcher and a loaf of black
bread can be distinguished within also, in the middle of the apartment
a large book resting on a wooden STELA; while here and there, fragments
of basketwork, two or three mats, a basket, and a knife lie upon the
ground._
_Some ten paces from the hut, there is a long cross planted in the
soil; and, at the other end of the platform, an aged and twisted
palm tree leans over the abyss; for the sides of the mountain are
perpendicular, and the Nile appears to form a lake at the foot of the
cliff._
_The view to right and left is broken by the barrier of rocks. But
on the desert-side, like a vast succession of sandy beaches, immense
undulations of an ashen-blonde color extend one behind the other,
rising higher as they recede; and far in the distance, beyond the
sands, the Libyan chain forms a chalk-colored wall, lightly shaded by
violet mists. On the opposite side the sun is sinking. In the north the
sky is of a pearl-gray tint, while at the zenith purple clouds disposed
like the tufts of a gigantic mane, lengthen themselves against the blue
vault. These streaks of flame take darker tones; the azure spots turn
to a nacreous pallor; the shrubs, the pebbles, the earth, all now seem
hard as bronze; and throughout space there floats a golden dust so fine
as to become confounded with the vibrations of the light._
_Saint Anthony, who has a long beard, long hair, and wears a tunic of
goatskin, is seated on the ground cross-legged, and is occupied in
weaving mats. As soon as the sun disappears, he utters a deep sigh,
and, gazing upon the horizon, exclaims_:--
"Another day! another day gone! Nevertheless formerly I used not to
be so wretched. Before the end of the night I commenced my orisons;
then I descended to the river to get water, and remounted the rugged
pathway with the skin upon my shoulder, singing hymns on the way. Then
I would amuse myself by arranging everything in my hut. I would make my
tools; I tried to make all my mats exactly equal in size, and all my
baskets light; for then my least actions seemed to me duties in nowise
difficult or painful of accomplishment.
"Then at regular hours I ceased working; and when I prayed with my arms
extended, I felt as though a fountain of mercy were pouring from the
height of heaven into my heart. That fountain is now dried up. Why?"
(_He walks up and down slowly, within the circuit of the rocks._)
"All blamed me when I left the house. My mother sank to the ground,
dying; my sister from afar off made signs to me to return; and the
other--wept, Ammonaria, the child whom I used to meet every evening
at the cistern, when she took the oxen to drink. She ran after me. Her
foot rings glittered in the dust; and her tunic, open at the hips,
fluttered loosely in the wind. The aged anchorite who was leading me
away called her vile names. Our two camels galloped forward without
respite; and I have seen none of my people since that day.
"At first, I selected for my dwelling place, the tomb of a Pharaoh. But
an enchantment circulates through all those subterranean palaces, where
the darkness seems to have been thickened by the ancient smoke of the
aromatics. From the depths of Sarcophagi, I heard doleful voices arise,
and call my name; or else, I suddenly beheld the abominable things
painted upon the walls live and move; and I fled away to the shore
of the Red Sea, and took refuge in a ruined citadel. There my only
companions were the scorpions dragging themselves among the stones, and
the eagles continually wheeling above my head, in the blue of heaven.
At night I was torn by claws, bitten by beaks; soft wings brushed
against me; and frightful demons, shrieking in my ears, flung me upon
the ground. Once I was even rescued by the people of a caravan going
to Alexandria; and they took me away with them.
"Then I sought to obtain instruction from the good old man Didymus.
Although blind, none equalled him in the knowledge of the Scriptures.
When the lesson was finished, he used to ask me to give him my arm
to lean upon, that we might walk together. Then I would conduct him
to the Paneum, whence may be seen the Pharos and the open sea. Then
we would return by way of the post, elbowing men of all nations,
even Cimmerians clad in the skins of bears and Gymnosophists of the
Ganges anointed with cow-dung. But there was always some fighting in
the streets--either on account of the Jews refusing to pay taxes, or
of seditious people who wished to drive the Romans from the city.
Moreover, the city is full of heretics--followers of Manes; Valentinus,
Basilides, Arius--all seeking to engross my attention in order to argue
with me and to convince me.
"Their discourses often come back to my memory. Vainly do I seek to
banish them from my mind. They trouble me!
"I took refuge at Colzin, and there lived a life of such penance that
I ceased to fear God. A few men, desirous of becoming anchorites,
gathered about me. I imposed a practical rule of life upon them,
hating, as I did, the extravagance of Gnosus and the assertions of the
philosophers. Messages were sent to me from all parts, and men came
from afar off to visit me.
"Meanwhile the people were torturing the confessors; and the thirst of
martyrdom drew me to Alexandria. The persecution had ceased three days
before I arrived there!
"While returning thence, I was stopped by a great crowd assembled
before the temple of Serapis. They told me it was a last example which
the Governor had resolved to make. In the centre of the portico, under
the sunlight, a naked woman was fettered to a column, and two soldiers
were flogging her with thongs; at every blow her whole body writhed.
She turned round, her mouth open; and over the heads of the crowd,
through the long hair half hiding her face, I thought that I could
recognize Ammonaria....
[Illustration: ... through the long hair half hiding her face,
I thought that I could recognize Ammonaria]
"Nevertheless ... this one was taller ... and beautiful ...
prodigiously beautiful!"
(_He passes his hands over his forehead._)
"No! no! I must not think of it!
"Another time Athanasius summoned me to assist him against the Arians.
The contest was limited to invectives and laughter. But since that
time he has been calumniated, dispossessed of his see, obliged to fly
for safety elsewhere. Where is he now? I do not know! The people give
themselves very little trouble to bring me news. All my disciples have
abandoned me--Hilarion like the rest.
"He was perhaps fifteen years of age when he first came to me and his
intelligence was so remarkable that he asked me questions incessantly.
Then he used to listen to me with a pensive air, and whatever I needed
he brought it to me without a murmur--nimbler than a kid, merry enough
to make even the patriarchs laugh. He was a son to me."
(_The sky is red; the earth completely black. Long drifts of sand
follow the course of the gusts of wind, rising like great shrouds and
falling again. Suddenly against a bright space in the sky a flock of
birds pass, forming a triangular battalion, gleaming like one sheet of
metal, of which the edges alone seem to quiver._
_Anthony watches them._)
"Ah, how I should like to follow them.
"How often also have I enviously gazed upon those long vessels,
whose sails resemble wings--and above all when they were bearing
far away those I had received at my hermitage! What pleasant hours
we passed!--what out-pourings of feeling! No one ever interested me
more than Ammon: he told me of his voyage to Rome, of the Catacombs,
the Coliseum, the piety of illustrious women, and a thousand other
things!--and it grieved me to part with him! Wherefore my obstinacy
in continuing to live such a life as this? I would have done well to
remain with the monks of Nitria, inasmuch as they supplicated me to
do so. They have cells apart, and nevertheless communicate with each
other. On Sundays a trumpet summons them to assemble at the church,
where one may see three scourges hanging up, which serve to punish
delinquents, robbers, and intruders; for their discipline is severe.
"Nevertheless they are not without some enjoyments. The faithful bring
them eggs, fruits, and even instruments with which they can extract
thorns from their feet. There are vineyards about Prisperi; those
dwelling at Pabena have a raft on which they may journey when they go
to seek provisions.
"But I might have served my brethren better as a simple priest. As a
priest one may aid the poor, administer the sacraments, and exercise
authority over families.
"Furthermore, all laics are not necessarily damned, and it only
depended upon my own choice to become--for example--a grammarian, a
philosopher. I would then have had in my chamber a sphere of reeds,
and tablets always ready at hand, young men around me, and a wreath of
laurel suspended above my door, as a sign.
"But there is too much pride in triumphs such as those. A soldier's
life would have been preferable. I was robust and bold: bold enough to
fasten the cables of the military machines--to traverse dark forests,
or to enter, armed and helmeted, into smoking cities.... Neither was
there anything to have prevented me from purchasing with my money the
position of publican at the toll-office of some bridge; and travellers
would have taught me many strange things, and told me strange stories,
the while showing me many curious objects packed up among their
baggage....
"The merchants of Alexandria sail upon the river Canopus on holidays,
and drink wine in the chalices of lotus-flowers, to a music of
tambourines which makes the taverns along the shore tremble! Beyond,
trees, made cone-shaped by pruning, protect the quiet farms against
the wind of the south. The roof of the lofty house leans upon thin
colonettes placed as closely together as the laths of a lattice;
and through their interspaces the master, reclining upon his long
couch, beholds his plains stretching about him--the hunter among the
wheat-fields--the winepress where the vintage is being converted into
wine, the oxen treading out the wheat. His children play upon the floor
around him; his wife bends down to kiss him."
(_Against the grey dimness of the twilight, here and there appear
pointed muzzles, with straight, pointed ears and bright eyes. Anthony
advances toward them. There is a sound of gravel crumbling down; the
animals take flight. It was a troop of jackals._
_One still remains, rising upon his hinder legs, with his body half
arched and head raised in an attitude full of defiance._)
"How pretty he is! I would like to stroke his back gently!"
(_Anthony whistles to coax him to approach. The jackal disappears._)
"Ah! he is off to join the others. What solitude! what weariness!"
(_Laughing bitterly._)
"A happy life this indeed!--bending palm-branches in the fire to make
shepherds' crooks, fashioning baskets, stitching mats together--and
then exchanging these things with the Nomads for bread which breaks
one's teeth! Ah! woe, woe is me! will this never end? Surely death were
preferable! I can endure it no more! Enough! enough!"
(_He stamps his foot upon the ground, and rushes frantically to and fro
among the rocks; then pauses, out of breath, bursts into tears, and
lies down upon the ground, on his side._
_The night is calm; multitudes of stars are palpitating; only the
crackling noise made by the tarantulas is audible._
_The two arms of the cross make a shadow upon the sand; Anthony, who is
weeping, observes it._)
"Am I, then, so weak, O my God! Courage, let me rise from here!"
(_He enters his hut, turns over a pile of cinders, finds a live ember,
lights his torch and fixes it upon the wooden desk, so as to throw a
light upon the great book._)
"Suppose I take the Acts of the Apostles?--yes!--no matter where!"
_'And he saw the heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending, as it
were a great linen sheet let down by the four corners from heaven to
the earth--wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts, and creeping
things of the earth and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to
him: Arise, Peter! Kill and eat!'_[1]
"Then the Lord desired that his apostle should eat of all things?...
while I...."
(_Anthony remains thoughtful, his chin resting against his breast. The
rustling of the pages, agitated by the wind, causes him to lift his
head again; and he reads_:)
_'So the Jews made a great slaughter of their enemies with the sword,
and killed them, repaying according to what they had prepared to do to
them...._[2]
"Then, comes the number of people slain by them--seventy-five thousand.
They had suffered so much! Moreover, their enemies were the enemies of
the true God. And how they must have delighted in avenging themselves
thus by the massacre of idolaters! Doubtless the city must have been
crammed with the dead! There must have been corpses at the thresholds
of the garden gates, upon the stairways, in all the chambers, and piled
up so high that the doors could no longer move upon their hinges!...
But lo! here I am permitting my mind to dwell upon ideas of murder and
of blood!..."
(_He opens the book at another place._)
_'Then King Nabuchodonosor fell on his face, and worshipped
Daniel...._'[3]
"Ah! that was just! The _Most High_ exalts his prophets above Kings;
yet that monarch spent his life in banqueting, perpetually drunk with
pleasure and pride. But God, to punish him, changed him into a beast!
He walked upon four feet!"
(_Anthony begins to laugh; and in extending his arms, involuntarily
disarranges the leaves of the book with the tips of his fingers. His
eyes fell upon this phrase_:--)
_'And Ezechias rejoiced at their coming, and he showed them the house
of his aromatical spices, and the gold and the silver, and divers
precious odours and ointments, and the house of his vessels, and all
that he had in his treasures....'_[4]
"I can imagine that spectacle; they must have beheld precious stones,
diamonds and darics heaped up to the very roof. One who possesses so
vast an accumulation of wealth is no longer like other men. While
handling his riches he knows that he controls the total result of
innumerable human efforts--as it were the life of nations drained by
him and stored up, which he can pour forth at will. It is a commendable
precaution on the part of Kings. Even the _Wisest_ of all did not
neglect it. His navy brought him elephants' teeth and apes.... Where is
that passage?"
(_He turns the leaves over rapidly._)
"Ah! here it is:"