TRIAL OF THE GREAT.
A 'Morality' at Tours--The 'St. Anthony' of Spagnoletto--Bunyan's
Pilgrim--Milton on Christ's Temptation--An Edinburgh saint and
Unitarian fiend--A haunted Jewess--Conversion by fever--Limit of
courage--Woman and sorcery--Luther and the Devil--The ink-spot at
Wartburg--Carlyle's interpretation--The cowled devil--Carlyle's
trial--In Rue St. Thomas d'Enfer--The Everlasting No--Devil of
Vauvert--The latter-day conflict--New conditions--The Victory of
Man--The Scholar and the World.
A representation of the Temptation of St. Anthony (marionettes), which
I witnessed at Tours (1878), had several points of significance. It
was the mediæval 'Morality' as diminished by centuries, and
conventionalised among those whom the centuries mould in ways and
for ends they know not. Amid a scenery of grotesque devils, rudely
copied from Callot, St. Anthony appeared, and was tempted in a way
that recalled the old pictures. There was the same fair Temptress, in
this case the wife of Satan, who warns her lord that his ugly devils
will be of no avail against Anthony, and that the whole affair should
be confided to her. She being repelled, the rest of the performance
consisted in the devils continually ringing the bell of the hermitage,
and finally setting fire to it. This conflagration was the supreme
torment of Anthony--and, sooth to say, it was a fairly comfortable
abode--who utters piteous prayers and is presently comforted by an
angel bringing him wreaths of evergreen.
The prayers of the saint and the response of the angel were meant to
be seriously taken; but their pathos was generally met with pardonable
laughter by the crowd in the booth. Yet there was a pathos about it
all, if only this, that the only temptations thought of for a saint
were a sound and quiet house and a mistress. The bell-noise alone
remained from the great picture of Spagnoletto at Siena, where the
unsheltered old man raises his deprecating hand against the disturber,
but not his eyes from the book he reads. In Spagnoletto's picture
there are five large books, pen, ink, and hour-glass; but there is
neither hermitage to be burnt nor female charms to be resisted.
But Spagnoletto, even in his time, was beholding the vision of
exceptional men in the past, whose hunger and thirst was for knowledge,
truth, and culture, and who sought these in solitude. Such men have
so long left the Church familiar to the French peasantry that any
representation of their temptations and trials would be out of place
among the marionettes. The bells which now disturb them are those
that sound from steeples.
Another picture loomed up before my eyes over the puppet performance at
Tours, that which for Bunyan frescoed the walls of Bedford Gaol. There,
too, the old demons, giants, and devils took on grave and vast forms,
and reflected the trials of the Great Hearts who withstood the Popes
and Pagans, the armed political Apollyons and the Giant Despairs,
who could make prisons the hermitages of men born to be saviours of
the people.
Such were the temptations that Milton knew; from his own heart
came the pigments with which he painted the trial of Christ in the
wilderness. 'Set women in his eye,' said Belial:--
Women, when nothing else, beguiled the heart
Of wisest Solomon, and made him build,
And made him bow to the gods of his wives.
To whom quick answer Satan thus returned.
Belial, in much uneven scale thou weigh'st
All others by thyself....
But he whom we attempt is wiser far
Than Solomon, of more exalted mind,
Made and set wholly on the accomplishment
Of greatest things....
Therefore with manlier objects we must try
His constancy, with such as have more show
Of worth, of honour, glory, and popular praise;
Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wrecked. [96]
The progressive ideas which Milton attributed to Satan have not
failed. That Celestial City which Bunyan found it so hard to reach
has now become a metropolis of wealth and fashion, and the trials
which once beset pilgrims toiling towards it are now transferred
to those who would pass beyond it to another city, seen from afar,
with temples of Reason and palaces of Justice.
The old phantasms have shrunk to puppets. The trials by personal
devils are relegated to the regions of insanity and disease. It is
everywhere a dance of puppets though on a cerebral stage. A lady well
known in Edinburgh related to me a terrible experience she had with
the devil. She had invited some of her relations to visit her for some
days; but these relatives were Unitarians, and, after they had gone,
having entered the room which they had occupied, she was seized by
the devil, thrown on the floor, and her back so strained that she had
to keep her bed for some time. This was to her 'the Unitarian fiend'
of which the Wesleyan Hymn-Book sang so long; but even the Wesleyans
have now discarded the famous couplet, and there must be few who would
not recognise that the old lady at Edinburgh merely had a tottering
body representing a failing mind.
I have just read a book in which a lady in America relates her trial
by the devil. This lady, in her girlhood, was of a christian family,
but she married a rabbi and was baptized into Judaism. After some years
of happy life a terrible compunction seized her; she imagined herself
lost for ever; she became ill. A christian (Baptist) minister and
his wife were the evil stars in her case, and with what terrors they
surrounded the poor Jewess may be gathered from the following extract.
'She then left me--that dear friend left me alone to my God, and to
him I carried a lacerated and bleeding heart, and laid it at the foot
of the cross, as an atonement for the multiplied sins I had committed,
whether of ignorance or wilfulness; and how shall I proceed to portray
the heart-felt agonies of that night preceding my deliverance from
the shafts of Satan? Oh! this weight, this load of sin, this burden
so intolerable that it crushed me to the earth; for this was a
dark hour with me--the darkest; and I lay calm, to all appearance,
but with cold perspiration drenching me, nor could I close my eyes;
and these words again smote my ear, No redemption, no redemption; and
the tempter came, inviting me, with all his blandishment and power,
to follow him to his court of pleasure. My eyes were open; I certainly
saw him, dressed in the most phantastic shape. This was no illusion;
for he soon assumed the appearance of one of the gay throng I had
mingled with in former days, and beckoned me to follow. I was awake,
and seemed to lie on the brink of a chasm, and spirits were dancing
around me, and I made some slight outcry, and those dear girls watching
with me came to me, and looked at me. They said I looked at them but
could not speak, and they moistened my lips, and said I was nearly
gone; then I whispered, and they came and looked at me again, but
would not disturb me. It was well they did not; for the power of God
was over me, and angels were around me, and whispering spirits near,
and I whispered in sweet communion with them, as they surrounded me,
and, pointing to the throne of grace, said, 'Behold!' and I felt that
the glory of God was about to manifest itself; for a shout, as if a
choir of angels had tuned their golden harps, burst forth in, 'Glory
to God on high,' and died away in softest strains of melody. I lifted
up my eyes to heaven, and there, so near as to be almost within my
reach, the brightest vision of our Lord and Saviour stood before me,
enveloped with a light, ethereal mist, so bright and yet transparent
that his divine figure could be seen distinctly, and my eyes were
riveted upon him; for this bright vision seemed to touch my bed,
standing at the foot, so near, and he stretched forth his left hand
toward me, whilst with the right one he pointed to the throne of grace,
and a voice came, saying, 'Blessed are they who can see God; arise,
take up thy cross and follow me; for though thy sins be as scarlet
they shall be white as wool.' And with my eyes fixed on that bright
vision, I saw from the hand stretched toward me great drops of blood,
as if from each finger; for his blessed hand was spread open, as if
in prayer, and those drops fell distinctly, as if upon the earth;
and a misty light encircled me, and a voice again said, 'Take up thy
cross and follow me; for though thy sins be as scarlet they shall be
white as wool.' And angels were all around me, and I saw the throne
of heaven. And, oh! the sweet calm that stole over my senses. It
must have been a foretaste of heavenly bliss. How long I lay after
this beautiful vision I know not; but when I opened my eyes it was
early dawn, and I felt so happy and well. My young friends pressed
around my bedside, to know how I felt, and I said, 'I am well and so
happy.' They then said I was whispering with some one in my dreams
all night. I told them angels were with me; that I was not asleep,
and I had sweet communion with them, and would soon be well.' [97]
That is what the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness comes to when
dislocated from its time and place, and, with its gathered ages of
fable, is imported at last to be an engine of torture sprung on the
nerves of a devout woman. This Jewess was divorced from her husband
by her Christianity; her child died a victim to precocious piety;
but what were home and affection in ruins compared with salvation
from that frightful devil seen in her holy delirium?
History shows that it has always required unusual courage for a human
being to confront an enemy believed to be præternatural. This Jewess
would probably have been able to face a tiger for the sake of her
husband, but not that fantastic devil. Not long ago an English actor
was criticised because, in playing Hamlet, he cowered with fear on
seeing the ghost, all his sinews and joints seeming to give way;
but to me he appeared then the perfect type of what mankind have
always been when believing themselves in the presence of præternatural
powers. The limit of courage in human nature was passed when the foe
was one which no earthly power or weapon could reach.
In old times, nearly all the sorcerers and witches were women; and
it may have been, in some part, because woman had more real courage
than man unarmed. Sorcery and witchcraft were but the so-called
pagan rites in their last degradation, and women were the last to
abandon the declining religion, just as they are the last to leave
the superstition which has followed it. Their sentiment and affection
were intertwined with it, and the threats of eternal torture by devils
which frightened men from the old faith to the new were less powerful
to shake the faith of women. When pagan priests became christians,
priestesses remained, to become sorceresses. The new faith had
gradually to win the love of the sex too used to martyrdom on earth
to fear it much in hell. And now, again, when knowledge clears away
the old terrors, and many men are growing indifferent to all religion,
because no longer frightened by it, we may expect the churches to be
increasingly kept up by women alone, simply because they went into them
more by attraction of saintly ideals than fear of diabolical menaces.
Thomas Carlyle has selected Luther's boldness in the presence of what
he believed the Devil to illustrate his valour. 'His defiance of the
'Devils' in Worms,' says Carlyle, 'was not a mere boast, as the like
might be if spoken now. It was a faith of Luther's that there were
Devils, spiritual denizens of the Pit, continually besetting men. Many
times, in his writings, this turns up; and a most small sneer has
been grounded on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg, where he sat
translating the Bible, they still show you a black spot on the wall;
the strange memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther sat translating
one of the Psalms; he was worn down with long labour, with sickness,
abstinence from food; there rose before him some hideous indefinable
Image, which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work; Luther
started up with fiend-defiance; flung his inkstand at the spectre,
and it disappeared! The spot still remains there; a curious monument
of several things. Any apothecary's apprentice can now tell us what we
are to think of this apparition, in a scientific sense; but the man's
heart that dare rise defiant, face to face, against Hell itself, can
give no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail before
exists not on this earth nor under it--fearless enough! 'The Devil
is aware,' writes he on one occasion, 'that this does not proceed
out of fear in me. I have seen and defied innumerable Devils. Duke
George,'--of Leipzig, a great enemy of his,--'Duke George is not equal
to one Devil,' far short of a Devil! 'If I had business at Leipzig,
I would ride into Leipzig, though it rained Duke Georges for nine
days running.' What a reservoir of Dukes to ride into!' [98]
Although Luther's courage certainly appears in this, it is plain that
his Devil was much humanised as compared with the fearful phantoms
of an earlier time. Nobody would ever have tried an inkstand on the
Gorgons, Furies, Lucifers of ancient belief. In Luther's Bible the
Devil is pictured as a monk--a lean monk, such as he himself was only
too likely to become if he continued his rebellion against the Church
(Fig. 17). It was against a Devil liable to resistance by physical
force that he hurled his inkstand, and against whom he also hurled
the contents of his inkstand in those words which Richter said were
half-battles.
Luther's Devil, in fact, represents one of the last phases in
the reduction of the Evil Power from a personified phantom with
which no man could cope, to that impersonal but all the more real
moral obstruction with which every man can cope--if only with
an inkstand. The horned monster with cowl, beads, and cross, is a
mere transparency, through which every brave heart may recognise the
practical power of wrong around him, the established error, disguised
as religion, which is able to tempt and threaten him.
The temptations with menace described--those which, coming upon
the weak nerves of women, vanquished their reason and heart; that
which, in a healthy man, raised valour and power--may be taken as
side-lights for a corresponding experience in the life of a great
man now living--Carlyle himself. It was at a period of youth when,
amid the lonely hills of Scotland, he wandered out of harmony with the
world in which he lived. Consecrated by pious parents to the ministry,
he had inwardly renounced every dogma of the Church. With genius and
culture for high work, the world demanded of him low work. Friendless,
alone, poor, he sat eating his heart, probably with little else to
eat. Every Scotch parson he met unconsciously propounded to that youth
the question whether he could convert his heretical stone into bread,
or precipitate himself from the pinnacle of the Scotch Kirk without
bruises? Then it was he roamed in his mystical wilderness, until he
found himself in the gayest capital of the world, which, however,
on him had little to bestow but a further sense of loneliness.
'Now, when I look back, it was a strange isolation I then lived
in. The men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but
Figures; I had practically forgotten that they were alive, that they
were not merely automatic. In the midst of their crowded streets and
assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart,
not another's, that I kept devouring) savage also, as is the tiger in
his jungle. Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust,
have fancied myself tempted and tormented of a Devil; for a Hell,
as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were more
frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil
has been pulled down--you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To
me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even
of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable, Steam-engine,
rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh,
the vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the
Living banished thither, companionless, conscious? Why, if there is
no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?' ...
'From suicide a certain aftershine of Christianity withheld me.' ...
'So had it lasted, as in bitter, protracted Death-agony, through
long years. The heart within me, unvisited by any heavenly dewdrop,
was smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since
earliest memory I had shed no tear; or once only when I, murmuring
half-audibly, recited Faust's Deathsong, that wild Selig der den er
im Siegesglanze findet (Happy whom he finds in Battle's splendour),
and thought that of this last Friend even I was not forsaken, that
Destiny itself could not doom me not to die. Having no hope, neither
had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of Devil; nay, I often
felt as if it might be solacing could the Arch-Devil himself, though
in Tartarean terrors, rise to me that I might tell him a little of my
mind. And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite,
pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what;
it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath
would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless jaws
of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured.
'Full of such humour, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole
French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dogday, after much
perambulation, toiling along the dirty little Rue Sainte Thomas
de l'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and
over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar's Furnace; whereby doubtless my
spirits were little cheered; when all at once there rose a Thought
in me, and I asked myself, 'What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like
a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering and
trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that
lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too,
and all that the Devil or Man may, will, or can do against thee! Hast
thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a
Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet,
while it consumes thee! Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy
it!' And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my
whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong,
of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time the
temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it,
but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.
'Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the
recesses of my Being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me
stood up, in native God-created majesty and with emphasis recorded
its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life,
may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of
view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said, 'Behold thou
art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's);'
to which my whole Me now made answer, 'I am not thine, but Free,
and for ever hate thee!'
'It is from this hour that I incline to date my spiritual New Birth,
or Baphometic fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be
a Man.' [99]
Perhaps he who so uttered his Apage Satana did not recognise amid
what haunted Edom he wrestled with his Phantom. Saint Louis, having
invited the Carthusian monks to Paris, assigned them a habitation in
the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, near the ancient chateau of Vauvert,
a manor built by Robert (le Diable), but for a long time then
uninhabited, because infested by demons, which had, perhaps, been
false coiners. Fearful howls had been heard there, and spectres seen,
dragging chains; and, in particular, it was frequented by a fearful
green monster, serpent and man in one, with a long white beard,
wielding a huge club, with which he threatened all who passed that
way. This demon, in common belief, passed along the road to and
from the chateau in a fiery chariot, and twisted the neck of every
human being met on his way. He was called the Devil of Vauvert. The
Carthusians were not frightened by these stories, but asked Louis to
give them the Manor, which he did, with all its dependencies. After
that nothing more was heard of the Diable Vauvert or his imps. It
was but fair to the Demons who had assisted the friars in obtaining a
valuable property so cheaply that the street should thenceforth bear
the name of Rue d'Enfer, as it does. But the formidable genii of the
place haunted it still, and, in the course of time, the Carthusians
proved that they could use with effect all the terrors which the
Devils had left behind them. They represented a great money-coining
Christendom with which free-thinking Michaels had to contend, even
to the day when, as we have just read, one of the bravest of these
there encountered his Vauvert devil and laid him low for ever.
I well remember that wretched street of St. Thomas leading into Hell
Street, as if the Parisian authorities, remembering that Thomas
was a doubter, meant to remind the wayfarer that whoso doubteth
is damned. Near by is the convent of St. Michael, who makes no war
on the neighbouring Rue Dragon. All names--mere idle names! Among
the thousands that crowd along them, how many pause to note the
quaintness of the names on the street-lamps, remaining there from
fossil fears and phantom battles long turned to fairy lore. Yet amid
them, on that sultry day, in one heart, was fought and won a battle
which summed up all their sense and value. Every Hell was conquered
then and there when Fear was conquered. There, when the lower Self
was cast down beneath the poised spear of a Free Mind, St. Michael at
last chained his dragon. There Luther's inkstand was not only hurled,
but hit its mark; there, 'Get thee behind me,' was said, and obeyed;
there Buddha brought the archfiend Mara to kneel at his feet.
And it was by sole might of a Man. Therefore may this be emphasised
as the temptation and triumph which have for us to-day the meaning
of all others.
A young man of intellectual power, seeing beyond all the conventional
errors around him, without means, feeling that ordinary work, however
honourable, would for him mean failure of his life--because failure
to contribute his larger truth to mankind--he finds the terrible
cost of his aim to be hunger, want, a life passed amid suspicion
and alienation, without sympathy, lonely, unloved--and, alas! with a
probability that all these losses may involve loss of just what they
are incurred for, the power to make good his truth. After giving up
love and joy, he may, after all, be unable to give living service
to his truth, but only a broken body and shed blood. Similar trials
in outer form have been encountered again and again; not only in
the great temptations and triumphs of sacred tradition, but perhaps
even more genuinely in the unknown lives of many pious people all
over the world, have hunger, want, suffering, been conquered by
faith. But rarely amid doubts. Rarely in the way of Saint Thomas,
in no fear of hell or devil, nor in any hope of reward in heaven, or
on earth; rarely indeed without any feeling of a God taking notice,
or belief in angels waiting near, have men or women triumphed utterly
over self. All history proves what man can sacrifice on earth for an
eternal weight of glory above. We know how cheerfully men and women
can sing at the stake, when they feel the fire consuming them to be
a chariot bearing them to heaven. We understand the valour of Luther
marching against his devils with his hymn, 'Ein feste Burg ist unser
Gott.' But it is important to know what man's high heart is capable of
without any of these encouragements or aids, what man's moral force
when he feels himself alone. For this must become an increasingly
momentous consideration.
Already the educated youth of our time have followed the wanderer
of threescore years ago into that St. Thomas d'Enfer Street, which
may be morally translated as the point where man doubts every hell
he does not feel, and every creed he cannot prove. The old fears
and hopes are fading faster from the minds around us than from
their professions. There must be very few sane people now who are
restrained by fear of hell, or promises of future reward. What then
controls human passion and selfishness? For many, custom; for others,
hereditary good nature and good sense; for some, a sense of honour;
for multitudes, the fear of law and penalties. It is very difficult
indeed, amid these complex motives, to know how far simple human
nature, acting at its best, is capable of heroic endurance for truth,
and of pure passion for the right. This cannot be seen in those
who intellectually reject the creed of the majority, but conform to
its standards and pursue its worldly advantages. It must be seen,
if at all, in those who are radically severed from the conventional
aims of the world,--who seek not its wealth, nor its honours, decline
its proudest titles, defy its authority, share not its prospects for
time or eternity. It must be proved by those, the grandeur of whose
aims can change the splendours of Paris to a wilderness. These may
show what man, as man, is capable of, what may be his new birth,
and the religion of his simple manhood. What they think, say, and
do is not prescribed either by human or supernatural command; in
them you do not see what society thinks, or sects believe, or what
the populace applaud. You see the individual man building his moral
edifice, as genuinely as birds their nests, by law of his own moral
constitution. It is a great thing to know what those edifices are,
for so at last every man will have to build if he build at all. And if
noble lives cannot be so lived, we may be sure the career of the human
race will be downhill henceforth. For any unbiassed mind may judge
whether the tendency of thought and power lies toward or away from
the old hopes and fears on which the regime of the past was founded.
A great and wise Teacher of our time, who shared with Carlyle his
lonely pilgrimage, has admonished his generation of the temptations
brought by talent,--selfish use of it for ambitious ends on the
one hand, or withdrawal into fruitless solitude on the other; and I
cannot forbear closing this chapter with his admonition to his young
countrymen forty years ago. [100]
'Public and private avarice makes the air we breathe thick and fat. The
scholar is decent, indolent, complacent. See already the tragic
consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects,
eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the
complacent. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our
shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of
God, find the earth below not in unison with these,--but are hindered
from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is
managed inspire and turn drudges, or die of disgust,--some of them
suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of
young men as hopeful, now crowding to the barriers for the career,
do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on
his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to
him. Patience--patience;--with the shades of all the good and great
for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite
life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles,
the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is
it not the chief disgrace in the world--not to be an unit; not to
be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which
each man was created to bear,--but to be reckoned in the gross, in
the hundred, in the thousand of the party, the section, to which we
belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north or the
south? Not so, brothers and friends,--please God, ours shall not be
so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands;
we will speak our own minds.'