Book: A Strange Story, Volume 7.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 7.




The change of scene wrought a decided change for the better in her health
and spirits, but not such as implied a dawn of reviving reason. But her
countenance was now more rarely overcast. Its usual aspect was glad with
a soft mysterious smile. She would murmur snatches of songs, that were
partly borrowed from English poets, and partly glided away into what
seemed spontaneous additions of her own,--wanting intelligible meaning,
but never melody nor rhyme. Strange, that memory and imitation--the two
earliest parents of all inventive knowledge--should still be so active,
and judgment--the after faculty, that combines the rest into purpose and
method-be annulled!

Julius Faber I see continually, though his residence is a few miles
distant. He is sanguine as to Lilian's ultimate recovery; and, to my
amazement and to my envy, he has contrived, by some art which I cannot
attain, to establish between her and himself intelligible communion. She
comprehends his questions, when mine, though the simplest, seem to her in
unknown language; and he construes into sense her words, that to me are
meaningless riddles.

"I was right," he said to me one day, leaving her seated in the garden
beside her quiet, patient mother, and joining me where I lay--listless yet
fretful--under the shadeless gum-trees, gazing not on the flocks and
fields that I could call my own, but on the far mountain range, from which
the arch of the horizon seemed to spring,--"I was right," said the great
physician; "this is reason suspended, not reason lost. Your wife will
recover; but--"

"But what?"

"Give me your arm as I walk homeward, and I will tell you the conclusion
to which I have come."

I rose, the old man leaned on me, and we went down the valley along the
craggy ridges of the winding creek. The woodland on the opposite bank was
vocal with the chirp and croak and chatter of Australian birds,--all
mirthful, all songless, save that sweetest of warblers, which some early
irreverent emigrant degraded to the name of magpie, but whose note is
sweeter than the nightingale's, and trills through the lucent air with a
distinct ecstatic melody of joy that dominates all the discords, so
ravishing the sense, that, while it sings, the ear scarcely heeds the
scream of the parrots.

[1] Creek is the name given by Australian colonists to precarious water
Courses and tributary streams.




CHAPTER LXXI.

"You may remember," said Julius Faber, "Sir Humphry Davy's eloquent
description of the effect produced on him by the inhalation of nitrous
oxide. He states that he began to lose the perception of external things;
trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through his mind, and were
connected with words in such a manner as to produce perceptions perfectly
novel. 'I existed,' he said, 'in a world of newly-connected and
newly-modified ideas.' When he recovered, he exclaimed: 'Nothing exists
but thoughts; the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures,
and pains!'

"Now observe, that thus a cultivator of positive science, endowed with one
of the healthiest of human brains, is, by the inhalation of a gas,
abstracted from all external life,--enters into a new world, which
consists of images he himself creates and animates so vividly that, on
waking, he resolves the universe itself into thoughts."

"Well," said I, "but what inference do you draw from that voluntary
experiment, applicable to the malady of which you bid me hope the cure?"

"Simply this: that the effect produced on a healthful brain by the nitrous
oxide may be produced also by moral causes operating on the blood, or on
the nerves. There is a degree of mental excitement in which ideas are
more vivid than sensations, and then the world of external things gives
way to the world within the brain.[1] But this, though a suspension of
that reason which comprehends accuracy of judgment, is no more a permanent
aberration of reason than were Sir Humphry Davy's visionary ecstasies
under the influence of the gas. The difference between the two states of
suspension is that of time, and it is but an affair of time with our
beloved patient. Yet prepare yourself. I fear that the mind will not
recover without some critical malady of the body!"

"Critical! but not dangerous?--say not dangerous! I can endure the
pause of her reason; I could not endure the void in the universe if her
life were to fade from the earth."

"Poor friend! would not you yourself rather lose life than reason?"

"I--yes! But we men are taught to set cheap value on our own lives; we do
not estimate at the same rate the lives of those we love. Did we do so,
Humanity would lose its virtues."

"What, then! Love teaches that there is something of nobler value than
mere mind? Yet surely it cannot be the mere body? What is it, if not
that continuance of being which your philosophy declines to
acknowledge,--namely, soul? If you fear so painfully that your Lilian
should die, is it not that you fear to lose her forever?"

"Oh, cease, cease!" I cried impatiently. "I cannot now argue on
metaphysics. What is it that you anticipate of harm to her life? Her
health has been stronger ever since her affliction. She never seems to
know ailment now. Do you not perceive that her cheek has a more hardy
bloom, her frame a more rounded symmetry, than when you saw her in
England?"

"Unquestionably. Her physical forces have been silently recruiting
themselves in the dreams which half lull, half amuse her imagination.
Imagination! that faculty, the most glorious which is bestowed on the
human mind, because it is the faculty which enables thought to create, is
of all others the most exhausting to life when unduly stimulated and
consciously reasoning on its own creations. I think it probable that had
this sorrow not befallen you, you would have known a sorrow yet
graver,--you would have long survived your Lilian. As it is now, when she
recovers, her whole organization, physical and mental, will have undergone
a beneficent change. But, I repeat my prediction,--some severe malady of
the body will precede the restoration of the mind; and it is my hope that
the present suspense or aberration of the more wearing powers of the mind
may fit the body to endure and surmount the physical crisis. I remember a
case, within my own professional experience, in many respects similar to
this, but in other respects it was less hopeful. I was consulted by a
young student of a very delicate physical frame, of great mental energies,
and consumed by an intense ambition. He was reading for university
honours. He would not listen to me when I entreated him to rest his mind.
I thought that he was certain to obtain the distinction for which he
toiled, and equally certain to die a few months after obtaining it. He
falsified both my prognostics. He so overworked himself that, on the day
of examination, his nerves were agitated, his memory failed him; he
passed, not without a certain credit, but fell far short of the rank
amongst his fellow competitors to which he aspired. Here, then, the
irritated mind acted on the disappointed heart, and raised a new train of
emotions. He was first visited by spectral illusions; then he sank into a
state in which the external world seemed quite blotted out. He heeded
nothing that was said to him; seemed to see nothing that was placed before
his eyes,--in a word, sensations became dormant, ideas preconceived
usurped their place, and those ideas gave him pleasure. He believed that
his genius was recognized, and lived amongst its supposed creations
enjoying an imaginary fame. So it went on for two years, during which
suspense of his reason, his frail form became robust and vigorous. At the
end of that time he was seized with a fever, which would have swept him in
three days to the grave had it occurred when I was first called in to
attend him. He conquered the fever, and, in recovering, acquired the full
possession of the intellectual faculties so long suspended. When I last
saw him, many years afterwards, he was in perfect health, and the object
of his young ambition was realized; the body had supported the mind,--he
had achieved distinction. Now what had so, for a time, laid this strong
intellect into visionary sleep? The most agonizing of human emotions in a
noble spirit,--shame! What has so stricken down your Lilian? You have
told me the story: shame!--the shame of a nature pre-eminently pure. But
observe that, in his case as in hers, the shock inflicted does not produce
a succession of painful illusions: on the contrary, in both, the illusions
are generally pleasing. Had the illusions been painful, the body would
have suffered, the patient died. Why did a painful shock produce pleasing
illusions? Because, no matter how a shock on the nerves may originate, if
it affects the reason, it does but make more vivid than impressions from
actual external objects the ideas previously most cherished. Such ideas
in the young student were ideas of earthly fame; such ideas in the young
maiden are ideas of angel comforters and heavenly Edens. You miss her
mind on the earth, and, while we speak, it is in paradise."

"Much that you say, my friend, is authorized by the speculations of great
writers, with whom I am not unfamiliar; but in none of those writers, nor
in your encouraging words, do I find a solution for much that has no
precedents in my experience,--much, indeed, that has analogies in my
reading, but analogies which I have hitherto despised as old wives'
fables. I have bared to your searching eye the weird mysteries of my
life. How do you account for facts which you cannot resolve into
illusions,--for the influence which that strange being, Margrave,
exercised over Lilian's mind or fancy, so that for a time her love for me
was as dormant as is her reason now; so that he could draw her--her whose
nature you admit to be singularly pure and modest--from her mother's home?
The magic wand; the trance into which that wand threw Margrave himself;
the apparition which it conjured up in my own quiet chamber when my mind
was without a care and my health without a flaw,--how account for all
this: as you endeavoured, and perhaps successfully, to account for all my
impressions of the Vision in the Museum, of the luminous, haunting shadow
in its earlier apparitions, when my fancy was heated, my heart tormented,
and, it might be, even the physical forces of this strong frame
disordered?"

"Allen," said the old pathologist, "here we approach a ground which few
physicians have dared to examine. Honour to those who, like our bold
contemporary, Elliotson, have braved scoff and sacrificed dross in seeking
to extract what is practical in uses, what can be tested by experiment,
from those exceptional phenomena on which magic sought to found a
philosophy, and to which philosophy tracks the origin of magic."

"What! do I understand you? Is it you, Julius Faber, who attach faith to
the wonders attributed to animal magnetism and electro-biology, or
subscribe to the doctrines which their practitioners teach?"

"I have not examined into those doctrines, nor seen with my own eyes the
wonders recorded, upon evidence too respectable, nevertheless, to permit
me peremptorily to deny what I have not witnessed.[2] But wherever I look
through the History of Mankind in all ages and all races, I find a
concurrence in certain beliefs which seem to countenance the theory that
there is in some peculiar and rare temperaments a power over forms of
animated organization, with which they establish some unaccountable
affinity; and even, though much more rarely, a power over inanimate
matter. You are familiar with the theory of Descartes, 'that those
particles of the blood which penetrate to the brain do not only serve to
nourish and sustain its substance, but to produce there a certain very
subtle Aura, or rather a flame very vivid and pure, that obtains the name
of the Animal Spirits;'[3] and at the close of his great fragment upon
Man, he asserts that 'this flame is of no other nature than all the fires
which are in inanimate bodies.'[4] This notion does but forestall the
more recent doctrine that electricity is more or less in all, or nearly
all, known matter. Now, whether in the electric fluid or some other fluid
akin to it of which we know still less, thus equally pervading all matter,
there may be a certain magnetic property more active, more operative upon
sympathy in some human constitutions than in others, and which can account
for the mysterious power I have spoken of, is a query I might suggest, but
not an opinion I would hazard. For an opinion I must have that basis of
experience or authority which I do not need when I submit a query to the
experience and authority of others. Still, the supposition conveyed in
the query is so far worthy of notice, that the ecstatic temperament (in
which phrase I comprehend all constitutional mystics) is peculiarly
sensitive to electric atmospheric influences. This is a fact which most
medical observers will have remarked in the range of their practice.
Accordingly, I was prepared to find Mr Hare Townshend, in his interesting
work,[5] state that he himself was of 'the electric temperament,' sparks
flying from his hair when combed in the dark, etc. That accomplished
writer, whose veracity no one would impugn, affirms that between this
electrical endowment and whatever mesmeric properties he might possess,
there is a remarkable relationship and parallelism. Whatever state of the
atmosphere tends to accumulate and insulate electricity in the body,
promotes equally' (says Mr. Townshend) 'the power and facility with which
I influence others mesmerically.' What Mr. Townshend thus observes in
himself, American physicians and professors of chemistry depose to have
observed in those modern magicians, the mediums of (so-called) 'spirit
manifestation.' They state that all such mediums are of the electric
temperament, thus everywhere found allied with the ecstatic, and their
power varies in proportion as the state of the atmosphere serves to
depress or augment the electricity stored in themselves. Here, then, in
the midst of vagrant phenomena, either too hastily dismissed as altogether
the tricks of fraudful imposture, or too credulously accepted as
supernatural portents-here, at least, in one generalized fact, we may,
perhaps, find a starting point, from which inductive experiment may
arrive, soon or late, at a rational theory. But however the power of
which we are speaking (a power accorded to special physical temperament)
may or may not be accounted for by some patient student of nature, I am
persuaded that it is in that power we are to seek for whatever is not
wholly imposture, in the attributes assigned to magic or witchcraft. It
is well said, by a writer who has gone into the depth of these subjects
with the research of a scholar and the science of a pathologist, 'that if
magic had exclusively reposed on credulity and falsehood, its reign would
never have endured so long; but that its art took its origin in singular
phenomena, proper to certain affections of the nerves, or manifested in
the conditions of sleep. These phenomena, the principle of which was at
first unknown, served to root faith in magic, and often abused even
enlightened minds. The enchanters and magicians arrived, by divers
practices, at the faculty of provoking in other brains a determined order
of dreams, of engendering hallucinations of all kinds, of inducing fits of
hypnotism, trance, mania, during which the persons so affected imagined
that they saw, heard, touched, supernatural beings, conversed with them,
proved their influences, assisted at prodigies of which magic proclaimed
itself to possess the secret. The public, the enchanters, and the
enchanted were equally dupes.'[6] Accepting this explanation,
unintelligible to no physician of a practice so lengthened as mine has
been, I draw from it the corollary, that as these phenomena are exhibited
only by certain special affections, to which only certain special
constitutions are susceptible, so not in any superior faculties of
intellect, or of spiritual endowment, but in peculiar physical
temperaments, often strangely disordered, the power of the sorcerer in
affecting the imagination of others is to be sought. In the native tribes
of Australasia the elders are instructed in the arts of this so-called
sorcery, but only in a very few constitutions does instruction avail to
produce effects in which the savages recognize the powers of a sorcerer:
it is so with the Obi of the negroes. The fascination of Obi is an
unquestionable fact, but the Obi man cannot be trained by formal lessons;
he is born a fascinator, as a poet is born a poet. It is so with the
Laplanders, of whom Tornoeus reports that of those instructed in the
magical art 'only a few are capable of it.' 'Some,' he says, 'are
naturally magicians.' And this fact is emphatically insisted upon by the
mystics of our own middle ages, who state that a man must be born a
magician; in other words, that the gift is constitutional, though
developed by practice and art. Now, that this gift and its practice
should principally obtain in imperfect states of civilization, and fade
into insignificance in the busy social enlightenment of cities, may be
accounted for by reference to the known influences of imagination. In the
cruder states of social life not only is imagination more frequently
predominant over all other faculties, but it has not the healthful vents
which the intellectual competition of cities and civilization affords.
The man who in a savage tribe, or in the dark feudal ages, would be a
magician, is in our century a poet, an orator, a daring speculator, an
inventive philosopher. In other words, his imagination is drawn to
pursuits congenial to those amongst whom it works. It is the tendency of
all intellect to follow the directions of the public opinion amidst which
it is trained. Where a magician is held in reverence or awe, there will
be more practitioners of magic than where a magician is despised as an
impostor or shut up as a lunatic. In Scandinavia, before the introduction
of Christianity, all tradition records the wonderful powers of the Vala,
or witch, who was then held in reverence and honour. Christianity was
introduced, and the early Church denounced the Vala as the instrument of
Satan, and from that moment down dropped the majestic prophetess into a
miserable and execrated old hag!"

"The ideas you broach," said I, musingly, "have at moments crossed me,
though I have shrunk from reducing them to a theory which is but one of
pure hypothesis. But this magic, after all, then, you would place in the
imagination of the operator, acting on the imagination of those whom it
affects? Here, at least, I can follow you, to a certain extent, for here
we get back into the legitimate realm of physiology."

"And possibly," said Faber, "we may find hints to guide us to useful
examination, if not to complete solution of problems that, once
demonstrated, may lead to discoveries of infinite value,--hints, I say, in
two writers of widely opposite genius, Van Helmont and Bacon. Van
Helmont, of all the mediaeval mystics, is, in spite of his many
extravagant whims, the one whose intellect is the most suggestive to the
disciplined reasoners of our day. He supposed that the faculty which he
calls Fantasy, and which we familiarly call Imagination,--is invested with
the power of creating for itself ideas independent of the senses, each
idea clothed in a form fabricated by the imagination, and becoming an
operative entity. This notion is so far favoured by modern physiologists,
that Lincke reports a case where the eye itself was extirpated; yet the
extirpation was followed by the appearance of luminous figures before the
orbit. And again, a woman, stone-blind, complained of 'luminous images,
with pale colours, before her eyes.' Abercrombie mentions the case 'of a
lady quite blind, her eyes being also disorganized and sunk, who never
walked out without seeing a little old woman in a red cloak, who seemed to
walk before her.'[7] Your favourite authority, the illustrious Miller,
who was himself in the habit of 'seeing different images in the field of
vision when he lay quietly down to sleep, asserts that these images are
not merely presented to the fancy, but that even the images of dreams are
really seen,' and that 'any one may satisfy himself of this by accustoming
himself regularly to open his eyes when waking after a dream,--the images
seen in the dream are then sometimes visible, and can be observed to
disappear gradually.' He confirms this statement not only by the result
of his own experience, but by the observations made by Spinoza, and the
yet higher authority of Aristotle, who accounts for spectral appearance as
the internal action of the sense of vision.[8] And this opinion is
favoured by Sir David Brewster, whose experience leads him to suggest
'that the objects of mental contemplation may be seen as distinctly as
external objects, and will occupy the same local position in the axis of
vision as if they had been formed by the agency of light.' Be this as it
may, one fact remains,--that images can be seen even by the blind as
distinctly and vividly as you and I now see the stream below our feet and
the opossums at play upon yonder boughs. Let us come next to some
remarkable suggestions of Lord Bacon. In his Natural History, treating of
the force of the imagination, and the help it receives 'by one man working
by another,' he cites an instance he had witnessed of a kind of juggler,
who could tell a person what card he thought of. He mentioned this 'to a
pretended learned man, curious in such things,' and this sage said to him,
'It is not the knowledge of the man's thought, for that is proper to God,
but the enforcing of a thought upon him, and binding his imagination by a
stronger, so that he could think of no other card.' You see this sage
anticipated our modern electro-biologists! And the learned man then
shrewdly asked Lord Bacon, 'Did the juggler tell the card to the man
himself who had thought of it, or bid another tell it?' 'He bade another
tell it,' answered Lord Bacon. 'I thought so,' returned his learned
acquaintance, 'for the juggler himself could not have put on so strong an
imagination; but by telling the card to the other, who believed the
juggler was some strange man who could do strange things, that other man
caught a strong imagination.'[9] The whole story is worth reading,
because Lord Bacon evidently thinks it conveys a guess worth examining.
And Lord Bacon, were he now living, would be the man to solve the
mysteries that branch out of mesmerism or (so-called) spiritual
manifestation, for he would not pretend to despise their phenomena for
fear of hurting his reputation for good sense. Bacon then goes on to
state that there are three ways to fortify the imagination. 'First,
authority derived from belief in an art and in the man who exercises it;
secondly, means to quicken and corroborate the imagination; thirdly, means
to repeat and refresh it.' For the second and the third he refers to the
practices of magic, and proceeds afterwards to state on what things
imagination has most force,--'upon things that have the lightest and
easiest motions, and, therefore, above all, upon the spirits of men, and,
in them, on such affections as move lightest,--in love, in fear, in
irresolution. And,' adds Bacon, earnestly, in a very different spirit
from that which dictates to the sages of our time the philosophy of
rejecting without trial that which belongs to the Marvellous,--'and
whatsoever is of this kind, should be thoroughly inquired into.' And this
great founder or renovator of the sober inductive system of investigation
even so far leaves it a matter of speculative inquiry, whether imagination
may not be so powerful that it can actually operate upon a plant, that he
says: 'This likewise should be made upon plants, and that diligently; as
if you should tell a man that such a tree would die this year, and will
him, at these and these times, to go unto it and see how it thriveth.' I
presume that no philosopher has followed such recommendations: had some
great philosopher done so, possibly we should by this time know all the
secrets of what is popularly called witchcraft."

And as Faber here paused, there came a strange laugh from the
fantastic she-oak-tree overhanging the stream,--a wild, impish laugh.

"Pooh! it is but the great kingfisher, the laughing-bird of the
Australian bush," said Julius Faber, amused at my start of superstitious
alarm.

We walked on for some minutes in musing silence, and the rude log-hut in
which my wise companion had his home came in view,--the flocks grazing on
undulous pastures, the lone drinking at a watercourse fringed by the
slender gum-trees, and a few fields, laboriously won from the luxuriant
grassland, rippling with the wave of corn.

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