Book: A Strange Story, Volume 7.

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




I halted, and said, "Rest here for a few moments, till I gather up the
conclusions to which your speculative reasoning seems to invite me."

We sat down on a rocky crag, half mantled by luxuriant creepers with
vermilion buds.

"From the guesses," said I, "which you have drawn from the erudition of
others and your own ingenious and reflective inductions, I collect this
solution of the mysteries, by which the experience I gain from my senses
confounds all the dogmas approved by my judgment. To the rational
conjectures by which, when we first conversed on the marvels that
perplexed me, you ascribe to my imagination, predisposed by mental
excitement, physical fatigue or derangement, and a concurrence of singular
events tending to strengthen such predisposition, the phantasmal
impressions produced on my senses,--to these conjectures you now add a new
one, more startling and less admitted by sober physiologists. You
conceive it possible that persons endowed with a rare and peculiar
temperament can so operate on imagination, and, through the imagination,
on the senses of others, as to exceed even the powers ascribed to the
practitioners of mesmerism' and electro-biology, and give a certain
foundation of truth to the old tales of magic and witchcraft. You imply
that Margrave may be a person thus gifted, and hence the influence he
unquestionably exercised over Lilian, and over, perhaps, less innocent
agents, charmed or impelled by his will. And not discarding, as I own I
should have been originally induced to do, the queries or suggestions
adventured by Bacon in his discursive speculations on Nature, to wit,
'that there be many things, some of them inanimate, that operate upon the
spirits of men by secret sympathy and antipathy,' and to which Bacon gave
the quaint name of 'imaginants,' so even that wand, of which I have
described to you the magic-like effects, may have had properties
communicated to it by which it performs the work of the magician, as
mesmerists pretend that some substance mesmerized by them can act on the
patient as sensibly as if it were the mesmerizer himself. Do I state your
suppositions correctly?"

"Yes; always remembering that they are only suppositions, and volunteered
with the utmost diffidence. But since, thus seated in the early
wilderness, we permit ourselves the indulgence of childlike guess, may it
not be possible, apart from the doubtful question whether a man can
communicate to an inanimate material substance a power to act upon the
mind or imagination of another man--may it not, I say, be possible that
such a substance may contain in itself such a virtue or property potent
over certain constitutions, though not over all. For instance, it is in
my experience that the common hazel-wood will strongly affect some nervous
temperaments, though wholly without effect on others. I remember a young
girl, who having taken up a hazel-stick freshly cut, could not relax her
hold of it; and when it was wrenched away from her by force, was
irresistibly attracted towards it, repossessed herself of it, and, after
holding it a few minutes, was cast into a kind of trance, in which she
beheld phantasmal visions. Mentioning this curious case, which I supposed
unique, to a learned brother of our profession, he told me that he had
known other instances of the effect of the hazel upon nervous temperaments
in persons of both sexes. Possibly it was some such peculiar property in
the hazel that made it the wood selected for the old divining-rod. Again,
we know that the bay-tree, or laurel, was dedicated to the oracular
Pythian Apollo. Now wherever, in the old world, we find that the learning
of the priests enabled them to exhibit exceptional phenomena, which
imposed upon popular credulity, there was a something or other which is
worth a philosopher's while to explore; and, accordingly, I always
suspected that there was in the laurel some property favourable to
ecstatic vision in highly impressionable temperaments. My suspicion, a few
years ago, was justified by the experience of a German physician,
who had under his care a cataleptic or ecstatic patient, and who
assured me that he found nothing in this patient so stimulated the state
of 'sleep-waking,' or so disposed that state to indulge in the
hallucinations of prevision, as the berry of the laurel.[10] Well, we do
not know what this wand that produced a seemingly magical effect upon you
was really composed of. You did not notice the metal employed in the
wire, which you say communicated a thrill to the sensitive nerves in the
palm of the hand. You cannot tell how far it might have been the vehicle
of some fluid force in nature. Or still more probably, whether the pores
of your hand insensibly imbibed, and communicated to the brain, some of
those powerful narcotics from which the Buddhists and the Arabs make
unguents that induce visionary hallucinations, and in which substances
undetected in the hollow of the wand, or the handle of the wand itself,
might be steeped.[11] One thing we do know, namely, that amongst the
ancients, and especially in the East, the construction of wands for
magical purposes was no commonplace mechanical craft, but a special and
secret art appropriated to men who cultivated with assiduity all that was
then known of natural science in order to extract from it agencies that
might appear supernatural. Possibly, then, the rods or wands of the East,
of which Scripture makes mention, were framed upon some principles of
which we in our day are very naturally ignorant, since we do not ransack
science for the same secrets; and thus, in the selection or preparation of
the material employed, mainly consisted whatever may be referrible to
natural philosophical causes in the antique science of Rhabdomancy, or
divination and enchantment by wands. The staff, or wand, of which you
tell me, was, you say, made of iron or steel and tipped with crystal.
Possibly iron and crystal do really contain some properties not hitherto
scientifically analyzed, and only, indeed, potential over exceptional
temperaments, which may account for the fact that iron and crystal have
been favourites with all professed mystics, ancient and modern. The
Delphic Pythoness had her iron tripod, Mesmer his iron bed; and many
persons, indisputably honest, cannot gaze long upon a ball of crystal but
what they begin to see visions. I suspect that a philosophical cause for
such seemingly preternatural effects of crystal and iron will be found in
connection with the extreme impressionability to changes in temperatures
which is the characteristic both of crystal and iron. But if these
materials do contain certain powers over exceptional constitutions, we do
not arrive at a supernatural but at a natural phenomenon."

"Still," said I, "even granting that your explanatory hypotheses hit or
approach the truth;--still what a terrible power you would assign to man's
will over men's reason and deeds!"

"Man's will," answered Faber, "has over men's deeds and reason, habitual
and daily, power infinitely greater and, when uncounterbalanced,
infinitely more dangerous than that which superstition exaggerates in
magic. Man's will moves a war that decimates a race, and leaves behind it
calamities little less dire than slaughter. Man's will frames, but it
also corrupts laws; exalts, but also demoralizes opinion; sets the world
mad with fanaticism, as often as it curbs the heart's fierce instincts by
the wisdom of brother-like mercy. You revolt at the exceptional, limited
sway over some two or three individuals which the arts of a sorcerer (if
sorcerer there be) can effect; and yet, at the very moment in which you
were perplexed and appalled by such sway, or by your reluctant belief in
it, your will was devising an engine to unsettle the reason and wither the
hopes of millions!"

"My will! What engine?"

"A book conceived by your intellect, adorned by your learning, and directed
by your will, to steal from the minds of other men their persuasion of the
soul's everlasting Hereafter."

I bowed my head, and felt myself grow pale.

"And if we accept Bacon's theory of 'secret sympathy,' or the plainer
physiological maxim that there must be in the imagination, morbidly
impressed by the will of another, some trains of idea in affinity with
such influence and preinclined to receive it, no magician could warp you
to evil, except through thoughts that themselves went astray. Grant that
the Margrave who still haunts your mind did really, by some occult,
sinister magnetism, guide the madman to murder, did influence the
servant-woman's vulgar desire to pry into the secrets of her ill-fated
master, or the old maid's covetous wish and envious malignity: what could
this awful magician do more than any commonplace guilty adviser, to a mind
predisposed to accept the advice?"

"You forget one example which destroys your argument,--the spell which
this mysterious fascinator could cast upon a creature so pure from all
guilt as Lilian!"

"Will you forgive me if I answer frankly?"

"Speak."

"Your Lilian is spotless and pure as you deem her, and the fascination,
therefore, attempts no lure through a sinful desire; it blends with its
attraction no sentiment of affection untrue to yourself. Nay, it is
justice to your Lilian, and may be melancholy comfort to you, to state my
conviction, based on the answers my questions have drawn from her, that
you were never more cherished by her love than when that love seemed to
forsake you. Her imagination impressed her with the illusion that through
your love for her you were threatened with a great peril. What seemed the
levity of her desertion was the devotion of self-sacrifice. And, in her
strange, dream-led wanderings, do not think that she was conscious of the
fascination you impute to this mysterious Margrave: in her belief it was
your own guardian angel that guided her steps, and her pilgrimage was
ordained to disarm the foe that menaced you, and dissolve the spell that
divided her life from yours! But had she not, long before this, willingly
prepared herself to be so deceived? Had not her fancies been
deliberately encouraged to dwell remote from the duties we are placed on
the earth to perform? The loftiest faculties in our nature are those that
demand the finest poise, not to fall from their height and crush all the
walls that they crown. With exquisite beauty of illustration, Hume says
of the dreamers of 'bright fancies,' 'that they may be compared to those
angels whom the Scriptures represent as covering their eyes with their
wings.' Had you been, like my nephew, a wrestler for bread with the
wilderness, what helpmate would your Lilian have been to you? How often
would you have cried out in justifiable anger, 'I, son of Adam, am on
earth, not in Paradise! Oh, that my Eve were at home on my hearth, and
not in the skies with the seraphs!' No Margrave, I venture to say, could
have suspended the healthful affections, or charmed into danger the
wide-awake soul of my Amy. When she rocks in its cradle the babe the
young parents intrust to her heed; when she calls the kine to the milking,
the chicks to their corn; when she but flits through my room to renew the
flowers on the stand, or range in neat order the books that I read, no
spell on her fancy could lead her a step from the range of her provident
cares! At day she is contented to be on the commonplace earth; at evening
she and I knock together at the one door of heaven, which opes to
thanksgiving and prayer; and thanksgiving and prayer send us back, calm
and hopeful, to the task that each morrow renews."

I looked up as the old man paused, and in the limpid clearness of the
Australian atmosphere, I saw the child he thus praised standing by the
garden-gate, looking towards us, and though still distant she seemed near.
I felt wroth with her. My heart so cherished my harmless, defenceless
Lilian, that I was jealous of the praise taken from her to be bestowed on
another.

"Each of us," said I, coldly, "has his or her own nature, and the uses
harmonious to that nature's idiosyncrasy. The world, I grant, would get
on very ill if women were not more or less actively useful and quietly
good, like your Amy. But the world would lose standards that exalt and
refine, if no woman were permitted to gain, through the indulgence of
fancy, thoughts exquisite as those which my Lilian conceived, while
thought, alas! flowed out of fancy. I do not wound you by citing your Amy
as a type of the mediocre; I do not claim for Lilian the rank we accord to
the type of genius. But both are alike to such types in this: namely,
that the uses of mediocrity are for every-day life, and the uses of
genius, amidst a thousand mistakes which mediocrity never commits, are to
suggest and perpetuate ideas which raise the standard of the mediocre to a
nobler level. There would be fewer Amys in life if there were no Lilian!
as there would be far fewer good men of sense if there were no erring
dreamer of genius!"

"You say well, Allen Fenwick. And who should be so indulgent to the
vagaries of the imagination as the philosophers who taught your youth to
doubt everything in the Maker's plan of creation which could not be
mathematically proved? 'The human mind,' said Luther, 'is like a drunkard
on horseback; prop it on one side, and it falls on the other.' So the man
who is much too enlightened to believe in a peasant's religion, is always
sure to set up some insane superstition of his own. Open biographical
volumes wherever you please, and the man who has no faith in religion is a
man who has faith in a nightmare. See that type of the elegant
sceptics,--Lord Herbert of Cherbury. He is writing a book against
Revelation; he asks a sign from heaven to tell him if his book is approved
by his Maker, and the man who cannot believe in the miracles performed by
his Saviour gravely tells us of a miracle vouchsafed to himself. Take the
hardest and strongest intellect which the hardest and strongest race of
mankind ever schooled and accomplished. See the greatest of great men,
the great Julius Caesar! Publicly he asserts in the Senate that the
immortality of the soul is a vain chimera. He professes the creed which
Roman voluptuaries deduced from Epicurus, and denies all Divine
interference in the affairs of the earth. A great authority for the
Materialists--they have none greater! They can show on their side no
intellect equal to Caesar's! And yet this magnificent freethinker,
rejecting a soul and a Deity, habitually entered his chariot muttering a
charm; crawled on his knees up the steps of a temple to propitiate the
abstraction called 'Nemesis;' and did not cross the Rubicon till he had
consulted the omens. What does all this prove?--a very simple truth. Man
has some instincts with the brutes; for instance, hunger and sexual love.
Man has one instinct peculiar to himself, found universally (or with
alleged exceptions in savage States so rare, that they do not affect the
general law[12]),--an instinct of an invisible power without this earth,
and of a life beyond the grave, which that power vouchsafes to his spirit.
But the best of us cannot violate an instinct with impunity. Resist
hunger as long as you can, and, rather than die of starvation, your
instinct will make you a cannibal; resist love when youth and nature impel
to it, and what pathologist does not track one broad path into madness or
crime? So with the noblest instinct of all. Reject the internal
conviction by which the grandest thinkers have sanctioned the hope of the
humblest Christian, and you are servile at once to some faith
inconceivably more hard to believe. The imagination will not be withheld
from its yearnings for vistas beyond the walls of the flesh, and the span
of the present hour. Philosophy itself, in rejecting the healthful creeds
by which man finds his safeguards in sober prayer and his guide through
the wilderness of visionary doubt, invents systems compared to which the
mysteries of theology are simple. Suppose any man of strong, plain
understanding had never heard of a Deity like Him whom we Christians
adore, then ask this man which he can the better comprehend in his mind,
and accept as a natural faith,--namely, the simple Christianity of his
shepherd or the Pantheism of Spinoza? Place before an accomplished critic
(who comes with a perfectly unprejudiced mind to either inquiry), first,
the arguments of David Hume against the gospel miracles, and then the
metaphysical crotchets of David Hume himself. This subtle philosopher,
not content, with Berkeley, to get rid of matter,--not content, with
Condillac, to get rid of spirit or mind,--proceeds to a miracle greater
than any his Maker has yet vouchsafed to reveal. He, being then alive and
in the act of writing, gets rid of himself altogether. Nay, he confesses
he cannot reason with any one who is stupid enough to think he has a self.
His words are: 'What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of
different perceptions or objects united together by certain relations, and
supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with perfect simplicity and
identity. If any one, upon serious and candid reflection, thinks he has a
different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason with him no
longer.' Certainly I would rather believe all the ghost stories upon
record than believe that I am not even a ghost, distinct and apart from
the perceptions conveyed to me, no matter how,--just as I am distinct and
apart from the furniture in my room, no matter whether I found it there or
whether I bought it. If some old cosmogonist asked you to believe that
the primitive cause of the solar system was not to 'be traced to a Divine
Intelligence, but to a nebulosity, originally so diffused that its
existence can with difficulty be conceived, and that the origin of the
present system of organized beings equally dispensed with the agency of a
creative mind, and could be referred to molecules formed in the water by
the power of attraction, till by modifications of cellular tissue in the
gradual lapse of ages, one monad became an oyster and another a
Man,--would you not say this cosmogony could scarce have misled the human
understanding even in the earliest dawn of speculative inquiry? Yet such
are the hypotheses to which the desire to philosophize away that simple
proposition of a Divine First Cause, which every child can comprehend, led
two of the greatest geniuses and profoundest reasoners of modern
times,--La Place and La Marck.[13] Certainly, the more you examine those
arch phantasmagorists, the philosophers who would leave nothing in the
universe but their own delusions, the more your intellectual pride may be
humbled. The wildest phenomena which have startled you are not more
extravagant than the grave explanations which intellectual presumption
adventures on the elements of our own organism and the relations between
the world of matter and the world of ideas."

Here our conversation stopped, for Amy had now joined us, and, looking up
to reply, I saw the child's innocent face between me and the furrowed brow
of the old man.

[1] See, on the theory elaborated from this principle, Dr. Hibbert's
interesting and valuable work on the "Philosophy of Apparitions."

[2] What Faber here says is expressed with more authority by one of the
most accomplished metaphysicians of our time (Sir W. Hamilton):

"Somnambulism is a phenomenon still more astonishing [than dreaming]. In
this singular state a person performs a regular series of rational
actions, and those frequently of the most difficult and delicate nature;
and what is still more marvellous, with a talent to which he could make no
pretension when awake. (Cr. Ancillon, Essais Philos. ii. 161.) His
memory and reminiscence supply him with recollections of words and things
which, perhaps, never were at his disposal in the ordinary state,--he
speaks more fluently a more refined language. And if we are to credit
what the evidence on which it rests hardly allows us to disbelieve, he has
not only perception of things through other channels than the common
organs of sense, but the sphere of his cognition is amplified to an extent
far beyond the limits to which sensible perception is confined. This
subject is one of the most perplexing in the whole compass of philosophy;
for, on the one hand, the phenomena are so remarkable that they cannot be
believed, and yet, on the other, they are of so unambiguous and palpable a
character, and the witnesses to their reality are so numerous, so
intelligent, and so high above every suspicion of deceit, that it is
equally impossible to deny credit to what is attested by such ample and un
exceptionable evidence."--Sir W. Hamilton: Lectures on Metaphysics and
Logic, vol. ii. p. 274.

This perplexity, in which the distinguished philosopher leaves the
judgment so equally balanced that it finds it impossible to believe, and
yet impossible to disbelieve, forms the right state of mind in which a
candid thinker should come to the examination of those more extraordinary
phenomena which he has not himself yet witnessed, but the fair inquiry
into which may be tendered to him by persons above the imputation of
quackery and fraud. Muffler, who is not the least determined, as he is
certainly one of the most distinguished, disbelievers of mesmeric
phenomena, does not appear to have witnessed, or at least to have
carefully examined, them, or he would, perhaps, have seen that even the
more extraordinary of those phenomena confirm, rather than contradict, his
own general theories, and may be explained by the sympathies one sense has
with another,--"the laws of reflection through the medium of the brain."
(Physiology of the Senses, p. 1311.) And again by the maxim "that the
mental principle, or cause of the mental phenomena, cannot be confined to
the brain, but that it exists in a latent state in every part of the
organism." (Ibid., p. 1355.) The "nerve power," contended for by Mr.
Bain, also may suggest a rational solution of much that has seemed
incredible to those physiologists who have not condescended to sift the
genuine phenomena of mesmerism from the imposture to which, in all ages,
the phenomena exhibited by what may be called the ecstatic temperament
have been applied.

[3] Descartes, L'Homme, vol. iv. p. 345. Cousin's Edition.

[4] Ibid., p. 428.

[5] Facts in Mesmerism.

[6] La Magic et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquitd et an Moyen-Age. Par L. F.
Alfred Maury, Membre de Nnstitut. p. 225.

[7] "She had no illusions when within doors."--Abercrombie, On the
Intellectual Powers, p. 277. (15th Edition.)

[8] Muller, Physiology of the Senses, Baley's translation, pp. 1068-1395,
and elsewhere. Mr. Bain, in his thoughtful and suggestive work on the
"Senses and Intellect," makes very powerful use of these statements in
support of his proposition, which Faber advances in other words, namely,
"the return of the nervous currents exactly on their old track in revived
sensations."

[9] Perhaps it is for the reason suggested in the text, namely, that the
magician requires the interposition of a third imagination between his own
and that of the consulting believer, that any learned adept in (so-called)
magic will invariably refuse to exhibit without the presence of a third
person. Hence the author of "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magic," printed
at Parisy 1852-53--a book less remarkable for its learning than for the
earnest belief of a scholar of our own day in the reality of the art of
which he records the history--insists much on the necessity of rigidly
observing Le Ternaire, in the number of persons who assist in an
enchanter's experiments.

[10] I may add that Dr. Kerner instances the effect of laurel-berries on
the Seeress of Prevorst, corresponding with that asserted by Julius Faber
in the text.

[11] See for these unguents the work of M. Maury, before quoted, "La Magic
et l'Astrologie," etc., p. 417.

[12] It seems extremely doubtful whether the very few instances in which
it has been asserted that a savage race has been found without recognition
of a Deity and a future state would bear searching examination. It is
set forth, for example, in most of the popular works on Australia, that
the Australian savages have no notion of a Deity or a Hereafter, that they
only worship a devil, or evil spirit. This assumption, though made more
peremptorily, and by a greater number of writers than any similar one
regarding other savages, is altogether erroneous, and has no other
foundation than the ignorance of the writers. The Australian savages
recognize a Deity, but He is too august for a name in their own language;
in English they call Him the Great Master,--an expression synonymous with
"The Great Lord." They believe in a hereafter of eternal joy, and place
it amongst the stars.--See Strzelecki's Physical Description of New South
Wales.

[13] See the observations on La Place and La Marck in the Introduction to
Kirby's "Bridgewater Treatise."

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