Book: Godolphin, Volume 3.
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> Godolphin, Volume 3.
"Anxiously following their precepts--the truth of which soon appeared--I
found that solitude, fast, intense reverie upon the one theme on which we
desired knowledge, were the true elements and purifiers of this glorious
faculty. It was by these means, and by this power, that men so far behind
us in lesser lore achieved, on the mooned plains of Chaldea and by the
dark waters of Egypt, their penetration into the womb of Event;--by these
means, and this power, the solitaries of the Gothic time not only attained
to the most intricate arcana of the stars, but to the empire of the
spirits about, above, and beneath the earth; a power, indeed, disputed by
the presumptuous sophists of the present time, but of which their writings
yet contain ample proof. Nay, by the constant feeding, and impressing and
moulding, and refining, and heightening, the imaginative power, I do
conceive that even the false prophets and the evil practitioners of the
blacker cabala clomb into the power seemingly inconceivable--the power of
accomplishing miracles and prodigies, and to appearance belie, but in
truth verify, the course of nature. By this spirit within the flesh, we
grow _from_ the flesh, and may see, and at length invoke, the souls of the
dead, and receive warnings, and hear omens, and girdle our sleep with
dreams.
"Not unto me," continued the cabalist, in a lowlier tone, "have been
vouchsafed all these gifts; for I began the art when the first fire of
youth was dim within me; and it was therefore with duller and already
earth-clogged pinions that I sought to rise. Something, however, I have
won as a recompense for austere abstinence and much labour; and this power
over the land of dreams is at least within my command."
"Then," said Lucilla, in a disappointed tone, "it is only by a long course
of indulgence to the fervour of the imagination, and not by spell or
charm, that one can gain a similar power?"
"Not wholly so, my daughter," replied the mystic; "they who do so excite,
and have so raised the diviner faculty, can alone possess the certain and
invariable power over dreams, even without charms and talismans; but the
most dull or idle may hope to do so with just confidence (though not
certainty) by help of skill, and by directing the full force of their
half-roused fancy towards the person or object they wish to see reflected
in the glass of Sleep."
"And what means should the uninitiated employ?" asked Lucilla, in a tone
betokening her interest.
"I will tell thee," answered the astrologer. "Thou must inscribe on a
white parchment an image of the sun."
"As how?" interrupted Lucilla.
"Thus!" said the astrologer, drawing from among his papers one inscribed
with the figure of a man asleep on the bosom of an angel. "This was made
at the potential and appointed time, when the sun was in the Ninth of the
Celestial Houses, and the Lion shook his bright mane as he ascended the
blue mount. Observe, that on the figure must be written thy desire--the
name of the person thou wishest to see, or the thing thou wouldst have
foreshown: then having prepared and brought the mind to a faith in the
effect--for without faith the imagination lies inert and lifeless--this
image will be placed under the head of the invoker, and when the moon
goeth through the sign which was in the Ninth House of his nativity, the
Dream will glide into him, and his soul walk with the spirit of the
vision."
"Give me the image," said Lucilla, eagerly.
The mystic hesitated--"No, Lucilla," said he, at length; "no, it is a dark
and comfortless path, that of prescience and unearthly knowledge, save to
the few that walk it with a gifted light and a fearless soul. It is not
for women or children--nay, for few amongst men: it withers up the sap of
life, and makes the hair grey before its time. No, no; take the broad
sunshine, and the brief but sweet flowers of earth; they are better for
thee, my child, and for thy years than the fever and hope of the
night-dream and the planetary influence."
So saying, the astrologer replaced the image within the leaves of one of
his books; and with prudence not common to him, thrust the volume into a
drawer, which he locked. The fair face of Lucilla became clouded, but the
ill health of her father imposed a restraint on her wild temper.
Just at that moment the door slowly opened, and the Englishman stood
before the daughter and sire. They did not note him at first. The
solitary servant of the sage had admitted him; he had proceeded, without
ceremony, to the well-remembered apartment.
As he now stood gazing on the pair, he observed with an inward smile, how
exactly their present attitudes (as well as the old aspect of the scene)
resembled those in which he had broken upon them on the last evening he
had visited that chamber; the father bending over the old, worn, quaint,
table; and the daughter seated beside him on the same low stool. The
character of their countenances struck him, too, as wearing the same
ominous expression as when those countenances had chilled him on that
evening. For Volktman's features were impressed with the sadness that
breathed from, and caused, his prohibition to his daughter; and that
prohibition had given to her features an abstraction and shadow similar to
the dejection they had worn on the night we recur to.
This remembered coincidence did not cheer the spirits of the young
traveller; he muttered to himself; and then, as if anxious to break the
silence, moved forward with a heavy step.
Volktman started at the sound; and looking up, seemed literally
electrified by this sudden apparition of one whom he had so lately
expressed his desire to see. His lips muttered the intruder's name, one
well known to the reader (it was the name of Godolphin) and then closed;
but Lucilla sprang from her seat, and, clasping her hands joyously
together, darted forward till she came within a foot of the unexpected
visitor. There she abruptly arrested herself, blushed deeply, and stood
before him humbled, agitated, but all vivid with delight.
"What, is this Lucilla?" said Godolphin admiringly: "how beautiful she is
grown!" and advancing, he saluted, with a light and fraternal kiss, her
girlish and damask cheek: then, without heeding her confusion, he turned
to the astrologer, who by this time had a little recovered from his amaze.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE EFFECT OF YEARS AND EXPERIENCE.--THE ITALIAN CHARACTER.
Godolphin now came almost daily to the astrologer's abode. He was shocked
to perceive the physical alteration four years had wrought in his singular
friend; and, with the warmth of a heart naturally kind, he sought to
contribute to the comfort and enjoyment of a life that was evidently
drawing to a close.
Godolphin's company seemed to give Volktman a pleasure which nothing else
could afford him. He loved to converse on the various incidents that had
occurred to each since they met; and, in whatsoever Godolphin communicated
to him, the mystic sought to impress upon his friend's attention the
fulfilment of an astrological prediction.
Godolphin, though no longer impressed with a belief in the visionary's
science, did not affect to combat his assertions. He had not, in his
progress through life, found much to shake his habitual indolence in
ordinary affairs; and it was no easy matter to provoke one of his quiet
temper and self-indulging wisdom into conversational dispute. Besides,
who argues with fanaticism?
Since the young idealist had left England, the elements of his character
had been slowly performing the ordination of time, and working their due
change in its general aspect. The warm fountains of youth flowed not so
freely as before the selfishness that always comes, sooner or later, to
solitary men of the world, had gradually mingled itself with all the
channels of his heart. The brooding and thoughtful disposition of his
faculties having turned from romance to what he deemed philosophy, that
which once was enthusiasm had hardened into wisdom. He neither hated men
nor loved them with a sanguine philanthropy; he viewed them with cool and
discerning eyes. He did not think it within the power of governments to
make the mass, in any country, much happier or more elevated than they
are. Republics, he was wont to say, favoured aristocratic virtues, and
despotisms extinguished them: but, whether in a monarchy or republic, the
hewers of wood and the drawers of the water, the multitude, still remained
intrinsically the same.
This theory heightened his indifference to ambition. The watchwords of
party appeared to him ridiculous; and politics in general--what a great
moralist termed one question in particular--a shuttlecock kept up by the
contention of noisy children. His mind thus rested as to all public
matters in a state of quietude, and covered over with the mantle of a most
false, a most perilous philosophy. His appetites to pleasure had grown
somewhat dulled by experience, but he was as yet neither sated nor
discontented. One feeling at his breast still remained scarcely
diminished of its effect, when the string was touched--his tender
remembrance of Constance; and this had prevented any subsequent but
momentary attachment deepening into love. Thus, at the age of seven and
twenty, Percy Godolphin reappears on our stage.
There was a great deal in the Italian character that our traveller liked:
its love of ease, reduced into a system; its courtesy; its content with
the world as it is; its moral apathy as regards all that agitates life,
save one passion--and the universal tenderness, ardour, and delicacy
which, in that passion, it ennobles itself in displaying. The commonest
peasant of Rome or Naples, though not perhaps in the freer land of
Tuscany, can comprehend all the romance and mystery of the most subtle
species of love; all that it requires in England the idle habits of
aristocracy, or the sensitive fibre of genius, even to conceive. And what
is yet stranger, the worn-out debauches, sage with an experience and
variety of licentiousness, which come not within the compass of a northern
profligacy, remains alive to the earliest and most innocent sentiments of
the passion. And if Platonism in its coldest purity exist on earth, it is
among the Aretins of southern Italy.
This unworldly refinement, amidst so much worldly callousness, was a
peculiarity that afforded perpetual amusement to the nice eye and subtle
judgment of Godolphin. He loved not to note the common elements of
character; whatever was most abstract and difficult to analyse, pleased
him most. He mixed then much with the Romans, and was a favourite amongst
them; but, during his present visit to the Immortal City, he did not, how
distantly soever, associate with the English. His carelessness of show,
and the independence of a single man from burdensome connexions, rendered
his income fully competent to his wants; but, like many proud men, he was
not willing to make it seem even to himself, as a comparative poverty,
beside the lavish expenses of his ostentatious countrymen. Travel,
moreover, had augmented those stores of reflection which rob solitude of
ennui.
CHAPTER XXX.
MAGNETISM.--SYMPATHY.--THE RETURN OF ELEMENTS TO ELEMENTS.
Daily did the health of Volktman decline; Lucilla was the only one
ignorant of his danger. She had never seen the gradual approaches of
death: her mother's abrupt and rapid illness made the whole of her
experience of disease. Physicians and dark rooms were necessarily coupled
in her mind with all graver maladies; and as the astrologer, wrapt in his
calculations, altered not any of his habits, and was insensible to pain,
she fondly attributed his occasional complaints to the melancholy induced
by seclusion. With sedentary men, diseases being often those connected
with the Organisation of the heart, do not usually terminate suddenly: it
was so with Volktman.
One day he was alone with Godolphin, and their conversation turned upon
one of the doctrines of the old Magnetism, a doctrine which, depending as
it does so much upon a seeming reference to experience, survived the rest
of its associates, and is still not wholly out of repute among the wild
imaginations of Germany.
"One of the most remarkable and abstruse points in what students call
metaphysics," said Volktman, "is sympathy! the first principle, according
to some, of all human virtue. It is this, say they, which makes men just,
humane, charitable. When one who has never heard of the duty of assisting
his neighbour, sees another drowning, he plunges into the water and saves
him. Why? because involuntarily, and at once, his imagination places
himself in the situation of the stranger: the pain he would experience in
the watery death glances across him: from this pain he hastens,--without
analysing its cause, to deliver himself.
"Humanity is thus taught him by sympathy: where is this sympathy
placed?--in the nerves: the nerves are the communicants with outward
nature; the more delicate the nerves, the finer the sympathies; hence,
women and children are more alive to sympathy than men. Well, mark me: do
not these nerves have attraction and sympathy---not only with human
suffering, but with the powers of what is falsely termed inanimate nature?
Do not the wind, the influences of the weather and the seasons, act
confessedly upon them? and if one part of nature, why not another,
inseparably connected too with that part? If the weather and seasons have
sympathy with the nerves, why not the moon and the stars, by which the
weather and the seasons are influenced and changed? Ye of the schools may
allow that sympathy originates some of our actions; I say it governs the
whole world--the whole creation! Before the child is born, it is this
secret affinity which can mark and stamp him with the witness of his
mother's terror or his mother's desire."
"Yet," said Godolphin, "you would scarcely, in your zeal for sympathy,
advocate the same cause as Edricius Mohynnus, who cured wounds by a
powder, not applied to the wound, but to the towel that had been dipped in
its blood?"
"No," answered Volktman: "it is these quacks and pretenders that have
wronged all sciences, by clamouring for false deductions. But I do
believe of sympathy, that it has a power to transport ourselves out of the
body and reunite us with the absent. Hence, trances, and raptures, in
which the patient, being sincere, will tell thee, in grave earnestness,
and with minute detail, of all that he saw, and heard, and encountered,
afar off, in other parts of the earth, or even above the earth. As thou
knowest the accredited story of the youth, who, being transported with a
vehement and long-nursed desire to see his mother, did, through that same
desire, become as it were rapt, and beheld her, being at the distance of
many miles, and giving and exchanging signs of their real and bodily
conference."
Godolphin turned aside to conceal an involuntary smile at this grave
affirmation; but the mystic, perhaps perceiving it, continued yet more
eagerly:--
"Nay, I myself, at times, have experienced such trance, if trance it be;
and have conversed with them who have passed from the outward earth--with
my father and my wife. And," continued he, after a moment's pause, "I do
believe that we may, by means of this power of attraction--this elementary
and all-penetrative sympathy, pass away, in our last moments, at once into
the bosom of those we love. For, by the intent and rapt longing to behold
the Blest and to be amongst them, we may be drawn insensibly into their
presence, and the hour being come when the affinity between the spirit and
the body shall be dissolved, the mind and desire, being so drawn upward,
can return to earth no more. And this sympathy, refined and extended,
will make, I imagine, our powers, our very being, in a future state. Our
sympathy being only, then, with what is immortal, we shall partake
necessarily of that nature which attracts us; and the body no longer
clogging the intenseness of our desires, we shall be able by a wish to
transport ourselves wheresoever we please,--from star to star, from glory
to glory, charioted and winged by our wishes."
Godolphin did not reply, for he was struck with the growing paleness of
the mystic, and with a dreaming and intent fixedness that seemed creeping
over his eyes, which were usually bright and restless. The day was now
fast declining, Lucilla entered the room, and came caressingly to her
father's side.
"Is the evening warm, my child?" said the astrologer.
"Very mild and warm," answered Lucilla.
"Give me your arm then," said he; "I will sit a little while without the
threshold."
The Romans live in flats, as at Edinburgh, and with a common stair.
Volktman's abode was in the secondo piano. He descended the stairs with
a step lighter than it had been of late; and sinking into a seat without
the house, seemed silently and gratefully to inhale the soft and purple
air of an Italian sunset.
By and by the sun had entirely vanished: and that most brief but most
delicious twilight, common to the clime, had succeeded. Veil-like and
soft, the mist that floats at that hour between earth and heaven, lent its
transparent shadow to the scene around them: it seemed to tremble as for a
moment, and then was gone. The moon arose, and cast its light over
Volktman's earnest countenance,--over the rich bloom and watchful eye of
Lucilla,--over the contemplative brow and motionless figure of Godolphin.
It was a group of indefinable interest: the Earth was so still, that the
visionary might well have fancied it had hushed itself, to drink within
its quiet heart the voices of that Heaven in whose oracles he believed.
Not one of the group spoke,--the astrologer's mind and gaze were riveted
above; and neither of his companions wished to break the meditations of
the old and dreaming man.
Godolphin, with folded arms and downcast eyes, was pursuing his own
thoughts; and Lucilla, to whom Godolphin's presence was a subtle and
subduing intoxication, looked indeed upward to the soft and tender
heavens, but with the soul of the loving daughter of earth.
Slowly, nor marked by his companions, the gaze of the mystic deepened and
deepened in its fixedness.
The minutes went on; and the evening waned, till a chill breeze, floating
down from the Latian Hills, recalled Lucilla's attention to her father.
She covered him tenderly with her own mantle, and whispered gently in his
ear her admonition to shun the coldness of the coming night. He did not
answer; and on raising her voice a little higher, with the same result,
she looked appealingly to Godolphin. He laid his hand on Volktman's
shoulder; and, bending forward to address him,--was struck dumb by the
glazed and fixed expression of the mystic's eyes. The certainty flashed
across him; he hastily felt Volktman's pulse--it was still. There was no
doubt left on his mind; and yet the daughter, looking at him all the
while, did not even dream of this sudden and awful stroke. In silence,
and unconsciously, the strange and solitary spirit of the mystic had
passed from its home--in what exact instant of time, or by what last
contest of nature, was not known.
CHAPTER XXXI.
A SCENE.--LUCILLA'S STRANGE CONDUCT-GODOLPHIN PASSES THROUGH A SEVERE
ORDEAL.--EGERIA'S GROTTO, AND WHAT THERE HAPPENS.
Let us pass over Godolphin's most painful task. What Lucilla's feelings
were, the reader may imagine; and yet, her wayward and unanalysed temper
mocked at once imagination and expression to depict its sufferings or its
joys.
The brother of Volktman's wife was sent for: he and his wife took
possession of the abode of death. This, if possible, heightened Lucilla's
anguish. The apathetic and vain character of the middle classes in Rome,
which her relations shared, stung her heart by contrasting its own
desolate abandonment to grief. Above all, she was revolted by the
unnatural ceremonies of a Roman funeral. The corpse exposed--the cheeks
painted--the parading procession, all shocked the delicacy of her real and
reckless affliction. But when this was over--when the rite of death was
done, and when, in the house wherein her sire had presided, and she
herself had been left to a liberty wholly unrestricted, she saw strangers
(for such comparatively her relatives were to her) settling themselves
down, with vacant countenances and light words, to the common occupations
of life,--when she saw them move, alter (nay, talk calmly, and sometimes
with jests, of selling), those little household articles of furniture
which, homely and worn as they were, were hallowed to her by a thousand
dear, and infantine, and filial recollections;--when, too, she found
herself treated as a child, and, in some measure, as a dependant,--when
she, the wild, the free, saw herself subjected to restraint--nay, heard
the commonest actions of her life chidden and reproved,--when she saw the
trite and mean natures which thus presumed to lord it over her, and assume
empire in the house of one, of whose wild and lofty, though erring
speculations--of whose generous though abstract elements of character, she
could comprehend enough to respect, while what she did not comprehend
heightened the respect into awe;--then, the more vehement and indignant
passions of her mind broke forth! her flashing eye, her scornful gesture,
her mysterious threat, and her open defiance, astonished always, sometimes
amused, but more often terrified, the apathetic and superstitious
Italians.
Godolphin, moved by interest and pity for the daughter of his friend,
called once or twice after the funeral at the house; and commended, with
promises and gifts, the desolate girl to the tenderness and commiseration
of her relations. There is nothing an Italian will not promise, nothing
he will not sell; and Godolphin thus purchased, in reality, a forbearance
to Lucilla's strange temper (as it was considered) which otherwise,
assuredly, would not have been displayed.
More than a month had elapsed since the astrologer's decease; and, the
season of the malaria verging to its commencement, Godolphin meditated a
removal to Naples. He strolled, two days prior to his departure, to the
house on the Appia Via, in order to take leave of Lucilla, and bequeath to
her relations his parting injunctions.
It was a strange and harsh face that peered forth on him through the iron
grating of the door before he obtained admittance; and when he entered, he
heard the sound of voices in loud altercation. Among the rest, the
naturally dulcet and silver tones of Lucilla were strained beyond their
wonted key, and breathed the accents of passion and disdain.
He entered the room whence the sounds of dispute proceeded, and the first
face that presented itself to him was that of Lucilla. It was flushed
with anger; the veins in the smooth forehead were swelled; the short lip
breathed beautiful contempt. She stood at some little distance from the
rest of the inmates of the room, who were seated; and her posture was
erect and even stately, though in wrath: her arms were folded upon her
bosom, and the composed excitement of her figure contrasted with the play,
and fire, and energy of her features.
At Godolphin's appearance, a sudden silence fell upon the conclave; the
uncle and the aunt (the latter of whom had seemed the noisiest) subsided
into apologetic respect to the rich (he was rich to them) young
Englishman; and Lucilla sank into a seat, covered her face with her small
and beautiful hands, and--humbled from her anger and her vehemence--burst
into tears.
"And what is this?" said Godolphin, pityingly.
The Italians hastened to inform him. Lucilla had chosen to absent herself
from home every evening; she had been seen, the last night on the
Corso,--crowded as that street was with the young, the profligate, and the
idle. They could not but reprove "the dear girl" for this indiscretion
(Italians, indifferent as to the conduct of the married, are generally
attentive to that of their single, women); and she announced her
resolution to persevere in it.
"Is this true, my pupil?" said Godolphin, turning to Lucilla: the poor
girl sobbed on, but returned no answer. "Leave me to reprimand and
admonish her," said he to the aunt and uncle; and they, without appearing
to notice the incongruity of reprimand in the mouth of a man of
seven-and-twenty to a girl of fifteen, chattered forth a Babel of
conciliation and left the apartment.
Godolphin, young as he might be, was not unfitted for his task. There was
a great deal of quiet dignity mingled with the kindness of his manner; and
his affection for Lucilla had hitherto been so pure, that he felt no
embarrassment in addressing her as a brother. He approached the corner of
the room in which she sat; he drew a chair near to her; and took her
reluctant and trembling hand with a gentleness that made her weep with a
yet wilder vehemence.
"My dear Lucilla," said he, "you know your father honoured me with his
regard: let me presume on that regard, and on my long acquaintance with
yourself, to address you as your friend--as your brother." Lucilla drew
away her hand; but again, as if ashamed of the impulse, extended it
towards him.