The Philosophy of Mystery

Cast. How delightful to wander thus among the reliques of that age, when her citizens, the colonists of Britain, migrated from imperial Rome, and built their Venta Silurum, or Caerwent, from the ruins of which these now mouldering walls were formed. As we trod those pictured pavements of Caerwent beneath the blue sky of yesternoon, I felt all the inspiration of Astrophel, and a pageantry of Roman patricians seemed to sweep along the fragments of those painted tesselæ.

There is a happy combination of antiquity and simplicity in this land of Gwent. Almost within the shadow of the Roman Caerleon, the Monmouthshire peasants, at Easter and Whitsuntide, assemble to plant fresh flowers on the graves of their relatives. How I love these old customs! the chanting of the carol at Christmas; its very homeliness so redolent of love and friendship: and that quaint old Moresco dance which was introduced to England by the noble Katherine of Arragon. Then the pastimes of Halloween and Hogmanay in Scotland, and the Walpurgis night of Germany, and the May-day in Ireland, the festival of their patron saint, and the Midsummer night when the bealfires cast an universal lumination over the fells of the green isle, and the still more sacred fire, lighted up in November in worship of their social deity, Samhuin, whose potent influence charms the warm hearts of all the maids of Erin around the winter hearth of their homes. I listen unto these pleasures as if they were mine own: as children associate all the legends of their school histories with themselves and their own time.

In every spot of this land of Wales the very names of the olden time are before us: the romaunt of Prince Arthur and his knights is ever present to our fancy, for he hath, as on the crag that towers over Edinburgh, a seat on many a mountain rock in Wales; as the Cadair Arthur over Crickhowel, and the semicircle on Little Doward, and Maen Arthur on the moors of Cardigan.

Inspired by such an influence, I have roamed over the Isle of Elephanta, and gazed on its gorgeous pagoda hewn from the rock, and adorned by gigantic statues and mysterious symbols of the same eternal granite: on the beauteous excavations of Salsette: on the wonders of Elora, and on the classic reliques of Persepolis: on the beautiful columns of Palmyra, the Tadmor in the wilderness, where Solomon built his “fenced city;” as well as those arabesque and gothic temples, the abbeys and cathedrals of our own island. I too have almost dared to think that superstition and idolatry might be forgiven for the splendours of its architecture, even for the elevation of those giant blocks of Stonehenge and Avebury, the mouldering altars of the druidical priesthood, in the city consecrated to their god.

So do I feel in this court-yard of Chepstow Castle, whilom the Est-brig-hoel of Doomsdaye Booke, and in later times so blended with English history. See you not the Conqueror and his knights in panoply on prancing steeds before you? See you not Fitz Osborne and Warren, its former lords, loom out upon your sight? And, lo! the portal opens, and the dungeon of Henry Martin, the regicide, yawns like a bottomless pit before us. The shade of Charles Stewart rises; and again the phantom of Cromwell, uttering his epithets of scorn, as if the wanton puritan were about to dash the ink in the face of his colleague as he signed the death-warrant of the king. And now the scene changes, and behold the doomed one is chained to those massive rings of iron, and there with groaning dies.

Ev. I am most willing that you should thus indulge in your wild rhapsody, Astrophel, for it is the happy illustration of one potent cause of spectral illusion—association. There are few whose minds are not excited in some degree when they tread the localities of interesting events. By memory and its combinations something like an inspired vision may often seem to come over us—a day-dream. Or, if we have been brooding over a subject or gazing on the relics of departed or absent love and friendship: or while we stand on a spot consecrated by genius, or when we have passed the scene of a murder, still will association fling around us its visionary shadows.

Shortly after the death of Maupertuis, the president of the Academy of Berlin, Mr. Gleditsch, the curator of natural history, was traversing the hall in solitude, when he saw the phantom of the president standing in an angle of the room with his eyes intensely fixed on him: an effect perfectly explicable by the association of intense impression of memory in the very arena of the president’s former dignity.

You will remember the story of a rich libertine, told by Sir Walter Scott. Whenever he was alone in his drawing-room, he was so haunted by a spectral corps de ballet, that the very furniture was, as it were, converted into phantoms. To release himself from this unwelcome intrusion he retired to his country house, and here, for a while, he obtained the quiet which he sought. But it chanced that the furniture of his town house was sent to him in the country, and on the instant that his eyes fell on his drawing-room chairs and tables, the illusion came afresh on his mind. By the influence of association the green figurantes came frisking and capering into his room, shouting in his unwilling ears, “Here we are! here we are!”

Do you think it strange that a ghost should appear fleshless and shadowy without some supernatural influence? Be assured that the only influence exists in the sublime and intricate workings of that mind which in its pure state was itself an emanation from the Deity; which is only shadowed by illusion while in its earthly union with the brain, and which, on the dissolution of that brain, will again live uncombined, a changeless and eternal spirit.

It is as easy to believe the power of mind in conjuring up a spectre as in entertaining a simple thought: it is not strange that this thought may appear embodied, especially if the external senses be shut: if we think of a distant friend, do we not see a form in our mind’s eye, and if this idea be intensely defined, does it not become a phantom?

It was in Paris, at the soirée of Mons. Bellart, and a few days after the death of Marshal Ney, the servant, ushering in the Mareschal Aîné, announced Mons. Le Mareschal Ney. We were startled; and may I confess to you, that the eidōlon of the Prince of Moskwa was for a moment as perfect to my sight as reality?

Now it is as easy to imagine a fairy infinitely small as a giant infinitely large. Between an idea and a phantom, then, there is only a difference in degree; their essence is the same as between the simple and transient thought of a child, and the intense and beautiful ideas of a Shakspere, a Milton, or a Dante.

You hear I adopt the word idea, as referring to the organ of vision, but sight is not the only sense subject to illusion. Hearing, taste, smell, touch, may be thus perverted, because the original impression was on the focus of all the senses, the brain.

Indeed, two of these illusions are often synchronous: as when a deep sepulchral voice is uttered by a thin filmy spectre, like the ghosts of Ossian, through which the moonbeams and the stars were seen to glimmer. But the illusion of the eye is by far the most common, and hence our adopted terms refer chiefly to the sight: as spectre, phantom, phantasm, apparition, eidōlon, ghost, shadow, shade.

That destructive brainworm, Demonomania, is often excited in the mind of a proselyte by designing religious fanatics. Let the life of the selected person be ever so virtuous and exemplary, she (for it is usually on the softer sex that these impostures are practised) becomes convinced of the influence of the demon over her, and she is thus criminally taught the necessity of conversion—is won over to the erroneous doctrine of capricious and unqualified election.

These miseries do not always spring from self-interested impostors. The parent and the nurse, in addition to the nursery tales of fairies and of genii, too often inspire the minds of children with these diabolical phantoms. The effect is always detrimental,—too often permanently destructive. I will quote one case from the fourth volume of the Psychological Magazine, related by a student of the university of Jena.—“A young girl, about nine or ten years old, had spent her birth-day with several companions of her own age, in all the gaiety of youthful amusement. Her parents were of a rigorous devout sect, and had filled the child’s head with a number of strange and horrid notions about the devil, hell, and eternal damnation. In the evening, as she was retiring to rest, the devil appeared to her, and threatened to devour her. She gave a loud shriek, fled to the apartment where her parents were, and fell down apparently dead at their feet. A physician was called in, and she began to recover herself in a few hours. She then related what had happened, adding, that she was sure she was to be damned. This accident was immediately followed by a severe and tedious nervous complaint.”

The ghost will not appear to tell us what will happen, but it may rise, and with awful solemnity too, to tell us that which has happened. Such is the phantom of remorse,—the shadow of conscience,—which is indeed a natural penalty: a crime that carries with it its own consecutive punishment. Were the lattice of Momus fixed in the bosom, that window through which the springs of passion could be seen, there would be, I fear, a dark spot on almost every heart,—as there is, to quote the Italian proverb, “a skeleton in every house.” Of these pangs of memory, the pages both of history and fiction are teeming. Not in the visions of sleep alone, but in the glare of noonday, the apparition of a victim comes upon the guilty mind, —

Brutus, and Richard Plantagenet, and Clarence, and Macbeth, and Manfred, and Lorenzo, and Wallace, and Marmion, are but the archetypes of a very numerous family in real life,—for Shakspere, and Byron, and Schiller, and Scott, have painted in high relief these portraits from the life.

Many a real Manfred has trembled as he called up the phantom of Astarte; many a modern Brutus has gazed at midnight on the evil spirit of his Cæsar; many a modern Macbeth points to the vacant chair of his Banquo, the ghost in his seat, and he mentally exclaims,—“Hence, horrible shadow! unreal mockery, hence!”