This melody rushed to her lips, because it was perhaps the most naïve and powerful expression ever given to religious enthusiasm. Consuelo, however, was not calm enough to repress and manage her voice, and after the first two lines her intonation became a sob, and, bursting into tears, she fell on her knees.
The invisibles were electrified by her fervor, and sprang to their feet to hear this true inspiration with becoming respect. They descended from their places and approached her; while Wanda, taking her in her arms, placed her in those of Leverani, and said—"Look at him, and know that God permits you to reconcile virtue, happiness, and duty."
Consuelo for an instant was silent, as if she had been wafted to another world. At length she looked on Leverani, whose mask Marcus tore away. She uttered a piercing cry, and nearly died on his bosom as she recognised Albert. Leverani and Albert were one and the same person.
[CHAPTER XLI]
At this juncture the doors of the temple swung open with a metallic sound, and the Invisibles entered, two and two. The magic notes of the harmonica,[15] an instrument newly invented, the vibration of which was an unknown wonder to Consuelo, was heard in the air, and seemed to descend from the dome, which was open to the moon and the night wind. A shower of flowers fell slowly over the happy couple amid this solemn strain. Wanda stood by a tripod of gold, whence her right hand threw brilliant flames and clouds of perfume, while in the left she held the two ends of a chain of flowers and symbolic leaves she had cast around the two lovers. The invisible chiefs, their faces being covered with their long red drapery, with chaplets of the oak and accacia around their brows, stood up to receive the brothers as they passed by them, with a bow of veneration. The chiefs had the majesty of the old Druids, but their hands, unstained by blood, were opened to bless alone, and religious respect replaced the terror of old creeds. As the initiated appeared before the venerable tribune, they took off their masks, to salute the unknown with a bare brow. The latter were known to them only by acts of clemency and justice, paternal love and wisdom. Faithful to the religion of an oath, they did not seek to penetrate the mysterious veils. Certainly, though themselves unaware, the adepts knew these magi of a new religion, for they mingled with them in society, and, in the very bosom of their assemblies, were the best friends and confidants of the major portion of them—perhaps of each individual. In the practice of their religion the priest was always veiled, like the oracle of ancient days.
Happy childhood of innocent creeds, quasi fabulous dawn of sacred conspiracies, enwrapped in the night of ages, and decked with poetical uncertainty! though the space of scarcely one century separates us from these Invisibles, their existence to the historian is enigmatical. Thirty years after the illuminati assumed those powers of which the vulgar were ignorant, and finding their resources in the inventive genius of the chiefs, and in the tradition of the secret societies of mystic Germany, terrified the world by the most formidable and vast political conspiracy that ever existed. For a moment it shook the throne of every dynasty, and finally succumbed, bequeathing to the French revolution an electric current of sublime enthusiasm, ardent faith, and terrible fanaticism. Half a century before those days marked out by fate, and while the gallant monarchy of Louis XV., the philosophical despotism of Frederick II., the skeptic and mocking loyalty of Voltaire, the ambition and diplomacy of Maria Theresa, and the heretical toleration of Gangarelli, seemed to promise to the world a season of decrepitude, antagonism, chaos, and dissolution, the French revolution fermented and germinated in the dark. It existed in minds which were believing almost to fanaticism, under the form of one dream of universal revolution. While debauchery, hypocrisy, and incredulity ruled the world, a sublime faith, a magnificent revelation of the future, profound systems of organization, perhaps wiser than our Fourierism and Saint-Simonism, already realised in some rare groups the ideal conception of a future society diametrically opposed to what covers and hides their actions in history.
Such a contrast is one of the most prominent features of the eighteenth century, which was too full of ideas, and of intellectual labor of all kinds, for its synthesis to be made even yet, with clearness and profit, by the historians and philosophers of our own days. The reason is, there is a mass of contradictory documents, uninterpreted facts, not perceived at first, sources of information disturbed by the tumult of the century, and which must be purified before a solid bottom can be found. Many energetic laborers have remained obscure, bearing to the tomb the secret of their mission—so many dazzling glories absorbed the attention of their contemporaries, so many brilliant feats even now absorbed the retrospective attention of critics. Gradually, however, light will emanate from chaos; and if our century sum up its own deeds, it will also chronicle those of its predecessor—that vast logogriph, those brilliant nebulæ, where there is so much cowardice combined with grandeur, ignorance with knowledge, light with error, incredulity with faith, pedantry with mocking frivolity, superstition with lofty reason. This period of a hundred years saw the reigns of Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Pompadour, Peter the Great, Catharine II., Maria Theresa and Dubarry, Voltaire and Swedenborg, Kant and Mesmer, Rousseau and Dubois, Schroeffer and Diderot, Fenelon and Law, Zinzendorf and Liebnitz, Frederick II. and Robespierre, Louis XIV. and Philip Egalité, Marie Antoinette and Charlotte Corday, Weishaupt, Babœf and Napoleon—a terrible laboratory, where so many heterogeneous forms have been cast into the crucible, that they vomited forth, in their monstrous ebullition, a torrent of smoke, amid which we yet walk, enveloped in darkness and confused images.
Consuelo and Albert, as well as the Invisible chiefs and the adepts, were yet farther than we are from understanding it; they had no very lucid idea of the result of the changes and the turmoil into which they were anxious to precipitate themselves, with the enthusiastic hope of completely regenerating society. They fancied themselves on the eve of an evangelical republic, as the disciples of Jesus fancied he was about to establish an earthly power. The Taborites of Bohemia fancied themselves on the eve of a paradisiac condition; and the French Convention thought their armies about to commence a march of propagandism over the globe. Without this mad confidence, where would be great devotion? and without great folly, where would be great results? But for the Utopia of the divine revealer Jesus, where would be the idea of human fraternity? But for the contagious ecstacies of Joan of Arc, would we now be Frenchmen? But for the noble chimeras of the eighteenth century, would we have the first notions of equality? This mysterious revolution which the sects of the past had dreamed of, and which the mystic conspirators of the last century had vaguely foretold, fifty years before, as an era of renovation, Voltaire, the calm philosophical head of his day, and Frederick II., the great realiser of logical and cold power, did not anticipate. The most ardent and the wisest were far from reading the future. Jean Jacques Rousseau would have repudiated his own book, had he seen the mountain in a dream, with the guillotine glaring above it. Albert of Rudolstadt would have become again the lethargic madman of the Giants' Castle if the bloody glories, followed by Napoleon's despotism, and the restoration of the ancient régime, followed by the sway of the vilest material interests, had been revealed to him; or he fancied that he toiled to overthrow, at once and for ever, scaffolds and prisons, castles and convents, banks and citadels.
These noble children dreamed, and maintained their dream with all the power of their souls. They no more belonged to their century than did the shrewd politicians and wise philosophers. Their ideas of the future were not more lucid than those of the latter. They had no idea of that great unknown thing which each of us decks with the attributes of our own power, which deceives us all while it confirms us. Our children see it clad in a thousand dyes, and each keeps a shred for his own imperial toga. Fortunately, every century sees it more majestic, because each produces more persons to toil for its triumph. As for the men who would tear off the purple and cover it with eternal mourning, they are powerless, because they do not comprehend it. Slaves to the actual and present, they are ignorant that the immortal has no age, and that he who does not fancy it as it may be to-morrow, does not see it as it should be to-day.