Kate. And we are all the more curious in consequence. How much of such a story may I think true?
Atherton. As an ideal portraiture of that ambition which seeks lordship within the marches of the unseen world, I think Zanoni perfect.
Mrs. Atherton. The Rosicrucians pretended, did they not, that they could prolong life indefinitely,—laid claim to all sorts of wonderful power and knowledge? Have you not once or twice met with a person, or heard of one, who would certainly have been suspected of being a Rosicrucian by superstitious people? I mean, without any pretence on his part, merely from a singular appearance, or a mysterious manner, or uncommon cleverness.
Atherton. Oh, yes; such men would keep up the Rosicrucian tradition bravely among the common folk.
Willoughby. And among great folk, too, if they took the pains.
Mrs. Atherton. I was thinking of Colonel Napier’s description of George Borrow, which we were reading the other day. He pictures him youthful in figure, yet with snow-white hair; inscrutable, therefore, as to age, as the Wandering Jew; he has deep-black mesmeric eyes, terrible to dogs and Portuguese; he is silent about himself to the most tantalizing height of mystery, no man knowing his whence or whither; he is master of information astoundingly various, speaks with fluency English, French, German, Spanish, Greek, Hindee, Moultanee, the gipsy tongue, and more beside, for aught I know. So equipped, within and without, he might have set up for a Zanoni almost anywhere, and succeeded to admiration.
Atherton. How small the charlatans look beside such a specimen of true manhood. But where shall we find the distance wider between the ideal and the actual than in this very province of supernatural pretension? What a gulf between the high personage our romance imagines and that roving, dare-devil buccaneer of science, or that shuffling quacksalver which our matter-of-fact research discovers. Don’t you agree with me, Willoughby?
Willoughby. Altogether. Only compare the two sets of figures—what we fancy, and what we find. On the one side you picture to yourself a man Platonically elevated above the grossness and entanglement of human passions, disdaining earth, dauntlessly out-staring the baleful eyes of that nameless horror—the Dweller on the Threshold; commanding the prescience and the power of mightiest spirits; and visited, like Shelley’s Witch of Atlas, as he reads the scrolls of some Saturnian Archimage, by universal Pan, who comes with homage ‘out of his everlasting lair,’—
‘Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant.’
This is the theurgist, as imagination paints him. Now turn, on the other side, to the actual gallery of theosophic and theurgic worthies, as history reveals them. Baptista Porta dwells in a house which is the triumph of legerdemain,—the palace of Puck, the most intricate nest of traps, surprises, optical delusions, grotesque transformations,—throwing host and guests into paroxysms of laughter or of fear. You see Cornelius Agrippa, in threadbare bravery, with his heart upon his sleeve, and every expression by turns upon his brow, save that of the Platonic serenity. Paracelsus swears worse than my uncle Toby’s comrades in Flanders, and raves about his Homunculus. But from such men we cannot withhold sympathy, respect, even a certain admiration. In that eighteenth century, behold that grand magnet for all the loose and dupable social particles in every class and country—the soi-disant Count Cagliostro, with his Seraphina, his Egyptian Lodge, his elixirs and red powder, his magical caraffes, his phosphorous glories, his Pentagon and Columbs, his Seven Planetary Spirits, his Helios, Mene, Tetragrammaton. In that age of professed Illuminism, in the times of Voltaire and Diderot, when universal Aufklärung was to banish every mediæval phantasm, you see Father Gassner, with his miraculous cures, followed by crowds through Swabia and Bavaria;—Mesmer attracting Paris and Vienna to his darkened rooms and hidden music, to be awe-stricken by the cataleptic horrors there achieved;—the Count St. Germain declaring himself three hundred years old, and professing the occult science of diamond-manufacturing Brahmins;—the coffee-house keeper, Schröpfer, deluding Leipsic and Frankfort with his pretended theurgic art;—and St. Maurice, swindling the sceptical wits and roués who flutter in the drawing-rooms of Mesdames Du Maine and De Tencin, pretending to open converse for them with sylphs and Salamanders, invoking the genius Alaël, and finally subsiding into the Bastille. Such are some among the actual caricatures of the artistic conception embodied in the character of Zanoni.