“But when? I am dying with a desire to have the mystery unfolded.”
“May I speak without reserve, my Lord.”
“I wish you always had spoken without disguise, and acted openly.”
“What I am going to say may perhaps offend you; Yet I must beg you to give me leave to speak freely. I am not going to address Miguel, but the Duke.”
“Frankness and truth are equally acceptable to the latter as they are to the former; speak without reserve.”
“It is not fondness of truth, but vain curiosity that has driven you upon the dangerous ocean of knowledge, where you are cruising about without either rudder or compass, in search of unknown countries, and enchanted islands. I met you some time since on your voyage, and captured you. You could as well have fallen in with somebody else, who would have forged heavier fetters for you. I have not misused my power over you. You have indeed worked in the fetters which I have chained you with, but not in my service, not for me, but for your country, which you, I am sorry to say, would never have done voluntarily. You have attempted nothing, at least very little, to break those chains, but you struggled hard to avoid serving your country. I endeavoured to keep you in its service by strengthening your chains; however, unforeseen accidents liberated you from your bondage, and then I appeared first to you a lawless corsair, who had made an unlawful prize of you, although you had supposed me, before that time, to be a supernatural being, to whose power you fancied you had surrendered voluntarily. My dear Duke, I am neither a villain, nor am I a supernatural being; however, you are not able to judge of me. It is true that I possess important arcana, by the application of which I can effect wonderful things; but I am not allowed to make use of them before I have tried in vain every common means of attaining my aim. According to my knowledge of your Lordship, the artifices of natural magic were sufficient for carrying my point; but now, as the veil is taken from your eyes, and those delusions by which your will has been guided, have lost their influence upon you, now I could make use of my superior power, by which I have been enabled to effect the apparition of your tutor. However, you judge of my deeds equally wrong as of myself. At first you mistook real delusions, for miracles, and now you mistake the effect of a great and important arcanum, for delusion. Whence these sudden leaps from one extreme to the other? What is it that constantly removes from your eyes the real point of view from which you ought to see things? The source of this evil is within yourself; I will point it out to you, lest you discover it too late. You have an innate propensity, which has been nursed up by your lively imagination, a propensity which is agitating powerfully within you, and struggles for gratification, the propensity to the wonderful. Your tutor strove too late to combat it by the dry speculations of philosophy, instead of guiding and confining it in proper bounds. My God! your friend is an excellent man, who had your real happiness at heart; however, his philosophy was not altogether consistent. A preconceived contempt of all occult sciences prevented him examining them with impartiality, and declaring all events contrary to the common course of nature, to be the effects of imposition. He committed a sin against philosophy, premising as demonstrated, what was to be proved. Your own feeling, my Lord, made you sensible of the defects and exaggerations of his arguments; your reason was not sufficient to rectify, or to refute them; and thus you have adopted the principles of your tutor, not from conviction, but from a blind confidence in his learning and honesty, and believing the assertions of your instructor, you believed in his philosophy.”
“Hiermanfor! I think you are right.”
“Give me leave to proceed. It was consequently not philosophical conviction that made you suspect your inclination to the wonderful; but faith was opposed to faith. The former was founded on the authority of your tutor, and the latter on the secret voice of your heart. Regard for your friend, and the ambition of being looked upon as a philosopher, impelled you to adopt the principles of your tutor, and an innate instinct spurred you to yield to the voice of your heart, and thus you embraced by turns, the opinion of your instructor and the faith which originated from your heart, according to the strength of motive which prevailed on either side. However, these motives were never pure undoubted arguments of reason, but mere sentiments, which made you shift from one side to the other, in the same measure in which your sentiments of one or the other kind, received nourishment or additional strength from without. As soon as I began to play off my magical machineries your belief in miracles began to prevail; but as soon as your tutor recapitulated his lectures, philosophy resumed her former sway. You were a ball which flew alternately in his and my hands, because you wanted firm conviction, to fix yourself upon. Nevertheless I should have succeeded at last in getting an exclusive power over you merely by means of my delusions, because your predilection for the wonderful, and your imagination, which found an excuse and a gratification in my works, would have prevailed over the philosophical sentences which you have been taught. Paleski discovered to you what you ought to have discovered yourself, that my arts were mere delusions, and now you conclude that I can produce nothing but delusions. Perhaps you go still farther, and deny even the possibility of apparitions, because I have raised in Amelia’s house a ghost who was none. At bottom you keep firm to your character; you came over to my party because your feelings found their account in doing so; you find you have been deceived, and you fly back again to the opposite party because you fancy to find truth there. However you are really guided only by a blind instinct, by sentiment and opinion. And with these guides do you fancy you can penetrate to the sanctuary of truth and happiness?——Unhappy young man! you are doomed to deceive yourself and to be deceived.”
After a short pause the Irishman resumed:
“Pardon my frankness, my Lord! I have done.”