Part 13
In 1799 appeared the novel _St. Leon_, by William Godwin. It is not a very interesting work now, whatever it may have been at the time. The plot of it is, that a gentleman, who, through gambling, has sunk into poverty and plunged his family in distress, obtains from an uncanny old man the secret of recovering youth and obtaining money whenever he needs it. But he has vowed secrecy. He returns to his family, but is not recognised. He is cut off from the old sympathies. The novel speedily carries interest away from St. Leon to other persons, and ends without any account of his end, nor does it even carry St. Leon beyond the lives of his children. The romance might have been suggested by any traditional type of longevity, such as the Hindu Dnyaneshvar, found in his tomb reading his Commentaries 300 years after apparent death; or Artesius, the Arabian alchemist, said to have, by his art, prolonged his life 1025 years, or Alkazwini, who also lived præternaturally long. The preface, however, contains an interesting citation, which gives its actual origin:--“The following passage from a work, said to be written by the late Dr. John Campbel, and entitled _Hermippus Redivivus_, suggested the first hint of the present performance: ‘There happened in the year 1687 an odd accident at Venice, that made a very great stir then, and which I think deserves to be rescued from oblivion. The great freedom and ease with which all persons who make a good appearance live in that city is known sufficiently to all who are acquainted with it; such will not, therefore, be surprised that a stranger, who went by the name of Signor Gualdi, and who made a considerable figure there, was admitted into the best company, though nobody knew who or what he was. He remained at Venice for some months, and three things were remarked in his conduct. The first was, that he had a small collection of fine pictures, which he readily showed to anybody that desired it; the next, that he was perfectly versed in all arts and sciences, and spoke on every subject with such readiness and sagacity as astonished all who heard him; and it was, in the third place, observed that he never wrote or received any letter, never desired any credit, or made use of bills of exchange; but paid for everything in ready money, and lived decently, though not in splendour.
“‘This gentleman met one day at the coffee-house with a Venetian nobleman, who was an extraordinary good judge of pictures; he had heard of Signor Gualdi’s collection, and in a very polite manner desired to see them, to which the other very readily consented. After the Venetian had viewed Signor Gualdi’s collection, and expressed his satisfaction by telling him he had never seen a finer, considering the number of pieces of which it consisted--he cast his eye by chance over the chamber-door, where hung a picture of this stranger. The Venetian looked upon it, and then upon him. “This picture was drawn for you, sir,” says he to Signor Gualdi, to which the other made no answer but by a low bow. “You look,” continued the Venetian, “like a man of fifty, and yet I know this picture to be of the hand of Titian, who has been dead one hundred and thirty years. How is this possible?” “It is not easy,” said Signor Gualdi gravely, “to know all things that are possible; but there is certainly no crime in my being like a picture drawn by Titian.” The Venetian easily perceived, by his manner of speaking, that he had given the stranger offence, and therefore took his leave. He could not forbear speaking of this in the evening to some of his friends, who resolved to satisfy themselves by looking upon the picture the next day. In order to have an opportunity of doing so, they went to the coffee-house about the time that Signor Gualdi was wont to come thither; and not meeting him, one of them, who had often conversed with him, went to his lodgings to inquire after him, when he heard that he had set out an hour before for Vienna. This affair made a great noise, and found a place in all the newspapers of that time.’”
It is probable that not only _St. Leon_, but the _Bassevilliana_ of Vincenzo Monti had influence in exciting the English imagination with legends of this character. A translation of this Italian poem, by the Rev. Henry Boyd, was published in London in 1805. It is the story of a “Soul’s Doom,” founded on the murder of the French minister, Basseville, in Rome, near the end of the last century. The soul of Basseville is condemned to wander over the French provinces, and behold the desolations caused by the revolution and its retributions. The Spirit of the Abyss is forbidden to clutch Basseville. An angel says to the soul:
“Fear not; thou art not doomed to sip the wave Of black Avernus, which who tastes, resigned All hope of change, becomes the demon’s slave; But Heaven’s high justice, nor in mercy blind, Nor in security scrupulous to gauge Each blot, each wrinkle, of the human mind, Has written on the adamantine page, That thou no joys of paradise mayst know, Till punished be of France the guilty rage.”
Both _St. Leon_ and “The Soul’s Doom” might have been read by those comrades in distress, Shelley and Medwin, for whom seventy years ago Oxford Christianity, and homes inspired by it, had nothing better than wanderings about London under a curse. They took up the subject, Medwin says, when Shelley was fifteen. Of the poem, as it now stands, in the edition of Chatto and Windus, Shelley wrote but a few lines; but I think that amidst its rhapsodical rubbish a scholarly expression or illustration may here and there be found traceable to Shelley. There is evidence of Shelley’s divining-rod in the allusions to some of the more significant legends concerning Ahasuerus which had attracted the attention of several German poets. There is in the opening some resemblance to the scene in Southey’s _Curse of Kehama_. Where, in the latter, the young Hindu woman is brought forward to perish on the funeral-pyre, in Shelley’s poem a sinning novice is dragged to the “fatal shrine,” from which she is rescued by the mysterious traveller. This horseman, hastening to Padua,
“Wraps his mantle around his brow, As if to hide his woes.”
In his tale, he says:
“A burning cross illumed my brow, I hid it with a fillet grey.”
This Cross enables him to command fiends. To Paulo, who has rescued her, Rosa the novice has given herself. Victorio, her lover, summons a witch-demon, and to her consigns his soul to obtain a philtre which will secure Rosa’s love. But when he has administered it she dies.
Is the resemblance mentioned between this _Wandering Jew_ and the _Curse of Kehama_ accidental? The Medwin-Shelley poem was unable to reach the light for which it struggled in 1810. It was published in _Frazer’s Magazine_ in 1831. But soon after it was written, Shelley shows great eagerness to get Southey’s poem, which had been announced, and twice writes to the bookseller, Stockdale, for it in December, 1810. In 1812, while at Keswick with his young wife, Shelley made the acquaintance of Southey, if not before. In the poem of Southey, the young Indian casts down the idol before which the woman is about to be burned, which corresponds to the blow given to Christ by Ahasuerus. The curse is artificially modified, and may have been suggested by the sentence on Cain, “Behold now art thou cursed from the earth.” The doom on the iconoclast is that on him shall fall neither the rain nor the sunshine, nor any of the influences of nature.
There would seem to be little doubt that _St. Leon_ inspired Shelley’s _St. Irvyne, the Rosicrucian_, or rather Ginotti, with his elixir of life, whose only “survival” is in Bulwer’s _Zanoni_. The “gigantic Ginotti” dies through the wicked Wolfstein; but Shelley was particular in pointing out that “he did not die by Wolfstein’s hand, but by the influence of that natural magic which, when the secret was imparted to the latter, destroyed him.” The longevity is here not a doom. But once, as Shelley was walking through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he picked up a “dirty and torn” work, which contained Schubart’s “Rhapsody” of Ahasuerus, elsewhere mentioned. Hogg was quite mistaken in affirming that Shelley’s account was an invention. Full information on this point may be found in Rossetti’s Shelley (vol. i. p. 434). The German poem had appeared in a magazine called the _German Museum_, in 1802. The Wandering Jew thus became a type in Shelley’s mind, and repeatedly appears in his works. In Alastor he uses the Wanderer as an illustration.
“Oh that God, Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice Which but one living man has drained, who now, Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels No proud exemption in the blighting curse He bears, over the world wanders for ever, Lone as incarnate death!”
It is, however, in _Queen Mab_ that we find the real form which arose before Shelley out of Schubart’s small casket, fished up from the muddy ocean of London. Schubart’s Ahasuerus whines and is pardoned. Shelley’s Ahasuerus is a Titan, who prefers the sharp vulture-beak and the chain to any surrender to the Christian Jove. Believing as I do that Cain was originally a Semitic Prometheus,--as first of those who began removal of Jahve’s curse on the earth by agriculture and working in metals,--I find it remarkable that Shelley, outcast from college and home in early youth because of his atheism, should recognise this feature in the distant successor of Cain.
“A strange and woe-worn wight, Arose beside the battlements, And stood unmoving there: His inessential figure cast no shade Upon the golden floor; His port and mien bore mark of many years, And chronicles of untold ancientness Were legible within his beamless eye: Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth; Freshness and vigour knit his manly frame; The wisdom of old age was mingled there With youth’s primeval dauntlessness; And inexpressible woe, Chastenéd by fearless resignation, gave An awful grace to his all-speaking brow.
_Spirit._--Is there a God?
_Ahasuerus._--Is there a God!--ay, an Almighty God, And vengeful as almighty! Once his voice Was heard on earth: earth shudder’d at the sound; The fiery-visaged firmament expressed Abhorrence, and the grave of nature yawn’d, To swallow all the dauntless and the good, That dared to hurl defiance at his throne, Girt as it was with power. None but slaves Survived--cold-blooded slaves, who did the work Of tyrannous Omnipotence; whose souls No honest indignation ever urged To elevated daring, to one deed Which gross and sensual self did not pollute. These slaves built temples for the omnipotent fiend, Gorgeous and vast: the costly altars smoked With human blood, and hideous pæans rang, Through all the long-drawn aisles. * * * * * “O Spirit! centuries have set their seal, On this heart of many wounds, and loaded brain, Since the Incarnate came: humbly he came, Veiling his horrible godhead In the shape of man; scorn’d by the world, his name unheard, Save by the rabble of his native town, Even as a parish demagogue. He led The crowd; he taught them justice, truth, and peace, In semblance; but he lit within their souls The quenchless flame of zeal, and blest the sword He brought on earth, to satiate with the blood Of truth and freedom his malignant soul At length his mortal frame was led to death. I stood beside him: on the torturing cross No pain assailed his unterrestrial sense; And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summ’d The massacres and miseries which his name Had sanction’d in my country, and I cried, ‘Go! go!’ in mockery. A smile of godlike malice reillumined His fading lineaments,--‘I go,’ he cried, ‘But thou shalt wander o’er the unquiet earth, Eternally.’--The dampness of the grave, Bathed my imperishable front. I fell, And long lay tranced upon the charméd soil. When I awoke hell burned within my brain, Which stagger’d on its seat; for all around The mouldering relics of my kindred lay, Even as the Almighty’s ire arrested them, And in their various attitudes of death, My murder’d children’s mute and eyeless skulls, Glared ghastlily upon me.
But my soul, From sight and sense of the polluting woe Of tyranny, had long learn’d to prefer Hell’s freedom to the servitude of heaven. Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began My lonely and unending pilgrimage, Resolved to wage unweariable war With my almighty tyrant, and to hurl Defiance at his impotence to harm, Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand That barr’d my passage to the peaceful grave Has crush’d the earth to misery, and given Its empire to the chosen of his slaves. * * * * * “Thus have I stood--through a wild waste of years Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony, Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined, Mocking my powerless tyrant’s horrible curse With stubborn and unalterable will; Even as the giant oak, which heaven’s fierce flame Had scathed in the wilderness, to stand A monument of fadeless ruin there; Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves The midnight conflict of the wintry storm, As in the sunlight’s calm it spreads Its worn and wither’d arms on high, To meet the quiet of a summer’s morn.
The Fairy waved her hand: Ahasuerus fled Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist, That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove, Flee from the morning beam: The matter of which dreams are made Not more endowed with actual life Than this phantasmal portraiture Of wandering human thought.”
This Ahasuerus is not only the fellow Titan of Prometheus, but he is the New Ahasuerus-Prometheus who had his fire to bring and his doom to suffer in England. The events of Shelley’s life between 1812, when he probably wrote this part of _Queen Mab_, and the latter part of 1814, added new curses to the eternal wanderings of the Jew. These appear in that sufficiently wild fragment entitled _The Assassins_, written in Switzerland, 1814, from which the subjoined passage is selected:
“A young man named Albedir, wandering in the woods, was startled by the screaming of a bird of prey, and, looking up, saw blood fall, drop by drop, from among the intertwined boughs of a cedar. Having climbed the tree, he beheld a terrible and dismaying spectacle. A naked human body was impaled on the broken branch. It was maimed and mangled horribly--every limb bent and bruised into frightful distortion, and exhibiting a breathing image of the most sickening mockery of life. A monstrous snake had scented its prey from among the mountains--and above hovered a hungry vulture. From amidst the mass of desolated humanity two eyes, black and excessively brilliant, shone with an unearthly lustre. Beneath the blood-stained eyebrows their steady rays manifested the serenity of an immortal power, the collected energy of a deathless mind, spell-secured from dissolution. A bitter smile of mingled abhorrence and scorn distorted his wounded lip--he appeared calmly to observe and measure all around--self-possession had not deserted the shattered mass of life.
“The youth approached the bough on which the breathing corpse was hung. As he approached, the serpent reluctantly unwreathed his glittering coils, and crept towards his dark and loathsome cave. The vulture, impatient of his meal, fled to the mountain, that re-echoed with his hoarse screams. The cedar-branches creaked with their agitating weight, faintly, as the dismal wind arose. All else was deadly silent.
“At length a voice issued from the mangled man. It rattled in hoarse murmurs from his throat and lungs--his words were the conclusion of some strange, mysterious soliloquy. They were broken and without apparent connection, completing wide intervals of inexpressible conceptions.
“‘The great tyrant is baffled, even in success. Joy, joy to his tortured foe! Triumph to the worm which he tramples under his feet! Ha! his suicidal hand might dare as well abolish the mighty frame of things! Delight and exultation sit before the closed gates of death! I fear not to dwell beneath their black and ghastly shadow. Here thy power may not avail! Thou createst--’tis mine to ruin and destroy. I was thy slave--I am thy equal, and thy foe. Thousands tremble before thy throne, who, at my voice, shall dare to pluck the golden crown from thy unholy head.’ He ceased. The silence of noon swallowed up his words. Albedir clung tighter to the tree--he dared not for dismay remove his eyes. He remained mute in the perturbation of mute and creeping horror.
“‘Albedir,’ said the same voice--‘Albedir, in the name of God, approach! He that suffered me to fall watches thee. The gentle and merciful spirits of sweet human love delight not in agony and horror. For pity’s sake, approach! In the name of thy good God, approach, Albedir!’ The tones were mild and clear as the responses of Æolian music. They floated to Albedir’s ear like the warm breath of June that lingers in the lawny groves, subduing all to softness. Tears of tender affection started into his eyes.”
The “Assassins” are something like Schiller’s “Robbers,” outlaws better than the laws that have branded them. In _Hellas_, Ahasuerus, though still appropriately responding to a summons from the Moslem Antichrist, is an impersonation of human thought as raised by long experience to a prophetic power. The idea is substantially the same as that which we have seen underlying the myths of Enoch and Teiresias, while it goes beyond them in its suggestion that knowledge, living over the ages past, and imagination attaining to the farthest outcome of present tendencies, can make for the being of a day an eternal existence. Ahasuerus says to Mahmud:
“All is contained in each. Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup Is that which has been, or will be, to that Which is--the absent to the present. Thought Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion, Reason, Imagination, cannot die; They are, what that which they regard appears, The stuff whence mutability can weave All that it hath dominion o’er, worlds, worms, Empires, and superstitions.”
With true Shelleyan felicity Hassan describes this Jew--
“From his eye looks forth A life of unconsumed thought which pierces The present, and the past, and the to come ... Some feign that he is Enoch.”
In the year 1820 appeared the novel in four volumes, _Melmoth, the Wanderer_, by the Rev. Robert Charles Maturin, author also of _Bertram_, a respectable play, and several novels. Melmoth is a man who has sold himself to Satan for the advantage of a vast length of life, to which is added a power of passing instantaneously, at will, from place to place. The terms of his bond are that he may escape the final doom of his soul, which is to pay for these advantages, provided he can find anyone willing to take the contract, with its benefits and penalty, off his hands. The author’s purpose appears to be to show that no one would deliberately damn himself to all eternity for any temporal advantage; though this would seem to be rather “Irish,” since his hero is just that man. However, the hero is an exception that proves the rule, for he goes about the world vainly tempting the poor and needy to take his place. Even a beautiful Indian maiden, who has fallen desperately in love with him, will not surrender her soul. Failing with all, he is carried off by the Devil. The supposed date of this catastrophe is toward the close of the eighteenth century.
The next work to be noticed at this point, and one which the perusal of Shelley may have suggested, is more distinctly based upon the legend of the Wandering Jew; this is the Rev. George Croly’s _Salathiel: A Story of the Past, the Present, and the Future_. This novel, in three volumes, appeared anonymously in 1828. The spirit in which the legend is treated in this work will sufficiently appear by the following passages:
“Every sterner passion that disturbs our nature was to rule in successive tyranny over my soul.
“Fearfully was the decree fulfilled.
“In revenge for the fall of Jerusalem, I traversed the country to seek out an enemy of Rome. I found in the Northern snows a man of blood: I stirred up the soul of Alaric and led him to the sack of Rome.
“In revenge for the insults heaped upon the Jew by the dotards and dastards of the city of Constantine, I sought out an instrument of compendious ruin: I found him in the Arabian sands, and poured ambition into the soul of the enthusiast of Mecca.
“In revenge for the pollution of the ruins of the Temple, I roused the iron tribes of the West, and at the head of the Crusaders, expelled the Saracens. I fed full on revenge, and I felt the misery of revenge!
“A passion for the mysteries of nature seized me. I talked with the Alchemist. I wore away years in the perplexities of the schoolmen; and I felt the guilt and emptiness of unlawful knowledge.
“A passion for human fame seized me. A passion for gold!...
“I found a bold Genoese. I led him to discover the New World; with its metals I inundated the Old; and to my own misery added the misery of two hemispheres.”
At length the eternal World-wanderer stands beside the newly discovered Printing Press; again he pays homage to Luther at his rise, and he attains a faith in the progress of mankind. “At this hour I see the dawn of things to whose glory the glory of the Past is but a dream!”
Quite another Ahasuerus than Shelley’s is represented in Wordsworth’s “_Song of the Wandering Jew_,” which somewhat resembles the idea of Müller, already quoted, as indeed both do the old saying, “The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”
“Though the torrents from their fountains Roar down many a craggy steep, Yet they find among the mountains Resting-places calm and deep.
“Clouds that love through air to hasten, Ere the storm its fury stills, Helmet-like themselves will fasten On the heads of towering hills.
“What if through the frozen centre Of the Alps the chamois bound, Yet he has a home to enter In some nook of chosen ground.
“If on windy days the raven Gambol like a dancing skiff, Not the less she loves her haven In the bosom of the cliff.
“Though the sea-horse in the ocean Own no dear domestic cave, Yet he slumbers--by the motion Rocked of many a gentle wave.
“The fleet ostrich, till day closes, Vagrant over desert sands, Brooding on her eggs reposes When chill night that care demands.
“Day and night my toils redouble, Never nearer to the goal; Night and day, I feel the trouble Of the Wanderer in my soul.”