CHAPTER XI
For as much as a year Satan continued these visits, but at last he came less often, and then for a long time he did not come at all. This always made me lonely and melancholy. I felt that he was losing interest in our tiny world and might at any time abandon his visits entirely. When one day he finally came to me I was overjoyed, but only for a little while. He had come to say good-by, he told me, and for the last time. He had investigations and undertakings in other corners of the universe, he said, that would keep him busy for a longer period than I could wait for his return.
“And you are going away, and will not come back any more?”
“Yes,” he said. “We have comraded long together, and it has been pleasant—pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see each other any more.”
“In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?”
Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, “There is no other.”
A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words might be true—even must be true.
“Have you never suspected this, Theodor?”
“No. How could I? But if it can only be true—”
“It is true.”
A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before it could issue in words, and I said, “But—but—we have seen that future life—seen it in its actuality, and so—”
“It was a vision—it had no existence.”
I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. “A vision?—a vi—”
“Life itself is only a vision, a dream.”
It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!
“Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!”
“I!”
“And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream—your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me.…
“I am perishing already—I am failing—I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!
“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, eons ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!…
“You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.
“It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”
He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.
AUT DIABOLUS AUT NIHIL: THE TRUE STORY OF A HALLUCINATION, by X.L. (Julian Osgood Field)
Originally published in Aut Diabolus Aut Nihil and Other Tales, 1894.
“πρός τών θεών, ένύπνιον έστιώµεθα.”
—ARISTOPHANIS, Σφπχες
*
“Again, I believe that all that use sorceries, incantations, and spells, are not witches, or, as we term them, magicians; I conceive there is a traditional magic, not learned immediately from the devil, but at second-hand from his scholars, who, having once the secret betrayed, are able and do empirically practice without his advice; they proceeding upon the principles of nature, where actives aptly conjoined to disposed passives will, under any master, produce their effects.”
—Sir Thomas Browne: Rel. Med.
CHAPTER I
To be ordained has been looked upon for many years in this country as the best, speediest, and safest way of “making gentlemen” of such bipeds as stand in sore need of the transformation.
As we are all by baptism spiritually cleansed of all blemish, so is the son of the tradesman, doctor, solicitor, or what not, socially regenerated by taking holy orders.
Now this bewildering wholesale social acceptation of the ninety-and-nine who positively decline to stray, finding it a much more profitable policy to stay quietly in the fold nibbling the fodder, is peculiar to Protestant communities, and we do not find the same social indulgence extended to spiritual advisers in Roman Catholic countries. In climes still fascinated by the scintillations proceeding from the Triple Crown, the priest is not received—that is, familiarly received—apart from his official capacity in society. He is, of course, ever to be forthcoming and at hand as a professional healer of souls when no other or better healer of souls can be found, and when a soul needs healing very badly; but if he be not a man of culture and refinement,—that is, if he has failed to catch the tricks, manners, and bearings of such—for the mere question of birth is, of course, of minor importance, the laying on of the bishop’s hands having smoothed over all that difficulty,—the mere fact of his being a priest does not entitle him to claim any of the privileges accruing to that most elastic title of gentleman; and many a woman of social rank abroad will readily, gladly—nay, eagerly—confess to, and receive absolution from, a man whose society at her dinner-table she would not tolerate for a moment.
We cannot but think that this reserve has its advantages, and that all people of refined feeling benefit by a rule which requires from one seeking familiar social recognition the production of some other credential, save only that the postulant be a servant of the Church.
At home, we find the spiritual adviser, merely by reason of his office, entitled to lay a claim—nay, actually laying a claim—to a place at our dinner-table, to a chair at our club, to the smoking of our cigars, the drinking of our wines, the riding of our horses, the consoling of our wives, and, alas! the marrying of our daughters, when, in many instances, the social merits of the man himself would hardly justify him, under ordinary circumstances, in aspiring to a closer intimacy with us than may reasonably be expected to arise from the proper exercise of his professional duties in the saving of our souls, and the flogging of our bo
ys.
Such a man being so received, in the event of his not being sweet and whole, will hardly think it worth his while to purify himself of his uncleanness solely for our sakes—nay, in many instances, will take a grotesque and savage delight in endeavoring to widen, by his vulgarities, the deplorable breach which, if we are to believe cynics and scoffers, already exists between St. James’s Square and Mount Sinai.
Abroad, the priest who would seek to be considered a gentleman, and be received as such in society, must endeavour to imbue himself with some of the refinement innate in those with whom he would fain consort, and thus it happens that he studies with more or less success to imitate such ad unguem facti homines as may from time to time swim within his ken.
So it is that we not infrequently find (and oddly enough more often than not in the most exclusive social coteries like that of the Faubourg St.-Germain), not only the most charming, refined, and sought-after men to be priests, but also to be men of low birth and origin, who owe, however, their social recognition and success, not to their cloth, but to the grace with which they have learned to wear it. To such a man as this we will now introduce the reader.
The career of the Abbé Girod had been an eminently successful one—successful in every way; and even he himself was forced to acknowledge such to be the case as he reviewed his past life, sitting by a blazing fire in his comfortable apartment in the Rue Miromesnil previous to dressing for the Due de Frontignan’s dinner-party.
Born of poor parents in the south of France, entering the priesthood at an early age, having received but a meager education, and that chiefly confined to a superficial knowledge of the most elementary treatises on theology, he had, in five-and-twenty years, and solely by his own exertions, unaided by patronage, obtained a most desirable berth in one of the leading churches in Paris, thereby becoming the recipient of a handsome income, and being thus enabled to indulge in his rather expensive tastes as dilettante and homme du monde.
The few hours snatched from his parochial duties he had never failed to devote to study, and his application and determination had borne him golden fruit in more ways than one. He had, moreover, so cultivated and made such good use of the rare opportunities afforded him in early life of associating with gentlemen, that when now at length he found his presence in demand at every house in the “Faubourg” where wit and graceful learning were appreciated, no one would ever have suspected he had not been nurtured and bred in accordance with the strictest canons of social refinement.
But in his upward progress such had been his experiences of life that when, during the brief intervals of breathing-time he allowed himself, he would look below and above, down to where he had begun and up to where he was endeavoring to climb, he was forced to confess that at every step a belief, an illusion, had been trodden under foot; that the clouds of glory of which Wordsworth speaks had cither altogether died away on the horizon, or had become so threatening and dark in aspect as to make him instinctively seek refuge under the umbrella of cynicism; and he would wonder, while bracing himself for a new effort, how it would all end, and whether the mitre he lusted for would not perhaps, after all, be placed upon a head that doubted even the existence of a God.
He was not, however, a bad man, but merely one of that class who have embraced the priesthood merely as a means of raising themselves from obscurity to eminence, and have, in their intercourse with the world, discovered many flaws and blemishes in what at one time they may have considered perfect. He was indeed only fervent in his apolausticism; and the embracing of such golden images as he might care to adore, he found dangerous to his peace of mind, in that the gilding thereof was but too apt to come off upon his lips. When at first his reason began to reject many of the dreams and fables hitherto cherished and believed in, the Abbé Girod was almost inclined to abandon in despair any attempt to discern the false from the true, and this all the more that he saw plainly the time thus spent was in a worldly sense but wasted, and that the good things of this world come to such reapers as gather in wheat and tares alike, well knowing there is a market for them both.
During a certain period, therefore, of his struggle upward—
“An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry,”
—while his worldly ambition was aiding by sly insinuations the deadly work already begun by the destruction of his dreams, Henri Girod was nigh being an atheist.
But the nature of the man was too finely sensual for this phase to be lasting; and when at length he found himself so far successful in his worldly aspirations as to be tolerably sure of their complete fulfillment; when at length he found time to examine spiritual matters apart from their direct bearing upon his social altitude, his aesthetic sense—which by this time had necessarily developed—was struck as by a new revelation, and thrilled and entangled by the exquisite beauty of Christianity; and thus, as a shallow philosophy had nearly reduced him to become an atheist, so a deep and sensual spirit of sentimentality nearly reconciled him to becoming a Christian.
His Madonna was the Madonna of Raphael, not that of Albert Durer: the woman whose placid grace of countenance creates an emotion more subtly voluptuous than desire; not she in whose face can be discerned the human mother of the Man of Sorrows and of Him divinely acquainted with all grief The Christ he adored was not the Friend of the broken-hearted, the Healer of the blind Bartimeus, He whom Andrea del Mantegna shows us hanging on the cross; but He “who feedeth among the lilies”—the Alpha and Omega of all aesthetic conception. Christianity, in a word, he looked upon as the highest moral expression of artistic perfection, and he regarded it with the same admiration he accorded to the Antinous and the Venus of Milo.
He was not, however, by nature a pagan as some men are, men who, in the words of De Musset—
Sont venus trop tard dans un monde trop vieux”
but the atmosphere in which his early years had been passed had been so antagonistic and stifling to his warm sensuous nature, his inner life had been so cramped in and starved, that when at length the key of gold opening the prison door let in the outer air, his spirit reveled in the wild extravagance so often found accompanying sudden and long-wished-for emancipation.
His nature was perhaps not one that could have been attuned to a perfect harmony with that of a Greek or Roman of the golden days, but one rather better calculated to enjoy the hybrid atmosphere of the Italian Renaissance; and he would have been in his element in the Rucellai Gardens, conversing with feeble little Cosimino or laughing with Buondelmonte and Luigi Alamanni.
He did not trouble himself to believe in the narrative of the Bible; but its precepts and tendencies he appreciated and admired, although it must in all honesty be confessed he did not always put himself out to follow them.
In his heart he utterly rejected all idea of a future life, since it was incompatible with his conception of the artistic unity of this; but then again, he would blandly acknowledge to himself that there are perhaps, after all, things we cannot comprehend, and that beauty may have no term.
Being, however, broadly speaking, an honest man, and one unwilling to eat bread he had not earned, he assimilated so far as in him lay his duties as a priest with his ideas as a man of culture; and his sermons were ever of Love—sermons which, winged as they were with impassioned eloquence, were deservedly popular with all, from the scholar who delighted in them as intellectual feasts to the fashionable mondaine who was only too enchanted to find in the quasi-fatalistic and broadly-charitable views enunciated therein, excuses whereby her dreary and vulgar intrigues might be considered in a light more pleasing to herself and more consoling to her husband.
On the Sunday afternoon preceding the evening on which we introduce him to the reader, the abbé had departed from his usual custom, and by special request of his cure had preached a most remarkable se
rmon on the personality of Satan.
It is a vulgar error to suppose that men succeed best when their efforts are enlivened by a real belief in the matter in hand. Not only have some men such a superabundance of fervid imagination that they can, for the time being, provoke themselves into a pseudo-belief in what they know in their saner moments to be false, and thus fire themselves with real enthusiasm for a mere myth and shadow; but, moreover, a large class of men are endowed with minds so restless and so finely strung that they can play with a sophism with marvelous dexterity and skill, while lacking that vigorous and comprehensive grasp of mind which the lucid exposition of a hidden truth necessitates.
The Abbé Girod belonged a little to both these classes of beings; and, moreover, his vanity as an intellectual man provoked him to extraordinary exertions in cases wherein he fancied he might win for himself the glory of strengthening and verifying matters which in themselves perhaps lacked almost the elements of existence.
“Spiritual truths,” he once cynically remarked to Sainte Beuve, whom, by the way, he detested, “will take care of themselves: it is the nursing of spiritual falsehood that needs all the care of the clergy.”
On the Sunday in question he had surpassed himself. With biting irony he had annihilated the disbelievers in divine punishment, and then with persuasive and overwhelming eloquence he had urged the necessity of believing, not only in hell, but in the personality of the Prince of Evil.
Women had fainted in their terror, men had been frightened into seeking the convenient solace of the confessional, and the archbishop had written him a letter of the warmest congratulation and thanks.
It was a triumph which a man of the nature of the Abbé Girod particularly enjoyed. The idea of finding himself the successful reviver of an inanimate doctrine, while secretly conscious that he was in reality a skeptic in matters of dogmatically vital importance, was, to a mind so prone to delight in paradoxes, eminently agreeable; and it tickled his palate with a sharp, pungent joy to sec the letter of the archbishop lying upon a volume of Strauss, and to read the glowing and extravagant praise lavished upon himself in the pages of the Univers, after having enjoyed a sparkling draught of Voltaire.
The Devils & Demons MEGAPACK ®: 25 Modern and Classic Tales Page 28