Bulwer-Lytton's Mystic Novels : on the Margins of the Invisible
L-V Ti BULWER-LYTTON'S MYSTIC NOVELS: IY'Nc)L__ r-ir0 ON THE MARGINS OF THE INVISIBLE
by
JOHN HENRY MONTGOMERY
DISSERTATION
submitted in the fulfilment
of the requirements for the degree
MASTER OF ARTS
in
ENGLISH
in the
FACULTY OF ARTS
at the
RAND AFRIKAANS UNIVERSITY
SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR R RYAN
NOVEMBER 2000 2
Table of Contents
Oorsig / Abstract 3 Introduction 7 Chapter 1 — Bulwer-Lytton: the unpopular, intelligent occultist 12 Chapter 2 — The occult works of Bulwer-Lytton: an eclectic philosophy of magic 26 Chapter 3 — The Science-Religion-Occult Paradigm 89 Conclusion 130 Bibliography 136 3
Oorsig
Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 - 1873) het baie geskryf, in baie verskillende genres. Hierdie verhandeling bespreek die werke van sy okkulte genre en ondersoek hulle teen die agtergrond van die wetenskaplike en religieuse paradigmas wat die Midde- Viktoriaanse leserspubliek beinvloed het. Gewilde Viktoriaanse skrywers coos Dickens en Thackeray het in 'n realistiese styl geskryf, deels as 'n reaksie teen toenemende materialisme van hulle tyd. Bulwer-Lytton het gevind dat die style nie gepas was om uiting te gee aan sy mistiese idees nie. Hy het dus instede gebruik gemaak van die metafisiese roman — 'n sub-genre van die ridderroman — wat uitstekend aan sy doel beantwoord het, maar wat nie so geredelik deur kritici, wat nie bereid was om nuwe gebiede te betree nie, aanvaar is nie.
Ofskoon Bulwer-Lytton altyd tred gehou het met verwikkelinge in die Spiritualisme, was sy lewenslange belangstelling die studie van die okkulte en geheime genootskappe. Die werke wat in hierdie verhandeling bespreek word dui aan hou deurdringbaar die grenslyne tussen die wetenskap, religie en die okkulte is, en hoe hierdie drie diskoerse saamsmelt eerder as om kunsmatig apart gehou te word. Sy passie vir die mistieke bring Bulwer-Lytton nader aan die Romantiek as die Viktoriaanse tydsgees. As gevolg van 'n hegte vriendskap met John Varley (1778 - 1842), 'n vriend uit William Blake se binnekring, het Bulwer-Lytton vertroud geraak met aspekte van Blake wat veral in A Strange Story vergestalt word. W B Yeates en Rider Haggard, beide bewonderaars van Bulwer-Lytton, het weer op hulle beurt sy idees in hulle werke beliggaam, en Madame Blavatsky het haar van skaamtelose letterdiewery teenoor horn skuldig gemaak in haar boek Isis Unveiled. En ewe ontwetend, sou Bulwer-Lytton se fiktiewe roman The Coming Race vir Hitler as `bewys' dien dat 'n gehieme meestersras wel bestaan!
Afgesien van hierdie toe-eienings, beide negatief en positief, is Bulwer-Lytton onbekend aan moderne lesers, teensy daar met sy argaIese skryfstel gehekel word. Die doel van hierdie verhandeling is om verby sy styl na die idees van hierdie geleerde romanskrywer te kyk. Sodoende word 'n bietjie meer lig gewerp op die redes hoekom dit so belangrik is, om op sosiale en wetenskaplike gebied, kennis te neem van die okkulte. Deur die samelewing vanuit die oogpunt van geheime of esoteriese randgemeenskappe te beskou, kry ons 'n nuwe blik op die hoofstroom-samelewing en 4 hoe die okkulte die bestaande grenslyne van die samelewing bevraagteken. Die geskiedenis van die okkulte is 'n studie van die langsame proses van sosiale verandering en die herbepaling van morele, wettenskaplike en religieuse grense. 'n Negering van die uitwerking van die okkulte op die samelewing, het tot gevolg gehad dat 'n gebrekkige geskiedsbeskouing ontstaan het. Om die negentiende-eeuse herlewing in die okkulte te verontagsaam, is om 'n groot stuk van ons moderne intellektuele ontwikkeling mis te kyk. 'n Insig in die okkulte geestesprosesse kan lig werp op baie dinge wat geskiedkundiges al lank aan die raai het.
Bulwer-Lytton het deur sy okkulte werke, met hulle klem op die mag van die verbeelding, die positiewe aspekte van die Romantiek as teenvoeter tot materialisme weereens onder die aandag van sy samelewing gebring. Dit is dan ook in die opsig veral dat by 'n bydrae lewer tot die Engelse letterkunde. Sy vermod om die negentiende-eeuse paradoks, naamlik om die mistieke vanuit 'n rationele oogpunt te ondersoek, te konfronteer is waarskynlik uniek onder die Engelse skrywers van sy tyd. Dit sou ook moeilik wees om nog 'n Engelese skrywer te vind wat so aktief navorsing gedoen het, of wat met soveel onbevooroordeeldheid die veld van die mistieke betree het. Bulwer-Lytton het inderdaad sy kuns op 'n hoe eerder as 'n lae vlak bedryf. 5
Abstract
Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 - 1873) was a prolific writer in many genres. This dissertation takes the major works of his occult genre and examines them in the backdrop of the scientific and religious paradigms informing the mid-Victorian reading public. In response partly to the increase in materialism, popular Victorian novelists such as Dickens and Thackeray were writing in a realistic style which Bulwer-Lytton found not suited to convey his mystical ideas. Instead, he made use of the metaphysical novel — a sub-genre of the romance novel — well-suited for his purposes but antithetical to critics often not willing to explore new territory.
Although always alive to developments in Spiritualism, Bulwer-Lytton's life-long interest lay in the study of the occult and secret societies. The works chosen for this dissertation indicate how the boundaries between science, religion and the occult are permeable. In his works, these three discourses conflate instead of being kept discrete by artificial means. His passion for the mystical aligns Bulwer-Lytton more with the Romantics than the Victorians. Through a close friendship with John Varley (1778 - 1842), an inner-circle friend of William Blake, Bulwer-Lytton came to learn of aspects of Blake which reflect particularly in A Strange Story. W B Yeates and Rider Haggard, both admirers of Bulwer-Lytton, would incorporate his ideas into their works, and Madame Blavatsky would shamelessly plagiarise him in her Isis Unveiled. Unwittingly, Bulwer-Lytton's wholly-fictional novel, The Coming Race, would serve as 'proof' to Hitler that a secret master race actually existed.
Apart from these appropriations, good and bad, Bulwer-Lytton is unfamiliar to modern readers, except perhaps to lampoon him for his archaic style of writing. The aim of this dissertation is to look beyond the style to the ideas of this scholarly novelist. In doing so, a little more light is shed as to why an understanding of the occult is scientifically and socially important, why viewing society from the marginal perspective of esoteric groups allows us to view mainstream society in fresh ways, and how the occult challenges the existing moral boundaries of a society. The history of the occult is a study of the lengthy process of social change and the redefinition of moral, social, scientific, and religious boundaries. Neglect of the impact of the occult has led to a partial view of history. To ignore the occult revival of the nineteenth century is to ignore a large slice of modern intellectual development. An 6 understanding of the workings of the occult mind explains much which has been puzzling historians.
Bulwer-Lytton, through his occult works with their emphasis on the power of the imagination, re-introduced into his society the positive aspects of Romanticism as an antidote to materialism. It is in this capacity that he particularly contributes to English literature. His ability to confront the nineteenth-century paradox of investigating the mystical from a vantage point of rationality is probably unique among English writers of the period, nor is it easy to find another English writer who embarked on such active investigation as Bulwer-Lytton or who displayed such an open mind and such commitment in the field of mysticism. Bulwer-Lytton created in the higher, rather than the lower, register of his craft. 7
Introduction Many see the merit in studying traditional science and religion, but not many consider the untraditional and unconventional aspects of human social life — not being a neutral area of study — as suitable for serious study. The result is that those with views dedicated to the pursuit of the esoteric and occult' have suffered scholarly neglect. This dissertation challenges that position and aims to demonstrate that the occult is a legitimate and important area of investigation in its own right and as an avenue leading to a greater understanding of the society of which it is a part. Discussions on science, religion and the occult often turn into arid academic debates but if they are referenced by disciplines such as English literature, outside of those areas interested in them only for their intrinsic knowledge, then science, religion and the occult yield to rich comparative and historical investigations "about modes of thought and social practices" (Neusner and Flesher 1989:261).
Why is an understanding of the occult scientifically and socially important? Not being placed within the establishment, the occult is a dislocated entity. When attention is drawn to this "extraneous phenomenon, it acts as a possible index of fluctuations in ... social dislocation" (Lehmann and Myers 1985:352). Rather than create the,;e dislocations in society, occult beliefs are more "symptomatic of dislocating social trends than causal of them" (Lehmann and Myers 1985:351). In other words, understanding the covert aspects of the occult furthers our understanding of non- occult, overt systems "explicitly constructed to compensate for the cognitive shortcomings which characterize many occult beliefs" (Lehmann and Myers 1985:353). The occult is so uncharacteristic of everyday life yet to a greater or lesser extent there is "a near universality of belief" in it (Lehmann and Myers 1985:353, and below). If occult beliefs are so prevalent it might, perhaps, constitute "part of what it means to be human". If that is so, then there is justification in speculating on "the basic quirks inherent in human psychological structure that supports such beliefs" (Lehmann and Myers 1985:354).
The term occult is described in more detail later. For the purposes of the introduction, the occult is that which is beyond the range of ordinary knowledge; mysterious; secret; disposed or communicated only to the initiated; of or pertaining to magic, astrology, and other alleged sciences claiming use or knowledge of the secret, mysterious, or supernatural. The term 'occult' used in this way is synonymous with 'mysticism' and 'magic'. 8 Esoteric groups are regarded as "numerically marginal and pariah" yet every society in every historical period has had social groups devoted to the accumulation of 'hidden' knowledge and the search for power to apply that knowledge in daily life (Tiryakian 1974:1). Such groups can be studied for their philosophical tenets with profit but additional yields come when we examine them for their societal roles. Secret movements are fascinating to study as we observe their members' efforts to build societies devoted to the understanding of esoteric doctrines and to apply them in their daily life. The types of groups in existence and the way they are received "serves as an index for the content and process of social change" because they are indicative of the "level of tolerance of the larger society for the free exercise of an individual's beliefs" (Tiryakian 1974:foreword).
The history of the occult is a study of the lengthy process of social change and the redefinition of moral, social, scientific, and religious boundaries. And in their reactions to occult deviance, religion and science (both institutional and personal), are forced to reexamine their moral boundaries. The scientific and religious literature devoted entirely to debunking various occult claims is abundant testimony of the type of reaction meted out to occultists. Nevertheless, the "reactions to these [occult] phenomena provide both the scientific and religious communities with a golden opportunity for self-reflection ... the occult serves both the adherents and the opponents for recentering their own worldviews" (Ben-Yehuda - 19-85:102). The occult, then, is a boundary-defining device acting, as it does, from outside the recognised establishment. In fact, by its very nature the occult cannot exist except in apposition to the establishment since it eschews the establishment's worldview.
How, why, where, and when does the occult challenge the existing moral boundaries of a society? How efficacious is it? Morality "refers to the set of criteria used in any one given moral universe to differentiate between good and bad, desired and undesired ... Morality (and ideology) is the system that may legitimize or deleligitimize the use of power" (Neusner and Flesher 1989:230). The demarcation of moral boundaries becomes explicit when it is challenged by a deviant, non-conformist ideology, such as the occult. Challenging a moral boundary forces society to reexamine it and either defend or redefine the boundary.
The redefinition of moral boundaries takes place on the "micro (individual) level 9 through reconstructing individuals' cognitive maps, or moving them from one symbolic-moral universe to another" (Neusner and Flesher 1989:230). When a significant number of individuals change their subjective outlooks in a similar way, at the macro level, societal moral boundaries shift. The nature of pluralistic, complex societies is that they have "a marked presence of a variety of different centres [the occult being one of them], enveloped by symbolic-moral universes that compete with one another for resources, followers, and legitimacy" (Neusner and Flesher 1989:230). The occult is one such "form of alternative or elective centres used by adherents to refocus, revitalize, and redefine their worldviews" (Neusner and Flesher 1989:230).
Neglect of the impact of the occult has led to a partial view of history. To ignore the occult revival of the nineteenth century is to ignore "a large slice of modern intellectual development; and that the proper understanding of the workings of the occult mind explains much which has been puzzling" historians (Webb 1974:1). Webb calls occult activity 'underground' as opposed to the better-lit 'establishment'. To ask questions such as: are the two mutually exclusive, is there a dichotomy between the two; what does the occult teach us about the establishment — can lead to fresh historical insights.
Why has the occult been excluded because of its 'irrelevancy'? Considering the irrationality of the occult is another way of viewing history because it makes us rethink concepts we take for granted, like science and reason. Beliefs once considered irrational often cease to be irrational when viewed in their historical context. Surely the very fact that a great number of people are attracted to the occult has some sort of cultural meaning? Many historians have dismissed the occult because it was not part of the 'mainstream' (whatever that means). But the norm is only considered such if something else, such as occultism, is considered deviant. Analysing the reciprocal influence between the two widens our vision; whereas ignoring deviancy leads to a historical myopia.
A "disproportionate number" of occultists "come from the ranks of those occupying a marginal social status" (Tiryakian 1974:6). Social marginality means that the people or groups are "on the boundaries of society's institutional framework, not subject to its regulations yet not altogether disjoint from it" (Tiryakian 1974:6). Such groups are in a position both of inferiority and power. The occult has not received institutional 10 status either by science or religion and so it is perceived as inferior, yet occult groups are regarded as a source of power to its followers.
I would characterise Bulwer-Lytton as marginal along the lines Turner describes marginals "who are simultaneously members (by ascription, optation, self-definition, or achievement) of two or more groups whose social definitions and cultural norms are distinct from, and often even opposed to, one another" (1974:233). Turner then considers what is a social construct. If one is marginal, one must surely be marginal to a certain social structure. Turner says: "What I intend to convey by social structure here ... is ... the patterned arrangements of role-sets, status-sets and status-sequences consciously recognized and regularly operative in a given society" (1974:236-7).
Why I consider Bulwer-Lytton marginal is that he had deep occult beliefs but he was also part of the role-and status-sets Turner speaks of. Whilst taking a deep interest in the occult, Bulwer-Lytton also pursued an active political career. In 1852, he was elected conservative Member of Parliament for Hertfordshire, and held the post until his elevation to peerage in 1866. Thereafter he became a member of the House of Peers. He was Secretary for the Colonies in Lord Derby's ministry, 1858-59, and played a large part in the organization of the new colony of British Columbia. His occult ideas most likely influenced his political life. Bulwer-Lytton was an occultist amongst politicians and a politician amongst occultists. As Webb says: "If influential people are discovered to harbor occult ideas, it is quite reasonable to take these ideas as an index of a wider attitude to the broader questions of life" (Webb 1976:3).
It was Bulwer-Lytton who made the "idea of occultism fashionable in England" (Wilson 1971:328). The "spirit of magic underwent a complete transformation in the nineteenth century" — with Bulwer-Lytton it became "romantic literary property" (Wilson 1971:328). One of Haggard's favourite novelists was Bulwer-Lytton and much of She bears resemblance' to both Zanoni and A Strange Story (Messent, ed. 1981:96). Messent says that "Bulwer-Lytton ... wrote to scold an age that refused to believe in mysteries which it could not explain" (Messent, ed. 1981:100).
2 Ayesha's name in She is borrowed from A Strange Story. 11 Bulwer-Lytton's occult literature operates in that area where "two worlds clash head on ... the material and the supernatural" (Messent, ed. 1981:2). It is this sense of dislocation and fracture which provides the real power of his mystic novels. His occult literature allows the reader a view not only of the patent, but glimpses also of the latent side of the nineteenth century. If the nineteenth century is a tapestry, by excluding the occult we view only the top of the tapestry. By including the occult we also glimpse 'a view of the back of the tapestry 3 '. In the works of Bulwer-Lytton which will be discussed in this dissertation, both sides of the tapestry become equally visible.
3 As the governess in James's Turn of the Screw calls it. 12
Chapter 1 — Bulwer-Lytton: the unpopular, intelligent occultist
Two words — unpopularity and intelligence — seem to dominate general commentary about Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73) 4. A further word — occultism — frequently appears in accounts of a specific aspect of his life. This study intends acknowledging his unpopularity only to move beyond into the far more rewarding aspects of his life: as that of an intellectual and as an occultist. And when the two combine, as they do in Bulwer-Lytton, the gestalt-effect reveals curious and fascinating aspects of nineteenth- century England.
There are not many studies on Bulwer-Lytton. In a study of this novelist Wolff says: "Only an occasional wandering scholar ventures into this airless region of literary interstellar space, and when he emerges he almost invariably publishes his findings with a prefatory word of deprecation" (1971:145). Also in a sidereal vein, Roberts refers to him as "a lesser luminary dwarfed by brighter constellations" (1990:156). This opinion is again expressed by Fradin: "At best, modern critics and historians of the novel consider Bulwer merely a popularizer, a novelist expert enough to know what the public wanted and skilful enough to give it to them. At worst, they ignore him" (1961:1).
To some extent, this view of Bulwer-Lytton is justified. He was "too clever and facile", "wrote too many novels of different kinds" and was "undeniably responsive to the pressures of popular taste. Artificial and often pretentious, his novels are full of excess of style and feeling which grate upon modern sensibilities" (Fradin 1961:1-2). He is undeniably a prolific writer having published fifty-nine major works: thirty novels, some three dozen short stories, fourteen plays, nine volumes of poetry, and more than a dozen volumes of miscellaneous prose (magazine articles, translations, and historical studies). As Campbell points out, however, "quantity doesn't mean quality" (1986:128). Wolff reminds us that "prolific he certainly was, but no more so than many Victorians who wrote for money" (1971:145). It may be noteworthy that Bulwer-Lytton spent many years as a member of Parliament whilst also writing, but then so too did his friend Disraeli who "reached the very top of the [Parliamentary] pole, and wrote better, if not fewer, novels than Bulwer" (Wolff 1971:145).
4 In order to focus primarily on Bulwer-Lytton as a mystic, I only include relevant biographical detail. A comprehensive biography of Bulwer-Lytton is found in Campbell 1986:1-21. 13
What, then, has contributed to Bulwer-Lytton's neglect? His most obvious fault lay in his writing style and mannerisms. His grandson acknowledges that the attacks on his grandfather's person and works, although vicious, were not always unprovoked: "Most men, however talented, are apt to fail in something, and Lord Lytton's chief shortcoming was in matters of taste. This defect was conspicuous in his writings; it vitiated his style" (Life 1:494 5).
Even today there is a website devoted entirely to Bulwer-Lytton where "WWW" means Wretched Writers Welcome. Entrants can try outdo Bulwer-Lytton's opening lines. The front page of the website pays homage to the opening lines of Paul Clifford:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness (Paul Clifford, 1830).
In July 2000 a conference on Bulwer-Lytton was held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. The convenor, John Sutherland, added his personal worst openings in a recent TLS article: "My own vote would go to Harold's 'Merry was the month of May in the year of our Lord 1052' or Pompeii's 'Ho, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus tonight?"''.
This grandiloquence infuriated many of his contemporaries — the arch and most sustained of whom was Thackeray who childishly used to refer to Bulwer-Lytton as "Sawedwadgeorgeearllitnbulwig". 8 A more mature, less emotive observation was made by Trollope: "But from all of them [Bulwer's novels] there comes the same flavour of an effort to produce effect. The effects are produced, but it would have been better if the flavour had not been there ... His language is clear, good, intelligible
5 Lytton, Victor A G R, Second Earl of Lytton. The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton, By His Grandson. (2 vols.) London: Macmillan, 1913. (Referred to in this dissertation as 'Life') 6 URL: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
' Times Literary Supplement, 28 July 2000, p.12. 8 Melville, Lewis. Victorian novelists. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Press, 1970. 14 English, but it is defaced by mannerism. In all that he did, affectation was his fault" (Zipser 1974:23).
Acknowledging that Bulwer-Lytton was deficient in purely literary qualities, we move to his ideas. Understanding something of what his ideas are, we no longer judge him by some simplistic canon of what is or is not 'great literature'. Supposed weaknesses of style like his unfashionable archaism, need not obstruct appreciation. A number of modern critics of Bulwer-Lytton argue that it is not fair to judge him on literary standards alone. They allude to the fact that there is more to Bulwer-Lytton beneath the surface.
Christensen, for example, calls Bulwer-Lytton's style "elegant verbiage" but maintains that this verbiage "cannot fully stifle the mysterious power and vitality of his underlying vision". He urges the reader to "overlook the details and blemishes [of his work] ... in the effort to intuit the grandly simple idea in the artist's mind" (Christensen 1976:xi). Christensen's interest lies in Bulwer-Lytton's original and influential ideals and aspirations more than for the perfection of his work. Bulwer- Lytton's work expresses some of the most significant intellectual currents of the nineteenth century, several of which are far from are exhausted. He treats intelligently and interestingly various forms of mysticism and occultism, which treatment, because he is no longer familiar, is all the fresher today. Those who are part of the modern revival in the supernatural can profit from the lively and relevant ideas he expressed.
Fradin refers to Bulwer-Lytton's style as a "meretricious surface" but that "to assume that the surface is the whole ... does an injustice to Bulwer-Lytton and a disservice to the student of the Victorian temper" (Fradin 1961:2). Eigner puts forward Bulwer- Lytton as a spokesman for the metaphysical novel' because he is "the most conscientious, the most eloquent champion of his school" (Eigner 1978:12). Contained in these metaphysical novels are Bulwer-Lytton's occult views.
It is the occult theme which Bulwer-Lytton treats that certain critics see as his most valuable contribution, and which will form the basis of this study. Because of the sheer diversity and range of his work, this dissertation will only concentrate on some
9 This term is explained in the next chapter. 15 of his more notable occult themes. It is in these works that I find one way in which Bulwer-Lytton uniquely contributes to English literature, and, I believe, his contribution has been unfairly ignored. Christensen suggests that a thread which runs through Bulwer-Lytton's literary career is the development of the secret (occult) man. The thrust of his occult novels confronts the Victorian paradox of investigating the mystical from a vantage point of rationality. According to Wolff: "The record of Bulwer's active interest in the supernatural and his literary use of occult themes is probably unique among English writers of the period ... no other English writer embarked on such active investigation as Bulwer or displayed such an open mind and such commitment in this field" (Wolff 1971:314).
Another reason why Bulwer-Lytton was so unpopular, particularly with Thackeray, was that he vaunted his intellect. Relying once more on Trollope's objectivity, Trollope saw Bulwer-Lytton as "an intellectual writer and not merely a popular storyteller" (Zipser 1974:23, and below). Trollope believed that Bulwer-Lytton was "a man of very great parts. Better educated than either [speaking of Dickens and Thackeray], he was always able to use his erudition, and he thus produced novels from which very much not only may be, but must be, gleaned by his readers ... He had read extensively, and was always apt to give his readers the benefit of what he knew. The result has been that very much more than amusement may be obtained from Bulwer's novels".
Bulwer-Lytton's grandson also comments on his grandfather's intellectual capacity: "The range of his writing was extremely wide ... A careful reader of all his writings would probably be able to find amongst them some expression of nearly every idea which his mind received" (Life 2:41). Bulwer-Lytton's novels provide evidence of this serious, scholarly and intellectual mind; revealing a man of wide reading and deep knowledge. Bulwer-Lytton, who was able "to direct his own mental forces to an extraordinary degree", (Sadleir 1931:25) impressed Disraeli who says in a diary entry: "Bulwer is one of the few with whom my intellect comes into collision with benefit. He is full of thought and views at once original and just".' This judgement is shared by the recent scholarship of those such as Eigner, Wolff and Christensen who suggest
10As cited in Moncypenny W F. The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. New York, 1910-20. Vol. 1:235. 16 "that he attained the higher rather than the lower sphere in his art" (Campbell 1986:134).
Frustrated by the bad press he received in Britain, Bulwer-Lytton's opinion of the British reading public declined as his appreciation for those in Germany increased. Although his works were translated into several languages, "nowhere were they received with more enthusiasm by both the critics and the general reading public than in Germany ... he was even read by the Germans in preference to their native authors" (Zipser 1974:12). In 1876, a German critic reviewing one of Bulwer-Lytton's novels suggested that he was held in high esteem in Germany because he was "a man of high intellect and extreme aesthetic refinement ... attributes the Germans ... admire most in a writer" (Zipser 1974:13). According to Zipser, Bulwer-Lytton was "close in spirit to the Germans, and this is reflected in his works" (1974:14). The "German impulse within him was a dominant creative force in his own literary activity, reflecting itself strongly in both form and content, as well as in the ideas of his writings" (Zipser 1974:22). During his Cambridge university years (1821-25) Bulwer-Lytton learnt German and developed a taste for German philosophy and literature. He was influenced most by Goethe and Schiller although Hegel's philosophy also influenced Bulwer-Lytton whom he quotes extensively in his essay On Certain Principles of Art in Works of Imagination. Bulwer-Lytton was in favour of merging novelist and philosopher: "a novel-writer must be a philosopher ... All mankind is the field the novelist should cultivate, — all truth the moral he should strive to bring home"".
His contempt of the English public is revealed in letters to his literary manager John Forster, who was also one of his few friends. Writing of his work Zanoni, Bulwer- Lytton says it "will be no favourite with that largest of all asses — the English public" (Life 2:35). In 1838 he wrote Forster: "Our countrymen only understand the broad splosh, the thick brush, lots of outline, and a burly chap in the foreground" (Life 1:542). Zipser believes that "in general, he felt that the English were intellectually incapable of comprehending the higher, metaphysical meaning in his fiction" (Zipser 1974:12). Bulwer-Lytton could justifiably be proud that both the German critics and reading public were far more appreciative of him — they recognised the metaphysical content in his work. Sadleir quotes from a letter written by a George Darley, writing
il Lord Vincent's statement in Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham. 17 from Munich in 1834: "The Germans worship Bulwer — call his productions Shakespearean — a good proof by the bye how exquisitely they must appreciate the latter" (Sadleir 1931:327).
Not only did Bulwer-Lytton look for acceptance beyond his country but also to future generations. By his own admission he had "a conviction that [his] life had been entrusted with a mission to the hearts of beings unborn, and that in the long chain of thought connecting age with age [his] own being would be recognised as a visible link" (Life 1:27-28). Regrettably, although his occult themes are conducive to breaking temporal barriers, future generations have not vindicated him. That Bulwer- Lytton was involved in occult activities is undisputed but what is particularly difficult to assess is his membership in the revived Rosicrucian Brotherhood — to quote Bulwer-Lytton: "Who but a Rosicrucian could explain the Rosicrucian mysteries!" (Zanoni:9). There is a scarcity of reliable information about Bulwer-Lytton's occult interest and activities and in the nature of Rosicrucianism itself.
Too many critics accept as definitive this statement made by Bulwer-Lytton's grandson: "He was himself a member of the Society of Rosicrucians and Grand Patron of the Order. As this was a secret Society, it is not surprising that among Bulwer- Lytton's papers there should be no documents which throw any light on his connection with it, nor any mention of it in his correspondence (Life 2:41). Yet Campbell, for example, states: "He especially relished the notoriety of being a member of the revived Rosicrucian order in which he rose to the high office of grand patron sometime in the early 1850s" (1986:110). The grandson does not reveal his source of this information and in so doing "fails to provide evidence that his grandfather was a Rosicrucian. He even implies that the very absence of evidence constitutes proof of Bulwer-Lytton's loyalty to the secrecy of the brotherhood, thus paving the way for more innuendo and hearsay" (Roberts 1990:157).
The Society of which Bulwer-Lytton is purported to have been Grand Patron was the Rosicrucian Society in England or Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (often simply called the Soc. Ros.) (McIntosh 1980:110). The Soc. Ros. was founded in 1866 by R W Little and was a Masonic group devoted to the study of Rosicrucian matters. Other founding members were Westcott, McGregor Mathers, Woodman and Mackenzie, one of Little's acquaintances. (Howe 1972:28-29). Bulwer-Lytton's apparent 18 Rosicrucian connection, according to Wescott, arose from the 'fact' that he was an adept (an advanced initiate). In 1916 Westcott wrote: "In 1850 the very old Rosicrucian Lodge at Frankfurt am Main fell into abeyance; in this Lodge the first Lord Lytton was received into Adeptship and became imbued with the (Rosicrucian) ideas he displayed in his novel Zanoni". Howe goes on to say that "no information about an alleged Rosicrucian Lodge at Frankfurt am Main is available" (Howe 1972:31,32). Mackenzie was also convinced that Bulwer-Lytton was a Rosicrucian but at the level of the neophyte, the first rung on the Rosicrucian ladder. In a letter to Dr Westcott dated 24 March 1881, Mackenzie says : "Even Lytton who knew so much was only a Neophyte and could not reply when I tested him years ago" (Howe 1972:29).
Here we have two members of the same society attributing the lowest and highest status to Bulwer-Lytton: it could never happen that the most junior member (neophyte) could lead the society. Flower, in her short biography on Bulwer-Lytton adds to this confusion by stating: "Mackenzie, who knew Bulwer-Lytton well and was a Rosicrucian himself, spoke of the latter as a neophyte, the first rung on the Rosicrucian ladder, and Bulwer was considered a suitable candidate for the office of Grand Patron of the Rosicrucian Society of England when it was founded in 1866" (Flower 1973:32).
McIntosh adds to this story: "Lord Lytton's involvement (or rather non-involvement) with the Soc. Ros. is a curious story. Probably on account of his `Rosicrucian' novel Zanoni, he was proposed and voted in as Honorary Grand Patron of the Society in 1871, but without his knowledge. When he found out what had happened, he wrote to John Yarker, another enthusiastic dabbler in fringe masonry and a member of the Soc. Ros.'s Manchester college. Yarker sent an apologetic reply. As far as we know Lytton never even attended a meeting of the Soc. Ros" (McIntosh 1980:110). The letter to Yarker is the first indication of Bulwer-Lytton himself acknowledging involvement (or non-involvement) with the Soc. Ros. For this reason it is unfortunate that McIntosh does not reveal the source reference for the Yarker letter. The only other extant source is in a letter written by Bulwer-Lytton to Hargrave Jennings on 3 July 1870. Jennings had written a book called The Rosicrucians; Their Rites and Mysteries and had apparently asked Bulwer-Lytton for any additional information on Rosicrucianism. In reply Bulwer-Lytton wrote: "There are reasons why I cannot enter into the subject of 19 the `Rosicrucian Brotherhood', a society still existing, but not under any name by which it can be recognised by those without its pale" (Life 2:40). The only hint of involvement seems to be "his claim that the present Rosicrucians are impostors out of touch with the true ancient lore [and it] is calculated to suggest that he himself is familiar with the authentic order of Rosicrucians" (Roberts 1990:158).
Wolff also notices this hint and says wryly: "Indeed, except for the significant hint that the 'real' Rosicrucians no longer used the name, and that those who used the name were not real Rosicrucians, which in itself only provides an additional Bulwerean mystification, we are no further. And if we find that people calling themselves Rosicrucians claim Bulwer as one of them, we must view their claim with scepticism" (Wolff 1971:233). Finally, Zipser's comment on this part of the letter is that it is the only indication that "he may have belonged to a secret society, Rosicrucian or otherwise" (Zipser 1974:128).
The letter to Jennings ends with this statement: "Some time ago a sect pretending to style itself `Rosicrucians' and aggregating full knowledge of the mysteries of the craft, communicated with me, and in reply I sent them the cipher sign of the 'Initiate' — not one of them could construe it" (Life 2:42). Bulwer-Lytton is as evasive and enigmatic as the cipher test itself. There seems to be a certain amount of one-upmanship considering it was Mackenzie who had tested Bulwer-Lytton in a similar way and found him wanting. Even the author of the book, Jennings, invites contradiction. Bulwer-Lytton gave the book high praise — "no better book upon such a theme [Rosicrucianism] has been written, or indeed could be written" (Life 2:42). Mackenzie also praised it highly. Howe calls the book "nonsense from start to finish" and says "if Mackenzie supposed that Jennings knew anything about the `Rosicrucians' he was capable of believing anything" (Howe 1972:29). Cavendish calls the book "a comic muddle" (1990:138). Jennings, "obsessed with sex, believed that the worship of sex organs was the root of all religions and saw genital emblems nodding and winking at him wherever he looked" (Cavendish 1990:138).
Bulwer-Lytton remained equivocal about his involvement with the Rosicrucians to the end of his life. As Wolff comments: "In this way, as in so many others, Bulwer-Lytton was ambivalent. He loved to cover his tracks, to enjoy the reputation of being a kind 20 of sorcerer while protesting that in fact there was probably nothing in it. He enjoyed mystification as much as mysticism" (Wolff 1971:158).
Whether or not Bulwer-Lytton was a Rosicrucian will remain pure conjecture. If Bulwer-Lytton's participation with the Rosicrucians is difficult to assess, it is only slightly easier to ascertain his position as an occultist. His grandson is more accurate in this regard: "His study of occult subjects was serious and discriminating; and that traces of this bent of his mind should be apparent in his books is natural enough" (Life 2:40-41, and below). The grandson refuted the belief Bulwer-Lytton only wrote about the occult to increase the sales of his books or to exploit the public's appetite for sensationalism: "He certainly did not study magic for the sake of writing about it; still less did he write about it, without having studied it, merely for the purpose of making his readers' flesh creep".
Bulwer-Lytton's occult novels are the result of an "interplay between novelist, magician [read occultist] and philosopher" (Roberts 1990:156). Bulwer-Lytton believed that a novelist should be a philosopher yet of himself he says that he did "not pretend to be a philosopher; and if I did, I know of no sect of philosophy to which I could unreservedly give a disciple's adhesion" (Wolff 1971:154 12) His son, Robert, affirms this: "My father's creations responded to the guidance of no single school or system of philosopher, and contain no artistic illustration of the maxims of any particular school or system of philosophy" (Roberts 1990:156' 2). Bulwer-Lytton's occult works are, arguably, his best work and the most satisfying for him. But they are difficult, particularly when trying to ground and locate them within all that is loosely called "occult" — "the exploration leads the student into unfamiliar territory" (Wolff 1971:148).
As indicated, Bulwer-Lytton did not subscribe to any one philosophy. He does, however, mention some occultists and scientists who influenced him and this provides a tenuous, eclectic starting point. Some of the names mentioned in Bulwer-Lytton's novels are: the Neoplatonists, especially Iamblichus and Proclus, Psellus, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Van Helmont, Bacon, Newton, Descartes, Locke, Condillac, Hume, Reid,
12 Wolff is quoting from Bulwer-Lytton's On Essay-Writing in General and These Essays in Particular. Vol. 2. Pp.243-244. 13 Roberts is citing The Life, Letters and Literacy Remains of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton by his Son (London 1883:97). 21 Schelling, Hegel, Lamarck, Laplace, Maine de Biran, Davy, Faraday and Agassiz. For someone who did "not pretend to be a philosopher", Bulwer-Lytton's novels are filled with references to obscure and esoteric philosophies. And these names are not sprinkled around to create a pseudo-scientific effect; there is evidence that "for nearly forty years Bulwer-Lytton sustained a fascination for all things occult, and he assiduously read most of the classic texts written about the occult. His knowledge in this field was both comprehensive and profound" (Campbell 1986:110). His occult works — Zanoni (1842); The Haunters and the Haunted (1859); A Strange Story (1862), and The Coming Race (1871) — are evidence of his extensive reading and of his abiding interest as a practising occultist. As Wolff points out: "The mere dates of publication suggest that for almost thirty years Bulwer maintained this deep interest in the supernatural" (Wolff 1971:148).
Bulwer-Lytton also kept current on the latest developments in physiology and psychology, subjects allied to his interest in the occult. He followed the latest findings in psychical research and attended public demonstrations that explored phrenology, mesmerism, and spiritualism. Bulwer-Lytton supported the psychical research undertaken by Dr John Elliotson and Dr John Ashbumer, the two most respected figures in early Victorian psychic studies. His letters to friends document the frequency of seances held at his country estate at Knebworth and his status in occult circles in England was high. He also patronised spiritualists and magicians like Daniel Dunglas Home and Eliphas Levi, the latter who, on his visit to London in 1854, attempted an evocation of Apollonius of Tyana (a Pythagorean sage from Asia Minor during the first century AD). Bulwer-Lytton is believed to have been present at this meeting which is said to have taken place on top of a shop in London (Wilson 1971:197, for full account). Levi regarded Bulwer-Lytton as one of the principal exponents of occult studies in the country due largely to his reputation as the author of Zanoni.
A starting point in investigating Bulwer-Lytton's attitude to psychical phenomena is the statement made by his grandson who says his grandfather "was under no illusions regarding them. Spirit rappings, clairvoyance, astrology, etc., — he investigated them all, and found them all disappointingly unconvincing and unprofitable. His attitude of mind on these matters appears to have been exactly that of the members of the Psychical Research Society of the present day — anxious to learn something that would 22 extend the horizon of human knowledge and experience, yet forced to confess that nothing which he had witnessed himself really justified any definite conclusions" (Life 2:41). The "present day" refers to the year 1913, the date the biography was published. Actual evidence of Bulwer-Lytton's activities, however, shows that his grandson's statement — especially the phrase "disappointingly unconvincing" — is inaccurate and misleading.
Two incidents reveal that Bulwer-Lytton was totally convinced that psychical phenomena existed. In a letter to his son, he mentions contact he made with his deceased daughter, Emily. At a séance he put a question in thought to his dead daughter Emily: "I asked her the last name she thought of, and she answered Carl Ritter [the name of a young German with whom she had thought herself in love]. No Medium can know that, and the question was only put in thought" (Life 2:43). The other incident is mentioned in a book written by Home, a spiritualist especially popular among the fashionable circles in England. Bulwer-Lytton attended a séance where, in response to a question put to the spirit, it answered: "I am the spirit who influenced you to write Z As proof, Bulwer-Lytton asked the spirit to take his hand "and putting his hand beneath the surface of the table, it was immediately seized by a powerful grasp, which made him start to his feet in evident trepidation ... he recovered his composure, and offering an apology for the uncontrollable excitement caused by such an unexpected demonstration, he resumed his seat" (Wolff 1971:245' 4).
Bulwer-Lytton was convinced that psychical phenomena existed but statements he made publicly never endorse his private beliefs. He wanted the public to believe that he did not believe. One person who especially bore a grudge towards Bulwer-Lytton for not publicly acknowledging what he had experienced was Home's second wife. She felt that her husband was being denied publicity when a celebrity such as Bulwer- Lytton would not publicly announce incidents he had experienced. The press confronted Bulwer-Lytton to deny or affirm the "hand grasping" incident but he remained silent. Mrs Home's interpretation of this is: "In a matter of this sort to be silent was to affirm" (Wolff 1971:245).
14 The incident Wolff describes is in: Home D D. Incidents in my life. London: Longman 1863. 23 In public Bulwer-Lytton was an investigator of the supernatural, in private a believer. In 1863 he wrote a letter to a Mr Coleman (who apparently wanted to publish something suggesting that Bulwer-Lytton accepted spiritualism) instructing him not to proceed. In his letter' Bulwer-Lytton says: these phenomena "when submitted to the same laws of rational evidence, which are adopted in Courts of Law as scientific investigation, are found to disprove the wild notion that they are produced by the spirits of the dead or by any cause whatever". Yet Bulwer-Lytton reveals his own private reaction to the spiritualist phenomena in an undated letter to his son. He believes that if the activities at seances are tricks "it is hard to conceive it" (Life 2:42- 43, and below). He doubts, however whether it is the spirits of the dead behind the activities and wonders whether it is "brownies or fairies. They are never to be relied on for accurate answers, tho' sometimes they are wonderfully so, just like clairvoyants. Altogether it was startling".
Altogether it is, perhaps, not so startling that Bulwer-Lytton should hold public and private views on the occult. There is probably a good reason why, after all the time and energy he had devoted to the occult, Bulwer-Lytton would either not publicly endorse what he had found or, when he did, would only express disillusionment. His reaction to spiritualism seems to be — miraculous but so what? In the same letter to his son describing his encounter with Emily he says that the spirits "palter" with us, "do not enlarge our knowledge" and he doubts if any "practical end can be gained" (Life 2:44). Those who condemned him for not making public endorsements were probably upset that he would not endorse their particular brand of the supernatural; a brand which Bulwer-Lytton probably believed to be real but trivial.
Trivial is not a word associated with Bulwer-Lytton. He was far from credulous and his hard-headed approach to the occult was that of a patient researcher, expecting no quick or sensational results. It is worth emphasising, however, that he thought the subject well-worth investigating, having spent most of his adult life doing so. Mrs Home at first put Bulwer-Lytton's avoidance of public endorsement down to weakness or fear of ridicule. She later changed her opinion to one which Wolff believes is more accurate. Of him she says: 'He saw the facts of Spiritualism through a haze of fancies concerning sylphs, gnomes, 'Dwellers on (sic) the Threshold' etc. This
15 Life 2:49, the letter is quoted in full. 24 blend of "scientific curiosity combined with a set of superstitions of his own prevented Bulwer-Lytton from publicly committing himself to Home any more thoroughly than he had been willing to commit himself to" any one else (Wolff 1971:247). In other words Bulwer-Lytton's philosophy was so unique and personal — a mixture of science, magic and philosophy — that he was never able to lend support to any one.
A characteristically Victorian attitude is present in Bulwer-Lytton in that he adopts the scientific, empirical approach. He is one of the few who approached the mystical from a vantage point of rationality. When the unfamiliar becomes familiar through science, the frontiers of knowledge are extended: the supernatural is so called because it is not yet understood. This is a sound attitude; not the gullible, easy acceptance rife in contemporary occult circles. By finding the cause and then relating it back to the effect, it was not difficult for Bulwer-Lytton to take the leap of faith to believe in the supernatural.
Bulwer-Lytton never made the mistake of relying totally on rational science: he believed that man had a soul but that, like so many others held in the nineteenth- century, the soul was not being nourished by the church. His belief systems was "created out of need, the need to find a substitute for a lost faith or some moral center that would give meaning and coherence to a fragmented perplexing world" (Fradin 1961:2). In this perhaps the most energetic century of mankind's history, the revival of the occult was a revolt against the "coarse-grained reality" of materialism (Wilson 1971:324). Wilson believes that "nineteenth-century man found himself high and dry in a materialistic and boring world ... the universal complaint was boredom" (1971:329). This feeling (Wilson thinks) was brought on by rationalism, the obsession with the scientific view of nature. Men like Bulwer-Lytton recognised this and took steps to combat it. Wilson credits Bulwer-Lytton with making the idea of occultism fashionable in England and of being chiefly responsible for the magical revival in England.
If this is so, Bulwer-Lytton's occult beliefs are not found in statements made by him directly; rather indirectly in his occult works. The occult thread in the nineteenth 25 century was woven into his metaphysical novels' which "represent a genuine attempt to come to grips with the complex world in which he lived. They are, by and large, created out of tension; underlying them is a vivid sense of crisis, and awareness of dramatic changes and new scientific ideas which compelled him to make critical adjustments in the way he looked at himself and his world" (Fradin 1961:2).
16 The next chapter begins with an explanation of the term 'metaphysical novel'. 26
Chapter 2 — The Occult Works of Bulwer-Lytton: an eclectic philosophy of magic
The Metaphysical Novel Eigner argues that Romanticism influenced many forms of literature in the nineteenth- century to the extent that sub-genres were formed. One such sub-genre he lables 'the metaphysical novel'" and justifies this term even though it could be confused with the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. Eigner places Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, Melville, Hawthorne and Emily Brontë within this category — with Bulwer-Lytton as the most representative of this sub-genre, he being the most conscientious and eloquent champion and spokesman of the metaphysical novel. Bulwer-Lytton himself felt "he was both pioneering and perfecting a new form of the novel in England, building as he was upon a Goethean framework" (Zipser 1974:53).
The metaphysical novel is governed by a dual aspect of the ideal and the real which Eigner takes "to be its essential feature, [and] renders it more seriously a romance than any of the other subgenres of nineteenth-century fiction which have been called romances" (1978:10). He compares them favourably to Shakespeare's fifth-phase romances. As opposed to the realistic novel, metaphysical fiction is "not to be regarded as the mere portraiture of outward society", it "wanders from the exact probability of effects, in order to bring more strikingly before us the truth of causes" and "often invests itself in a dim and shadowy allegory" (Bulwer-Lytton The Disowned ). Bulwer-Lytton's deep engagement in the study of metaphysics aligned him more with Germany than England and was another contributing factor to his being misunderstood in his own country where "metaphysics and German philosophy were practically synonymous to most English readers of that period" (Zipser 1974:49). His efforts to write in the metaphysical genre were met with indifference by the English reading public; outright contempt on the part of his harsher critics. The overall effect was to "move him closer to the Germans, whose literary heritage he was drawing upon; the understanding of this foreign audience was greater, their response always appreciative and enthusiastic" (Zipser 1974:52).
17 A term coined by Bulwer-Lytton in his essay On Different Kinds of Prose Fiction contained in his novel The Disowned. 27 In fact the relationship between the metaphysical novelist and his reader is a "troublesome business" whatever the reader's nationality because the characters of such novels are sometimes presented as ideal types and at times realistically (usually to allow the author to move the story along) (Eigner 1978:66). Fenwick in A Strange Story is a good example of this. At times he represents the ideal of 'positive science' but he also helps move the narration forward by his actions. He also illustrates another goal of the metaphysical novelist — to follow the protagonist's conversion. The reader participates in Fenwick's move away from materialism to a belief in the supernatural, which conversion is effected empirically, through observable events which are convincing to Fenwick the rationalist. Fenwick is working on a treatise describing the phenomenal world, the typical materialist believing that "by a painstaking study and analysis of each separate part of nature, one will come ultimately to an understanding of the forces which baffle him" (Eigner 1978:225).
Hawthorne, in his Preface to The Blithedale Romance describes how the dual effect of merging allegory with the matter-of-fact created "a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel ... a suitable remoteness". Another way the metaphysical genre is exhibited is in the prefaces of the novels. Bulwer-Lytton frequently explains his a priori vision in his prefaces — A Strange Story and Zanoni have detailed prefaces. These prefaces explain to the reader the author's preconceived vision or truth, unlike the realist novelist who lets his protagonist discover his truth. The author's imposition of his truth may appear presumptuous, but it is an attempt to put forward an alternative philosophy to materialism. Because positivism is so entrenched, the metaphysical novelist has "to make himself conspicuous, perhaps even annoying and rude ... must violently or craftily reshape the readers' most basic habits of mind if he is to succeed in getting across his ... vision" (Eigner 1978:64). As Eigner concludes, the metaphysical novelist "was not his readers' friend or guide or even their priest; he was his readers' missionary" (1978:66).
The hold of the realistic novel in Victorian times created an almost universal expectation in critics and readers for mimetic realism. It frustrated them when the realistic aspects of the metaphysical novel did not go far enough, or were interrupted by the ideal. As Eigner says, "The presence of realistic elements in such works tended ... to accentuate the mysticism and render it more objectionable" (1978:7). This helps explains why Bulwer-Lytton's mystical novels were not well-received. The 28 metaphysical novelists were attempting to set up a counter-philosophy "to expose materialism ... so that metaphysics, which the positivists had banned from philosophy, might be restored as a legitimate province for human inquiry. The metaphysical novelists believed that such a shift in thought was requisite to the spiritual salvation of their contemporaries" (Eigner 1978:7).
Bulwer-Lytton mentioned this emphasis on materialism in his work England and the English: We as yet live under the philosophy of Adam Smith. The minds that formerly would have devoted themselves to metaphysical and moral research, are given up to inquiries into a more material study (1874:268).
Nineteenth-century critics perceived that the novel was moving towards realism, possibly in keeping with the spirit of positivism. As Eigner points out, "Like the scientists whom they paralleled, the realists were totally committed to a Lockean empiricism and to an unswerving faith in a cause-and-effect universe" (1978:63). Bulwer-Lytton spoke directly to this point in England and the English:
The philosophy of Locke is still the system of the English ... Few...know or conjecture the influence which one mighty mind insensibly wields over those masses of men ... I think it is our exclusive attention to Locke that I can trace much of the unspiritual and material form which our philosophy has since rigidly preserved. (1874:270)
The metaphysical novel confused the critics as they came more "frequently to conclude that one or the other aspect of a metaphysical novel must constitute a misdirection, a changed intention, a dishonestly imposed happy ending, or an impurity". Bulwer-Lytton argued "that the best fiction of his century [not only his own fiction] was being systematically misunderstood because reviewers could not or would not fathom the basic intentions of the genre" (Eigner 1978:10, both above). The critics, judging the metaphysical novel using the inappropriate criteria of what constituted a 'good' realistic novel (Scott, for example), threw the metaphysical novelist into the cannibal stewpot. To a critic, a commendable realistic novel "transports the reader consecutively and uninterruptedly through a long series of causes and effects" (Eigner 1978:80). The reader of a realistic novel identifies with 29 the protagonist (usually a strong, fully-rounded character) then travels with him through a series of incidents which help shape his destiny: In short, it is a rattling good story without annoying philosophical interruptions. The metaphysical novelist, on the other hand, "believes that personal trial and error is not the only or even the best way to wisdom" (Eigner 1978:80). He is at pains to keep us awake and engaged in a loftier goals. Whereas the realistic novel has "a built-in hypnotic quality", a rhythm between cause and effect, the metaphysical novelist changes "narrative horses and generic vehicles" to keep the reader off-balance and unsure (Eigner 1978:62). A good example of this change of pace are the dialogues between Fenwick and Faber in A Strange Story. Their effect is "to retard the progress ... to step in between two actions and therefore to weaken any supposed causal relationships between them, relationships which rest entirely upon the appearance of temporal proximity" (Eigner 1978:63).
Earlier, mention was made that the metaphysical novels compare favourably to Shakespeare's fifth-phase romances. One reason for this is a similarity in characterisation. The characters of a fifth-phase romance, for example The Tempest or Winter's Tale, seem like cardboard cut-outs, two-dimensional and not fully rounded. Abstract and unrounded, characters in a metaphysical novel are also often passive, such as Fenwick. This may be in order to allow the 'metaphysical' to come through. Lilian, for example, is passive to a fault but her mystical powers triumph over Margrave's evil. Metaphysical novelist's characters are seen by critics as the novel's "weakest suit" but such criticisms stem from "an imperfect understanding of the writer's aim" (Eigner 1978:67). Admittedly not an easy fit, but critics of the genre do not seem to accept that characters such as Fenwick, Lilian, Zanoni, Mejnour (to mention a few from the works under review 18) embody types and ideals as well as having to be at least partially realistic in order to also allow the narrative to unfold in the real world. The characters, as abstractions, are only made as concrete, are only developed as is absolutely necessary. Bulwer-Lytton identified with Shakespeare as a "poet who has never once drawn a character to be met with in actual life — who has never descended to a passion that is false, or a personage who is real!" (Zanoni:l0).
Bulwer-Lytton, a devotee of Schiller'', may have acquired his 'idealising principle' from Schiller; certainly it is of German origin. Bulwer-Lytton states (in his book on
18 The list is long. Other examples are Melville's Claggart and Billy Budd. 19 Bulwer-Lytton translated Schiller's poems into a book called The Poems and Ballads of Schiller. 30 translations of Schiller's poems) that what he admires most about Schiller is "his singular ardour for Truth, his solemn conviction of the duties of a Poet — that deep- rooted idea ... that the Minstrel should be the Preacher, that Song is the Sister of Religion in its largest sense, ... that the Stage is the Pulpit to all Sects" (Zipser 1974:106). Schiller believed that "the characters in the Greek tragedy are more or less ideal masks, and not actual individuals", and that Shakespeare fixed "his attention more upon a poetical abstractum, than upon mere individuals" (Eigner 1978:70 20). If Bulwer-Lytton did base this principle on Schiller, we have him to thank for making this German thought available first to English— and then American writers.
A metaphysical novelist, such as Bulwer-Lytton, was a living link between the original Romantic Movement with its belief in the power of the imagination that characterised the aesthetic revolt, and the materialism prevalent in the Victorian era. His conception of the ideal world and the soul prefigured the principles of the symbolists and decadents who made up romanticism's second wind. The symbolist movement was largely underpinned by occult philosophy. Mystery was intrinsic to the reaction against the supposed rationality of the Victorians. Bulwer-Lytton had a rich and genuine occult learning that earned him the respect of all the leading figures of the occult revival. He carried on the tradition of German and English Romanticism where imagination and intuition was held high. Occultism — with its emphasis on the imagination — fell within the legitimate province of this genre: "The worldview of the romantic movement is occultism ... Consider the greatest names out of thousands — Shelley, Blake,... Goethe, Novalis [Bulwer-Lytton is mentioned on the next page] ... If all these great figures had merely dabbled, if it were only a matter of table turnings and the like, we should dismiss it as a diversion of genius; but occult ideas are involved in their greatest works" (Senior 1959:50).
Bulwer-Lytton, we know, did not merely dabble in the occult. According to Wolff, Bulwer-Lytton's "active studies in the occult began in the early 1830s and became increasingly important to him as the years went by. Astrology, alchemy, mesmerism, clairvoyance, hypnotism, spiritualism, and magic: he investigated them all at first hand, and wrote about them all" (1973:148-9). The metaphysical novelists put forward mysticism as a solution to what "a great many of their contemporaries had been
20 Quoting from Correspondences between Schiller and Goethe from 1794 to 1805 Apr. 4 1797, I, 304. (London: 1877). 31 calling for, a key to the prison of a phenomenal world which appeared to separate them from the exercise of their greatest human potentials" (Eigner 1978:190).
Because of the Age of Reason where "only reason could show man the truth about the universe", man became a "thinking pygmy" (Wilson 1971:21) and neglected his imagination. The world of the rationalists was "a daylight place in which boredom, triviality and 'ordinariness' were ultimate truths" (Wilson 1971:21). Metaphysical novelists such as Bulwer-Lytton tried to release man from being trapped in the "triviality of everydayness" (Heidegger's phrase). When trapped, man forgets the world of broader significance and the result is depression and boredom. Mankind should "believe in realities outside his own smallness ... if he is to do anything worthwhile" (Wilson 1971:30). Fortunately this trap is a state of mind rather than an objective reality. Once the focus is removed from the trivial, the near, we can concentrate on the far. This is effected by reviving the sense of imagination.
Many share a craving to escape from the narrowness of their lives, being bored and suffocated by their immediate surroundings. Ouspensky found refuge in books on Atlantis and magic. To him, they temporarily drew aside the veil of banality to present another kind of knowledge different from the logical laws that govern everyday life. Speaking of the liberating effect which occult books had on him, Ouspensky' says:
But here, in these books, there is a strange flavour of truth ... for so long I had held myself in, have kept myself within artificial 'materialistic' bounds, have denied myself all dreams about things that could not be held within these bounds. I had been living in a desiccated and sterilised world, with an infinite number of taboos imposed on my thought. And suddenly these strange books broke down all the walls round me...
Books of another sort were written also as an attempt to overcome the banality of everyday life but they would take a dark, sinister turn. Not content with the 'white magic' of an Eliphas Levi, novelists like J K Huysmans wrote about 'black magic'. Novels such as A Rebours (which became the bible of Dorian Gray) and La Bas are bizarre and disgusting — an attempt to shock the readers out of their state of dullness.
21 New model of the universe; principles of the psychological method in its application to problems of science, religion, and art by P. D. Ouspensky. 32
Metaphysical novels, then, liberate people from the everyday. If "intelligent and vital people are denied this 'holiday' from everyday triviality, their creativity takes the form of an increasingly burning resentment against life that imprisons them..." (Wilson 1971:416). A person who takes an interest in the occult becomes removed from everyday life: "the dissipating sights and sounds of everyday life lies at the very foundation of occult literature" (Messent, ed. 1981:2). It is this metaphysical view which Bulwer-Lytton presents in the works under review.
Zanoni Zanoni is a "detailed, complex, and historically accurate reconstruction of the occultist, Masonic milieu of France in the 1780s and 1790s [and] ... can almost serve as an introductory textbook to the heavy cloud of occultism which brooded over revolutionary France" (Schuchard 1975:529). Zanoni is a reflection of the fear of revolution which pervaded the mid-1800s. Victorian society, particularly in the period before 1850, was "shot through, from top to bottom, with the dread of some wild outbreak of the masses that would overthrow the established order and confiscate private property" (Houghton 1957:55).
The novel begins when the narrator, a young man, enters a bookshop in Covent Gardens owned by D who specialises in occult books, because "there, perhaps, throughout all Europe, the curious might discover the most notable collection, ever amassed by an enthusiast, of the works of alchemist, cabalist, and astrologer" (Zanoni:7). He hopes to finds books about the Rosicrucians. Bulwer-Lytton's grasp of the books he mentions in Zanoni shows that he had read them and that he was not merely window-dressing. The bookshop actually existed: "Dendy, the old magic bookseller, was a reality" (Life 2:39). Dendy was more than a bookseller. Dr Walter Cooper Dendy (1794 - 1871) was also a surgeon, scholar, poet and artist, and a friend of John Varley (1778 - 1842), famous as a water-colour artist but also an occultist and who was acquainted with Blake. Bulwer-Lytton met Varley and incorporated what he learnt from Varley into his novels, particularly Zanoni and A Strange Story. Schuchard refers to an anecdote Dendy relates as to how Blake, in the middle of painting King Edward I, went into a reverie where he witnessed a fairy's funeral (1975:540). Dendy was also a keen follower of phrenology. Many phrenologists were interested in 33 Blake's ability as a visionary because they believed that those who had a certain highly-developed spot on the cranium, such as Blake did (they believed), had a greater propensity to see visions and dreams (Schuchard 1975:540).
The narrator meets an elderly customer, an authority on mysticism, with whom he becomes friendly. This gentleman "condescended to enter into a very interesting, and, as it seemed to me, a very erudite relation, of the tenets of the Rosicrucians, some of whom, he asserted, still existed, and still prosecuted, in august secrecy, their profound researches into natural science and occult philosophy" (Zanoni:11). The old man, a painter who had witnessed the first French Revolution and had suffered, tells him that the Rosicrucians still exist but that they are only a branch of a more illustrious order. The old man also shows him some of his extraordinary paintings which he is canying with him. The two maintain their friendship, while the young narrator learns more about mysticism. In one of their conversations, in answer to the question 'Are you acquainted with the Platonists?', the old man replies:
I have occasionally lost my way in their labyrinth ... they are rather difficult gentlemen to understand. Yet their knottiest problems have never yet been published. Their sublimest works are in manuscript, and constitute the initiatory learning, not only of the Rosicrucians, but of the nobler brotherhoods I have referred to. More solemn and sublime still is the knowledge to be gleaned from the elder Pythagoreans, and the immortal masterpieces of Apolloniusn (Zanoni:11).
The painter dies and leaves to the narrator the manuscript of a book he has written. When alive the old man, when asked what kind of book it was, had answered: "It is a romance, and it is not a romance. It is a truth for those who can comprehend it, and an extravagance for those who cannot" (Zanoni:14). This may have been Bulwer- Lytton' s forecast of how Zanoni would be received. The manuscript is entirely in hieroglyphics which must be painstakingly deciphered with a key. The ciphers in the manuscript are similar to the hieroglyphics "in some of Blake's works" (Schuchard 1975:532) . It is translated after two years' work.
n The same Apollonius which Levi tried to invoke. 34 The novel then goes back to the days of the painter's youth, the time just before the French Revolution — the 1780s — in Naples. A violinist of the Neapolitan orchestra, Pisani, composes wild operas which are believed to be too unfamiliar to be played. His daughter Viola, the principal singer at the opera house, has her father's opera staged without his knowledge and it is a great success. In her audience is a young, handsome stranger, Zanoni, recently arrived from India with a vast fortune. Anecdotal stories circulate that he is over 150 years old. He departs for Rome where he makes contact with an elderly sage, living as a recluse, whom he has not seen for years. They talk of the future in a way that anticipates the oncoming revolution which stands "as at the deathbed of the Old World, and beheld the New Orb, blood-red amidst cloud and vapour, — uncertain if a comet or a sun" (Zanoni:41). Zanoni feels deep sadness at the prospect but the elderly sage has no emotions.
In Paris Zanoni attends a dinner party of intellectuals. They talk of the happy days that lie ahead when there will be no kings and no priests, no wealth and no poverty, and when life can be prolonged. Zanoni and Cazotte, a novelist, are the only two present who do not agree. Cazotte begins to prophesy that the prisons will shortly be filled in the name of liberty and brotherhood. He predicts for each guest the fate that awaits them. Commenting on Cazotte's ability to prophecy, Zanoni says: "You have not shaken it off, ... it is on you still,- on you at this hour; it beats in your heart; it kindles in your reason; it will speak in your tongue!" (Zanoni:45).
There is evidence that the Cazotte dinner party historically took place although the exact details of the prophecy are disputed. The fact that it is only Zanoni and Cazotte who talk about cabalistic matters at a party made up of intellectuals talking nonsense (as events will prove) injects a cabalistic influence. It is significant that the only person Zanoni associates with at the party, Cazotte, was "deeply imbued with Martinism" — an "historical fact" (Wolff 1971: 345 23). The scene aligns Zanoni with Martinist ideals (even though the occult school he belonged to was far more ancient and better instructed in the secrets of nature) and helps establish him as a magus. The `Martinest ideals' refer to those of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743 - 1803), who is mentioned in Zanoni:
23 Wolff cites several French sources to support this. 35 St. Martin was a disciple of the school, and that, at least, is in its favour; for in spite of his mysticism, no man more beneficent, generous, pure, and virtuous than St. Martin adorned the last century. Above all, no man more distinguished himself from the herd of sceptical philosophers by the gallantry and fervour with which he combated materialism, and vindicated the necessity of faith amidst a chaos of unbelief. It may also be observed, that Cazotte, whatever else he learned of the brotherhood of Martines, learned nothing that diminished the excellence of his life and the sincerity of his religion. At once gentle and brave, he never ceased to oppose the excesses of the Revolution. To the last, unlike the Liberals of his time, he was a devout and sincere Christian. Before his execution, he demanded a pen and paper to write these words: 'Ma femme, mes enfans, ne me pleurez pas; ne m'oubliez pas, mais souvenez-vous surtout de ne jamais offenser Dieu.' (`My wife, my children, weep not for me; forget me not, but remember above everything never to offend God'.) (Zanoni:footnote on 45).
Claude de Saint-Martin was a follower of Don Martines de Pasqualies de la Tour, founder of a particular type of Rosicrucian society called the Elect Cohens. Saint- Martin's "lifelong endeavour [was] to bring to the world this vital insight that man is somehow a god who has forgotten his heritage and come to accept that he is a beggar" (Wilson 1971:320). His form of mysticism was deeply influenced by Boehme. Wilson states that Saint-Martin "was a vital influence on ... Romanticism" (1971:321) and that Romantics such as Shelley and Balzac gave artistic expression to his form of mysticism.
Bulwer-Lytton gives a sense of the atmosphere just prior to the start of the Revolution. It was "the day in which magnetism and magic found converts, ... when prophecies were current in every mouth; when ... necromancy professed to conjure up the shadows of the dead; when the Crosier and the Book were ridiculed, and Mesmer and Cagliostro were believed.... [Now] stalked from their graves in the feudal ages all the phantoms that had flitted before the eyes of Paracelsus and Agrippa. Dazzled by the dawn of the Revolution, Glyndon was yet more attracted by its strange accompaniments ..."(Zanoni:72 - 73).
The action then goes back to Naples two years later. Her parents dead, Viola earns a 36 living by singing. She has never forgotten Zanoni, but there is another suitor, a young Englishman named Glyndon, wealthy, a painter and a pleasure-seeker. He is described as "[b]rave, adventurous, vain, restless, inquisitive, he was ever involved in wild projects and pleasant dangers, — the creature of impulse and the slave of imagination" (Zanoni:72). Glyndon is in Naples with a friend of his, Mervale. Glyndon meets Zanoni and immediately senses that Zanoni has a power which he would like. On meeting Zanoni, Glyndon feels a sensation which Zanoni puts into words:
You must often have felt, gentlemen, each and all of you, especially when sitting alone at night, a strange and unaccountable sensation of coldness and awe creep over you; your blood curdles, and the heart stands still; the limbs shiver; the hair bristles; you are afraid to look up, to turn your eyes to the darker corners of the room; you have a horrible fancy that something unearthly is at hand; presently the whole spell, if I may so call it, passes away, and you are ready to laugh at your own weakness. Have you not often felt what I have thus imperfectly described? — if so, you can understand what our young friend has just experienced, even amidst the delights of this magical scene, and amidst the balmy whispers of a July night. (Zanoni:66).
When Glyndon asks Zanoni to explain this sensation, he answers: "I think, ... that it is the repugnance and horror with which our more human elements recoil from something, indeed, invisible, but antipathetic to our own nature; and from a knowledge of which we are happily secured by the imperfection of our senses" (Zanoni:67). Zanoni then goes on to explain that these sensations are not necessarily caused by spirits but that: there may be forms of matter as invisible and impalpable to us as the animalculae in the air we breathe, — in the water that plays in yonder basin. Such beings may have passions and powers like our own — as the animalculae to which I have compared them. The monster that lives and dies in a drop of water — carnivorous, insatiable, subsisting on the creatures minuter than himself — is not less deadly in his wrath, less ferocious in his nature, than the tiger of the desert. There may be things around us that would be dangerous and hostile to men, if Providence had not placed a wall between them and us, merely by different modifications of matter (Zanoni:67). 37 Glyndon is impatient to acquire this power and he asks Zanoni to teach him. Zanoni is reluctant and tells Glyndon that he would be mad to try and tries to dissuade him from the idea: "If I were to predict your fortune by the vain calculations of the astrologer, I should tell you, in their despicable jargon, that my planet sat darkly in your house of life. Cross me not, if you can avoid it. I warn you now for the first time and last" (Zanoni:76). But Glyndon is the young-man-in-search, the apprentice-to-life. He is disconcerted with his life as an artist and so turns to Zanoni to teach him the deeper mysteries of life. It is Mejnour, however, who undertakes to train him.
Glyndon soon starts to resemble Faust "who likewise turned to magic in his initial effort to surpass the bounds of common human knowledge" (Zipser 1974:68). Glyndon freely admits that he is motivated by "the desire not to resemble but to surpass my kind" (Zanoni:163). The comparison to Faust is intentional, the epigraph to the Fifth Book (The Effects of the Elixir) in Zanoni, a quote from Faust, is not gratuitous but appropriate. Glyndon, however, lacks the conviction and direction to be a Faust. He is weaker and more superficial than Faust and fails to undergo any sort of development or change. All he succeeds in doing is attracting the Dweller of the Threshold to him, the punishment for being "motivated less by intellectual inquisitiveness than selfish personal gains" (Zipser 1974:68). The Dweller enters Glyndon when he inhales a magic elixir contrary to Mejnour's instructions, similar to Faust's meeting with the Earth Spirit. Both Glyndon and Faust are without power to control the spirits they evoke.
Zanoni's qualities are gradually revealed: the appearance of a handsome Arab, good company, cheerful, charming and anecdotal, he heals the sick and is helpful in other ways but is not didactic. He is "equable, serene, and cheerful; ever ready to listen to the talk of others, however idle, or to charm all ears with an inexhaustible fund of brilliant anecdote and worldly experience. All manners, all nations, all grades of men, seemed familiar to him. He was reserved only if allusion were ever ventured to his birth or history" (Zanoni:96).
On the shore near Naples, Glyndon finds Zanoni gathering herbs. They fall into a long conversation about herbs. Zanoni and Mejnour (the recluse in Rome) are profound initiates of natural lore and are the only two left of their brotherhood. Zanoni used to read books but now "the only page he read was the wide one of nature" (Zanoni:87). 38 The secrets of nature are laid bare for them which expresses Bulwer-Lytton's own belief that the supernatural is only natural law as yet undiscovered. Botany is an important feature in Zanoni probably based on Goethe's Urpflanze. Wilson recounts a discussion between Goethe and Schiller (both favourites of Bulwer-Lytton) which took place in 1794 (1971:121-2, paraprhased). Schiller said that he wished that scientists would not make everything so fragmentary and disconnected. Goethe agreed and proceeded to tell him about his Urpflanze. Shiller rejected the concept as just being an idea, not provable. To this extent he was right but Goethe's approach to science is shown here as viewing nature as 'God's living garment' — an active, living whole.
Goethe believed that a key to understanding nature was to study plants; in particular the primal plant (Urpflanze): "a mystical botanical equivalent for the alchemical process" (Wolff 1971:176). During his conversation with Glyndon, Zanoni picks a pale blue flower which he holds to his chest, similar to Novalis's blaue Blume (found in the work Heinrich von Ofterdingen) the highest symbol of the German Romantic poets symbolising the principle of life itself "often, for the romantics, to be found in death" (Wolff 1971:176). (Jung would later link this blue flower to the medieval alchemical rose.) Not only do these small details show Bulwer-Lytton's in-depth knowledge of what he was writing about; the knowledgeable reader would realise, after completing the book, that Zanoni's holding the blue flower to his chest is prophetic: he will sacrifice his life for the life of Viola and the child. In answer to Glyndon's question: "Is the knowledge, then, so rare?", Zanoni answers:
Rare! The deeper knowledge is perhaps rather, among the arts, LOST to the modern philosophy of commonplace and surface! Do you imagine there was no foundation for those traditions which come dimly down from remoter ages, — as shells now found on the mountain-tops inform us where the seas have been? What was the old Colchian magic, but the minute study of Nature in her lowliest works? What the fable of Medea, but a proof of the powers that may be extracted from the germ and leaf? The most gifted of all the Priestcrafts, the mysterious sisterhoods of Cuth, concerning whose incantations Learning vainly bewilders itself amidst the maze of legends, sought in the meanest herbs what, perhaps, the Babylonian Sages explored in vain amidst the loftiest stars. (Zanoni:75). 39
Elsewhere, Mejnour also explains how although "[t]he microscope shows you the creatures on the leaf; no mechanical tube is yet invented to discover the nobler and more gifted things that hover in the illimitable air" (Zanoni:226).
Back in Naples Zanoni foils a powerful Neapolitan prince's efforts to abduct Viola and saves Glyndon's life in the process. The prince plans revenge: he will poison Zanoni at a banquet, abuse Viola and then pass her on to a repulsive revolutionary, Jean Nicot, a French painter. Zanoni has a vision of the scaffold with Nicot gibbering at him. For help in this crisis, Zanoni writes a letter to Mejnour, who comes to Naples. Zanoni drinks the poison but is not affected. Mejnour manoeuvres the prince into a duel with a French nobleman who kills the prince.
Viola and Zanoni both feel an attraction for each other but such love would result in Zanoni losing his special powers, and Viola's life would become an ordeal if she were to try and achieve immortality on earth. The initiation process will involve an encounter with the Dweller of the Threshold. Should she fail, Viola will grow old and die leaving behind an immortal, inconsolable Zanoni. To avoid this Zanoni tries unsuccessfully to persuade Glyndon and Viola to love each other. Unsuccessful, Zanoni takes Viola away from Naples. Viola is hopelessly attracted to Zanoni in an unusual way, not "that of mistress to lover, of slave to master, but rather of a child to its guardian, of a neophyte of the old religion to her priest" (Zanoni:85). Glyndon would prefer Viola as a mistress; not a wife — wedded now, as he is, to the idea of power over others: "A fiercer desire than that of love burns in my veins,- the desire not to resemble but to surpass my kind; the desire to penetrate and to share the secret of your own existence — the desire of a preternatural knowledge and unearthly power. I make my choice. In my ancestor's name, I adjure and remind thee of thy pledge. Instruct me; school me; make me thine; and I surrender to thee at once, and without a murmur, the woman whom, till I saw thee, I would have defied a world to obtain" (Zanoni:163).
One of Glyndon's ancestors was part of the order to which Zanoni belongs, that "mystical Fraternity, who, in an earlier age, boasted of secrets of which the Philosopher's Stone was but the least; who considered themselves the heirs of all that the Chaldeans, the Magi, the Gymnosophists, and the Platonists had taught; and who 40 differed from all the darker Sons of Magic in the virtue of their lives, the purity of their doctrines, and their insisting, as the foundation of all wisdom, oh the subjugation of the senses, and the intensity of Religious Faith" (Zanoni:95). This society is a:
Venerable Brotherhood, so sacred and so little known, from whose secret and precious archives the materials for this history have been drawn; ye who have retained, from century to century, all that time has spared of the august and venerable science, — thanks to you, if now, for the first time, some record of the thoughts and actions of no false and self-styled luminary of your Order be given, however imperfectly, to the world. Many have called themselves of your band; many spurious pretenders have been so-called by the learned ignorance which still, baffled and perplexed, is driven to confess that it knows nothing of your origin, your ceremonies or doctrines, nor even if you still have local habitation on the earth. Thanks to you if I, the only one of my country, in this age, admitted, with a profane footstep, into your mysterious Academe, ... have been by you empowered and instructed to adapt to the comprehension of the uninitiated, some few of the starry truths which shone on the great Shemaia of the Chaldean Lore, and gleamed dimly through the darkened knowledge of latter disciples, labouring, like Psellus and Iamblichus, to revive the embers of the fire which burned in the Hamarin of the East. Though not to us of an aged and hoary world is vouchsafed the NAME which, so say the earliest oracles of the earth, 'rushes into the infinite worlds,' yet is it ours to trace the reviving truths, through each new discovery of the philosopher and chemist. The laws of attraction, of electricity, and of the yet more mysterious agency of that great principal of life, which, if drawn from the universe, would leave the universe a grave, were but the code in which the Theurgy of old sought the guides that led it to a legislation and science of its own. To rebuild on words the fragments of this history, it seems to me as if, in a solemn trance, I was led through the ruins of a city whose only remains were tombs. From the sarcophagus and the urn I awake the genius (The Greek Genius of Death) of the extinguished Torch, and so closely does its shape resemble Eros, that at moments I scarcely know which of ye dictates to me,- 0 Love! 0 Death! (Zanoni:136 - 137)24.
24 This passage is quoted extensively because it later forms part of the explanation of Bulwer-Lytton's occult views. 41 When Glyndon insists upon becoming part of the order, the laws of Zanoni's brotherhood require that he help all descendants of those who have been part of the order. Zanoni is not in favour of Glyndon joining since "scarcely once in a thousand years is born the being who can pass through the horrible gates that lead into the worlds without [because] awful guardians and insurmountable barriers [exist] between the ambition of vice and the heaven of the loftier science" (Zanoni: 181, 218). Glyndon's friend Mervale also tries to persuade him not to join. Glyndon wavers but is convinced when he is miraculously saved by Zanoni when Vesuvius erupts. Glyndon expects Zanoni to be his tutor but finds that it is Mejnour instead. Mejnour is a calm and spiritual sage having passed through the 'horrible gates' thereby attaining immortality. Unlike Zanoni, Mejnour wants to grow the order into "a mighty and numerous race with a force and power sufficient to permit them to acknowledge to mankind their majestic conquests and dominion, to become the true lords of this planet, invaders, perchance, of others, masters of the inimical and malignant tribes by which at this moment we are surrounded: a race that may proceed, in their deathless destinies, from stage to stage of celestial glory, and rank at last amongst the nearest ministrants and agents gathered round the Throne of Thrones" (Zanoni: 181).
Mejnour takes Glyndon to a remote castle in the Italian mountains (infested with bandits) for his training. The old sage tells Glyndon that "[t]he elementary stage of knowledge is to make self, and self alone, thy study and thy world. Thou hast decided thine own career; thou hast renounced love; thou hast rejected wealth, fame, and the vulgar pomps of power. What, then, are all mankind to thee? To perfect thy faculties, and concentrate thy emotions, is henceforth thy only aim!" (Zanoni:199). Next Mejnour teaches the initiate the trance: "man's first initiation is in TRANCE. In dreams commences all human knowledge; in dreams hovers over measureless space the first faint bridge between spirit and spirit,- this world and the worlds beyond!" (Zanoni:221). Bulwer-Lytton describes the effect of the trance on Glyndon:
A sort of languor next seized his frame, but without, as he thought, communicating itself to the mind; and as this crept over him, he felt his temples sprinkled with some volatile and fiery essence. At the same moment a slight tremor shook his limbs and thrilled through his veins. The languor increased, still he kept his gaze upon the star, and now its luminous circumference seemed to expand and dilate. It became gradually softer and 42 clearer in its light; spreading wider and broader, it diffused all space, — all space seemed swallowed up in it. And at last, in the midst of a silver shining atmosphere, he felt as if something burst within his brain, — as if a strong chain were broken; and at that moment a sense of heavenly liberty, of unutterable delight, of freedom from the body, of birdlike lightness, seemed to float him into the space itself" (Zanoni:221).
At one time Glyndon asked Mejnour whether he and Zanoni were part of the Rosy Cross. "Do you imagine," answered Mejnour, "that there were no mystic and solemn unions of men seeking the same end through the same means before the Arabians of Damus, in 1378, taught to a wandering German the secrets which founded the Institution of the Rosicrucians? I allow, however, that the Rosicrucians formed a sect descended from the greater and earlier school. They were wiser than the Alchemists, — their masters are wiser than they."
"And of this early and primary order how many still exist?"
"Zanoni and myself."
"What, two only! — and you profess the power to teach to all the secret that baffles Death?"
"Your ancestor attained that secret; he died rather than survive the only thing he loved. We have, my pupil, no arts by which we CAN PUT DEATH OUT OF OUR OPTION, or out of the will of Heaven. These walls may crush me as I stand. All that we profess to do is but this, — to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventives to the effects of time. This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood. In our order we hold most noble, — first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body. But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret, which I will only hint to thee at present, by which HEAT, or CALORIC, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can 43 be made its perpetual renovater, — these I say, would not suffice for safety. It is ours also to disarm and elude the wrath of men, to turn the swords of our foes against each other, to glide (if not incorporeal) invisible to eyes over which we
can throw a mist and darkness" (Zanoni:217 - 218).
Mejnour leaves Glyndon alone for one month with various exercises to complete and a strict prohibition not to enter a certain room, even though he has the key for it. Glyndon completes the exercises early and, in order to keep his mind off the forbidden room, takes long walks. He stumbles across some peasants and is especially attracted to a girl, Fillide. "Oh, pupil of Mejnour! Oh, would-be Rosicrucian, Platonist, Magian, I know not what! I am ashamed of thee! What, in the names of Averroes and Burri and Agrippa and Hermes have become of thy austere contemplations? Was it for this thou didst resign Viola? I don't think thou hast the smallest recollection of the elixir or the Cabala. Take care! What are you about, sir? Why do you clasp that small hand locked within your own? ... Keep your eyes off those slender ankles and that crimson bodice!" (Zanoni:233).
Not only is Glyndon allowing his attention to wander but at various times he shows impatience to progress. With a desire "[f]ar more intense than the passion of the gamester was the frantic yet sublime desire that mastered the breast of Glyndon" (Zanoni:194). He disobeys Mejnour's prohibition, goes to the forbidden room, lights lamps and inhales vapour from vials — all of which he is forbidden to do. If he had waited until his training was complete, his experience would have been similar to this: "the very elixir that pours a more glorious life into the frame, so sharpens the senses that those larvae of the air become to thee audible and apparent; so that, unless trained by degrees to endure the phantoms and subdue their malice, a life thus gifted would be the most awful doom man could bring upon himself' (Zanoni:226).
Instead, in prematurely conjuring up the Dweller of the Threshold, "the casement became darkened with some object undistinguishable at the first gaze, but which sufficed mysteriously to change into ineffable horror the delight he had before experienced. By degrees this object shaped itself to his sight. It was as that of a human head covered with a dark veil through which glared, with livid and demoniac fire, eyes that froze the marrow of his bones" (Zanoni:243). "Thou hast entered the immeasurable region. I am the Dweller of the Threshold. What wouldst thou with me? 44 Silent? Dost thou fear me? Am I not thy beloved? Is it not for me that thou hast rendered up the delights of thy race? Wouldst thou be wise? Mine is the wisdom of the countless ages. Kiss me, my mortal lover" (Zanoni:243). After the monster has crawled towards Glyndon, Glyndon faints. He wakes up in bed the next morning. Beside him is a letter from Mejnour summarily dismissing him as his pupil. The letter states that only Glyndon can exorcise the Dweller from himself. Meeting the Dweller again scares Glyndon so much that he flees from the castle.
The Dweller of the Threshold is already alluded to in the preface to a previous novel of Bulwer-Lytton's, Maltravers. There he says: "He who would arrive at the Fairy Land must face the Phantoms". This metaphor takes on its full meaning in Zanoni where neophytes must pass the Dweller of the Threshold if they are to leave the (inadequate) world of realism and enter the occult world of the imagination. Turner sees this change of status in three phases using a metaphor based on limen (Latin for threshold): separation from the old status (preliminal), liminal and postliminal. These correspond to the stages of spearation, transition and reintegration into a new status (Moore 1997:229, paraphrased) which Glyndon would have passed through had he not disobeyed Mejnour.
Glyndon travels with Fillide to France. Still tormented, he leaves her there and returns to England where his sister comes to live with him. They are both affected by horrible visions. His sister dies from them but he survives and returns to France at the height of the revolution. He finds Fillide and teams up with Nicot and other revolutionaries erroneously believing that by serving humanity he can exorcise himself of the spectre. After Zanoni and Viola had set sail, they landed on an Ionian island where they had been living an idyllic life. Zanoni is steadily losing his powers and Viola has shown no interest in initiation. Zanoni believes that if she had a baby it would make her desire immortality. She conceives but a plague drives them from the island to Venice. Viola is dying and Zanoni has lost his powers. He has to accept a cure offered by a dark, formless spectre. Viola is cured, the baby is born but the spectre's presence is constant. Zanoni appeals to Mejnour for help whose response is to summons Zanoni to Rome.
While Zanoni is in Rome Glyndon comes to Venice. He warns Viola that Zanoni is a sorcerer. Viola is upset and goes to a priest for counselling. The priest is worthy but 45 ignorant and advises her to leave Venice to save the child from its father. At home she goes into Zanoni's private room and opens a vial and smells the elixir contained in it. This induces a vision where she sees Zanoni and Mejnour looking at her. Frightened, she decides to go to France with Glyndon. Mejnour's advice to Zanoni is to let her go but Zanoni prepares to join her in France.
It is Paris July 1794 and the reign of terror is at its height. Glyndon is looking after Viola and the baby but Fillide is very jealous. Nicot wants Glyndon to assassinate Robespierre. Instead Glyndon says that he has bribed an official for passports so that they can go to England: Nicot can join them if he tells Fillide that Viola is his charge not Glyndon's. Instead Nicot tells Fillide that Viola is Glyndon's mistress and that he intends denouncing Glyndon to Robespierre.
Zanoni is in Paris searching vainly for Viola. He sees great horrors but also numerous examples of self-sacrifice; something made impossible for him to do when he became immortal. Viola is working at menial occupations to keep her and the child alive. She agrees to go to England with Glyndon, Fillide and Nicot but the vengeful Fillide, believing Nicot, arranges with Nicot to have Viola and the child denounced alongside Glyndon. Nicot persuades Robespierre to do this. Nicot himself is also arrested. Glyndon flees through Paris and is met by Zanoni who hurries him to safe shelter at his house.
The two have a conversation where Glyndon reproaches Zanoni for allowing him to enter the brotherhood. Zanoni has to remind him how he had urged against this. He then accuses Zanoni of being a wizard but Zanoni explains how their brotherhood is based on good, sacred magic. They reach some kind of reconciliation when Glyndon realises that Zanoni no longer has the power to find his wife and child. Glyndon tells Zanoni where they are and, in appreciation, Zanoni puts Glyndon into a trance and exorcises the spectre from him.
Glyndon awakes to find a note from Zanoni telling him that he will find a boatman on the Seine ready to call for him. He is told that he will reach England and be spared for many years in order to redeem himself. It is only at this point in the novel that the reader can be certain that Glyndon is the elderly customer in the Covent Gardens' bookshop. Bulwer-Lytton never tells us this in so many words and his restraint is 46 highly artistic. In fact everything now falls into place: Glyndon, having lost the opportunity to enter into the profound brotherhood could still gain access to the Rosicrucians; which in fact he did. Zanoni is not a Rosicrucian tale and Mejnour and Zanoni were not Rosicrucians. They have only a mild, patronising approval for the Rosicrucians and Glyndon acknowledges that in joining the Rosicrucians he had to settle for second best.
Zanoni fails to bring about the fall of Robespierre before Viola and the child are due to be executed and so he determines to die in their place. In a vision he knows that Robespierre will fall the next day and that she will be freed. Whereas she would have been executed, Zanoni substitutes himself for Viola and goes to the scaffold 25. This act of self-sacrifice was alluded to when Zanoni picked the blue flower. A Voice [says]: "Thy courage has restored thy power. Once more, in the haunts of earth, thy soul charms me to thy side. Wiser now, in the moment when thou comprehendest Death, than when thy unfettered spirit learned the solemn mystery of Life; the human affections that thralled and humbled thee awhile bring to thee, in these last hours of thy mortality, the sublimest heritage of thy race, — the eternity that commences from the grave" (Zanoni:380). He is welcomed into heaven by angels. Robespierre is lynched by the mob. Viola, however, dies in her prison bed. Mejnour continues "at work with his numbers and his Cabala, amidst the wrecks of Rome, passionless and calm, sat in his cell the mystic Mejnour, — living on, living ever while the world lasts, indifferent whether his knowledge produces weal or woe" (Zanoni:382). The child is left alone but "the fatherless are the care of God" (Zanoni:405).
Aleister Crowley, an admirer of Bulwer-Lytton's work, remarks on Zanoni's sacrifice: "We have a sentimental idea of self sacrifice, the kind which is most esteemed by the vulgar and is the essence of popular Christianity. It is the sacrifice of the strong to the weak. This is wholly against the principles of evolution. Any nation which does this systematically on a sufficiently large scale destroys itself. The sacrifice is vain, the weak are not even saved. Consider the action of Zanoni in going to the scaffold in order to save his silly wife. The gesture was magnificent; it was evidence of his own supreme courage and moral strength; but if every one acted on that principle the race
25 Taking another's place on the scaffold, during the Reign of Terror, offered the pattern for Sidney Carton's sacrifice in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. 47 would deteriorate and disappear" 26.
As early as 1825 Bulwer-Lytton, aged 22, was developing the themes which would eventually form the basis of Zanoni (1842); that is, "the quest for superhuman wisdom and the ability to prolong life" (Campbell 1986:111). Schuchard refers to a footnote to Kosem Kesamine (1832) (another of Bulwer-Lytton's short stories) where Bulwer- Lytton said that "this tale was extracted from an unfinished romance which furnished the groundwork for Zanoni" which tale was in turn "derived from some papers written during his schooldays" (1975:530). His grandson claims that "the character of Mejnour and the main outlines of the story of Zanoni were inspired by a dream" (Life 2:32). Four years before Zanoni appeared, in 1838, the controlling ideas appeared as a short story, Zicci. The reason for tracing back is to show that Zanoni did not just simply appear in 1842 but had its genesis in Bulwer-Lytton's schooldays. This is important because it means that Bulwer-Lytton was thinking along occult lines from an early age. Bulwer-Lytton would be imbued with occult ideas by the time he met Varley and he sought out Varley's advice for the "occult machinery" of Zanoni and A Strange Story and "is said to have been much indebted to suggestions given to him by the artist" (Story 1894:254). Shortly I will show how this Blakean influence especially manifests in relation to art in Zanoni.
The reception of Zanoni was, like A Strange Story would be, mixed but mostly unfavourable. For the hostile critics it was easy to dismiss Zanoni as being incomprehensible. This had been predicted by Bulwer-Lytton in a letter to John Forster, his publisher, where he says that "Zanoni will be no favourite with that largest of all asses — the English Public" (Life 2:35). Punch did not like Bulwer-Lytton and would not let him get away with such comments with impunity. In an open letter to him they said: "Now, Sir Edward, this is not fair to the circulating libraries. It is all very well to talk of the 'common herd' and say 'it was not meant for them,' with a curl of your fine lip; but you know it was meant for everybody who could pay threepence for the perusal of the volumes — and very popular it has been, especially with ladies' maids and milliners. Why are you always complaining? The public read your novels; the publishers pay for them; you are a lion at dinners, a thing to point at in the street. Your admirer (within limits), Punch" (quoted in Cruse 1935:398).
26 Crowley, A. The Confessions Of Aleister Crowley: An Autobiography. London: J. Cape 1969:401. 48
At least Zanoni impressed Carlyle who had to wrest the book from his wife in order to read it. The man who once thought of Bulwer-Lytton as a "poor fribble" (Wolff 1971:2002') now wishes him "a long career". In the same letter, of Zanoni Carlyle says: "it will be a liberating voice for much that lay dumb imprisoned in many human souls; that it will shake old deep-set errors looser in their rootings, and thro' such chinks ... let in light on dark places greatly in need of light!" (Life 2:39). The Examiner, with John Forster as its editor, called the novel a "peculiar combination of the vague figures of a Dream with the stern realities of Life, it takes an original kind of place in prose fiction ... tinged throughout with the mystic nature of [a] ... Pythagorean school" (Wolff 1971:206). Forster's review recognises that Glyndon's failed quest is one of the major themes of the novel. The Anthenaeum came out with its review on 26 February 1842 and was "not sanguine". This reviewer said that he did not care whether Zanoni was the result of an experiment in a new genre or whether the author was "merely trying to puzzle the simple and pique the thinking reader" but whatever the reason Bulwer-Lytton had "wandered far beyond common ken and common sympathy" both in subject matter and style (Wolff 1971:204, 202). Campbell succinctly sums up The Anthenaeum 's view of Zanoni: "a strange patchwork of things discordant" (1986:117).
Some modern critics might use such a description not pejoratively but as commendation; in much the same way as they now view Shakespeare's romantic plays and realise the skill needed to write in the romantic or metaphysical genre. Two such modern critics could be Wolff and Eigner. Wolff states that Zanoni "is not in fact a Victorian novel, but a romantic one" (1971:224). Eigner refers to the realistic framework of the novel (the bookstore, elderly gentleman etc.) as a technique used by the metaphysical novelist, for as he points out "the metaphysical novel ... uses both its realistic beginning and, sometimes, its allegorical center as a means of arriving at the redeeming vision, which transcends and finally reconceives them both" (Eigner 1978:226).
To those for whom it was an extravagance, the gushy Miss Martineau summed up Zanoni in a "very brief analysis" — a key. Not strong on humility she says: "I confess
27 Original quote appears in Howe Susanne. Wilhelm Meister and his English Kinsmen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930. 49 that to me it seems perfectly clear" — this straight after admitting that her analysis was written "after a hasty circulating-library reading". (Wolff thinks of her as "the cleverest little girl in the classroom" (1971:215).) This key was written "partly for their [her ignorant friends'] guidance, partly for [her] own pleasure" but probably because she was a Bulwer-Lytton sycophant. The key worked for Bulwer-Lytton because he added it as an appendix to all editions after 1853 but without actually endorsing it. And that is why we are saddled with this ostensibly confident solution of the riddle. The basis for Zanoni is far more than Miss Henriette Martineau's offering.
The philosophical basis for Zanoni rests on Chaldean beliefs. In the preface to the work, Bulwer-Lytton writes that the novel will empower and instruct "the uninitiated" in "the starry truths which shone on the great Shemaia of the Chaldean Lore, and gleamed dimly through the darkened knowledge of later disciples" (Zanoni:136). Wolff explains the term "Shemaia" as being "the proper initiation of a suitable neophyte" and how "starry truths" is a reference to the Chaldean's "command over the sciences of the stars" (Wolff 1971:181). One of the "later disciples" alluded to was Plato. Bulwer-Lytton uses Plato's Phaedrus as the framework for Zanoni. And so from the start of the novel Bulwer-Lytton is giving its protagonists Zanoni and Mejnour "remarkable powers derive[ed] from a far older occult tradition than the Rosicrucians" (Campbell 1986:116). Zanoni is not a Rosicrucian story but "an occult parable based on Chaldean and Platonist concepts" (Campbell 1986: 116). The character Zanoni "is in part modeled (sic) on Saint-Martin" who never aligned himself with the Rosicrucians (Senior 1968: 51). It is interesting that Saint-Martin, like Zanoni, was ."diffidently unwilling to train disciples" (Wolff 1971: 172).
Plato's Phaedrus concerns "that part of the soul which is above intellect is excited to the gods, and thence derives its inspiration" (Zanoni:13). The soul mounts successively through divinely inspired stages of enthusiasms: musical, mystic, prophetic and amatory (Wolff 1971:161). Bulwer-Lytton used these stages as a basis for Zanoni, using the English version translated by Thomas Taylor: "it seems to me [Wolff] in the highest degree probable that he used Taylor's convenient and recent translation" (1971: 161 28). I would like only to mention these stages and then use them
28 Those interested in Bulwer-Lytton have much to be thankful for all the difficult background research Wolff did - although he does think (1971:195) that Bulwer-Lytton had "some acquaintance with "mind- expanding drugs" and that at one stage Viola has a "convincing bad trip"! 50 to develop the following major themes of Zanoni: art and the occult, politics and the occult, and the spiritual quest.
The first stage is musical enthusiasm which is the story of the violinist Pisani and his daughter, Viola (Book 1, The Musician). Secondly, the mystical enthusiasm concerns the occult apprenticeship of Clarence Glyndon (Books 2 - Art, Love and Wonder; 3 - Theurgia; 4 - The Dweller of the Threshold; 5 - The Effects of the Elixir). Thirdly, the prophetic enthusiasm is about Bulwer-Lytton's conservative political attack against the excesses of the French Revolution (Book 7 - The Reign of Terror). We see the revolution through the eye-witness Glyndon. Lastly, the amatory enthusiasm is found throughout the novel but particularly in Book 7 where Zanoni dies so that Viola and his child will live: only through self-sacrifice and death can he discover love, true happiness, and eternal life.
Zanoni treats a number of interesting themes regarding art and its relationship to the occult. Ideal art is "that in which one struggles upward to approach God" (Campbell 1986:114). This is the ideal school of art. It is great and beautiful and better than actual, real art. In order to paint this way, one has to conduct one's life based on grandeur of thought and beauty. Earlier we see how Glyndon is informed that "man's first initiation is in Trance. In dreams commences all human knowledge" (Zanoni:221). Schuchard links this to Blake's art: "As Glyndon falls under the spell of Zanoni's magical personality, he comes to despise the realism of the painter Nicot [based on Jacques Louis David], and studies the painting of the Italian Renaissance, with their complex Hermetic symbolism and talismanic nature" (1975:534). Schuchard believes that in Zanoni Bulwer-Lytton most fully developed his sense of the relation of art and magic: "he based his theories on John Varley's occultist interpretation of Blake's visions and 'illuminated' art" (1975: 529). Zanoni is set in Blake's time and captures the "heavy cloud of occultism which brooded over revolutionary France" and "the temptation to see the old painter [Glyndon] as a compound of Blake and Varley is overwhelming" (Schuchard 1975:529).
In words that echo Blake's theory of art and spiritual vision Glyndon concludes: "Yes, he felt Nicot's talk even on art was crime: it debased the imagination itself to mechanism. Could he, who saw nothing in the soul but a combination of matter, prate of schools that should excel Raphael? Yes, art was magic..." (Zanoni:125). Bulwer- 51 Lytton links art to magic sending the message that without magic "there can be no notion of excellence. For the ideal in art ... prize[s] something wiser, happier, and diviner than can be seen on earth" (Campbell 1986:115). Roberts also picks up on this concept that Bulwer-Lytton viewed art as a way to strive towards the supernatural: "the artist ... becomes the visionary who is able to unlock the absolute" (1990:182). She quotes Bulwer-Lytton: "Art employs itself in the study of Nature, for the purpose of implying through but by a hint or a symbol, the supernatural" (Roberts 1990:183 29). A positive aspect of ideal art is that it heightened the everyday significance of things, liberated the imagination and helped relieve "the absorbing tyranny of every-day life" (A Strange Story:331).
In Zanoni it is not only art, but also politics which Bulwer-Lytton links to the occult. In convincing arguments modern critics reveal how "Around the time of the French Revolution, Europe suffered great shocks of occultism" — "a plethora of self- consciously occult sects swarmed over the intellectual centres of Europe" (Senior 1968:35). Senior mentions how it is not relevant to try and prove or disprove the existence of the actual Rosicrucian Brotherhood; it is enough that "the kind of society the Fama called for certainly existed by the end of the eighteenth century" (1968:35). In other words there were secret societies in Europe at the time of the French Revolution some of which were mystically inclined (such as Saint-Martin's) whilst others were political. The occult was home to political ideologies, such as socialism, which wanted to challenge the political status quo. This alliance is understandable given that both new political organisations and occultists believed in ideas which challenged the powers that be. Senior makes the interesting observation that "The immense edifice of modern socialism ... had its beginnings in the occult" (Senior 1968:36, quoting French sources). The fact that one occult society might be a political threat whilst another might not was not understood by the powers that be (understandably, given their secret nature). As Schuchard says: "The French Revolution provided a watershed in the development of secret societies. After the French Revolution, secret societies were "both praised and vilified for...[their] suspected role in fomenting the Revolution" (1975:3).
29 Quote from Bulwer-Lytton's Caxtons, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 92 (1862) p. 163. 52 In 1856 Disraeli, as prime minister, voiced concerns about the power of secret societies with political agendas but he was laughed down 30. Roberts also ridicules Disraeli's insistence that there was a radical, neo-Masonic conspiracy in Europe (1974: 15-23). He calls Disraeli "an outstanding example of the extraordinary state of mind into which otherwise shrewd and intelligent men could be transported by a belief in secret societies" (Roberts 1974:21). If he had asked why Disraeli thought this way, he might have discovered that Disraeli had personal knowledge of occultism through Bulwer-Lytton and Varley, albeit all as mystics rather than political radicals. Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton had heard accounts of the occult influences during times of revolution from Varley and knew that some secret societies had an interest in politics and a capacity to influence politics. They knew the power of these societies whereas Roberts does not seem to. Disraeli still saw revolutions as a threat in the 1850s when the 1848 revolution would still be fresh in his mind. A fascinating story related by Levi justifies Disraeli's concerns that a revolution could be sparked off by a secret society.
Bulwer-Lytton and Eliphas Levi (1810 — 1875) were contemporaries and friends. Levi gives an account of how the 1848 Revolution started. He traces it back to the "magnetic influences" of Ganneau (the Mapah) leader of a group by the same name: "a weird, highly erotic development of Swedenborgianism" (Schuchard 1975:567). I believe that a full account of what happened will be worthwhile because it is such a strange version: A nervous and delicate young man named Sobrier was numbered among the Mapah's disciples; he lost his head completely and believed himself predestined to save the world by provoking the supreme crisis of an universal revolution. The days of 1848 drew towards the threshold ... Suddenly a young man appeared in the populous streets of the Quartier Saint-Martin. He was preceded by two street Arabs, one bearing a torch, and the other beating to arms. A large crowd gathered; the young man got upon a post and harangued the people. His words were incoherent and incendiary, but the gist was to proceed to the Boulevard des Capuchines and acquaint the ministry with the will of the people. The demoniac was marching at the head of a great concourse, pistol in each hand, still heralded by torch and tambour ... In the
30 Roberts 1974:21. 53 midst of this the young man and his street Arabs disappeared , but ... a pistol shot was fired at the people. This shot was the revolution.
It is trite to say that a mob takes on a life of its own but in this case the reason for the mob-behaviour is occult-related: Levi 31 claims that Sobrier was in a state of magnetic trance during this incident. Sobrier "had played his part in history in an almost trancelike state" (Wilson 1971:325).
Zanoni presents the French Revolution primarily through Glyndon's eyes. The novel explores "the spiritual crisis in individual case-histories" where Zanoni conducts his work "behind the scenes ... in individual cases rather than in mass-movements" (Coates 1984: 227, 228). In Zanoni Bulwer-Lytton likens the individual conduct of Glyndon to the mass action of Robespierre: "these would-be builders of a new world, like the students who have vainly struggled after our supreme science ... have attempted what is beyond their powers; they have passed from this solid earth of usages and forms into the land of shadow; and its loathsome keeper has seized them as its prey" (Zanoni:335). Bulwer-Lytton's controlling thesis in Zanoni is that "political visionaries like Robespierre and quixotic students like Glyndon fail to attain either reform or supreme wisdom because they attempt what is beyond their power" (Campbell 1986:114): "the idealistic revolutionaries are like the impatient neophytes" (Wolff 1971:196). By not waiting for authentic self-awareness and integration, they are like the novitiates in Novalis's The Disciples at Sais who die when they impatiently lift Isis's veil of forbidden knowledge. Bulwer-Lytton uses a quote from Schiller's poem version of the story as the epigraph to the fourth book of Zanoni where Isis says: "Be behind what there may — I raise the veil" (Zanoni:200).
Glydon's refusal to wait and gain knowledge slowly through proper preparation at each phase of his ordeal produces the Dweller of the Threshold which persecutes and punishes him. His impatience is brought on by his artistic aspirations. As his visionary capacity grows, he becomes increasingly confident of his artistic powers and tries to speed up the process of initiation which will render him magically creative. Robespierre and the other French revolutionaries parallel Glyndon's failure. They are also impatient to bring in a new dispensation based on freedom and equality. It is
31 Levi Eliphas. The History Of Magic Including A Clear And Precise Exposition Of Its Procedure, Its Rites And Its Mysteries. Trans, A E Waite. London: W Rider, 1913:498. 54 doomed from the start because they refuse to progress by gradual reforms. Their equivalent to Glyndon's Dweller of the Threshold is the Reign of Terror which "punishes them for their lawlessness and reliance on bloodshed" (Campbell 1986: 114). The author's sub-text is that had Glyndon proceeded by degrees, he might have become an initiate; had the reformers moved more slowly and kept within the law, they might have achieved true freedom for France.
Both Zanoni and Mejnour know that a long initiation period is necessary in order that the neophytes are ready to behave responsibly with the secret knowledge they obtain. Zanoni and Mejnour may not be immortal but they do have the ability to create the elixir of life and to control and use heat as an agent of renewal. The long initiation is necessary because this secret in the hands of a tyrant would be like letting a demon loose . The difficulties which the novice goes through help to purify his passions. The neophyte's progress towards initiation and the revolutionaries' reform measures have to be hard-won and authentic. The watered-down Rosicrucian teachings and the headstrong, unthinking French revolutionaries do not meet the high standards of the Chaldean brotherhood.
Nature has put "awful guardians and insurmountable barriers between the ambition of vice and the heaven of the loftier science" (Zanoni:218). Zanoni and Mejnour are trained in Chaldean lore which (according to Bulwer-Lytton ) is much more powerful than Rosicrucian teachings. Many read Zanoni as a Rosicrucian tale but as Wolff points out it "is more properly a novel of the wisdom that the Rosicrucians did not have" (Wolff 1971:185). The Rosicrucians n only have a partial wisdom unlike the truer, ancient wisdom of the Chaldeans known only to Zanoni and Mejnour. In Zanoni, Chaldean lore is put forward as even stronger than modern science which "gradually [makes] the discoveries that revive the truths the Chaldeans knew" (Wolff 1971:184). If these two characters are made portentous it is to make them examples of a strong, powerful mystic belief system.
Concepts such as magnetism, which orthodox science took some time to understand, were practised by those in previous ages. Bulwer-Lytton seems to advocate that a certain amount of retrogression to a time back to the mystics, before Aristotle, is
32 The concept of Rosicrucianism is considered in chapter 3. 55 preferred to the unheeding progression of modern science. He does not make these assertions lightly and indiscriminately — throughout Zanoni Bulwer-Lytton demonstrates his thorough knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of animal magnetism and of its roots in cabalistic and alchemical traditions. For example, as Glyndon continues his alchemical and cabalistic studies, Mejnour reveals the higher magnetism, upon which the magical consciousness is based: "Mejnour professed to find a link between all intellectual beings in the existence of a certain all- pervading and invisible fluid representing electricity ... a fluid that connected thought to thought with the rapidity and precision of the modern telegraph; and the influence of this fluid ... extended to the remotest past ... Thus, if the doctrine were true, all human knowledge became obtainable through a medium established between the brain of the individual inquirer and all the furthest and obscurest region of the universe of ideas" (Zanoni:230).
Bulwer-Lytton's argument seems to be that science might think that it has the answers whereas there is a more subtle aspect of which it is not even aware: "though man can see through a microscope, no mechanical tube is yet invented to discover the nobler and more gifted things that hover in the illimitable air" (Zanoni:226). Nor does Bulwer-Lytton embrace all forms of supernatural activity of his day. Much of the spiritualistic activity of his time was dismissed by him with the question cui bono? — who gains by this? He wants to re-establish the efficacy of mystic beliefs as powerful, robust systems; not effete parlour amusements.
Returning, in conclusion, to the point that the novel is about the lives of individuals, Zanoni, in addition to all the other themes it treats also operates as a Bildungsroman. We see the elderly Glyndon give an account of his impetuous past. Coates sees Glyndon "not so much an artist as a seeker of spiritual wisdom" (1984:229). This spiritual quest is, however, a failed one as such an outcome can only be for one who tries to pre-empt the spiritual journey. Bulwer-Lytton cleverly weaves in threads of art, occultism, political aspirations and spiritual quests to create a rich tapestry of Europe during the French Revolution. 56 The Haunted and the Haunters This short story was written between the writing of Zanoni and A Strange Story. In fact, it first appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in August 1859 but was shortened and reissued in 1861 because of a duplication of parts which would appear in A Strange Story. It is this shortened version which is always reproduced. It continues to be a popular ghost story belonging to the "destructive ghost story sub- genre — a formula in which a person must face and exorcise a malignant force" (Campbell 1986:118).
The narrator stays in a house reputed to be haunted. No one has been able to stay in the house for more than three days, nor do they describe exactly the same phenomena. Inside, he immediately encounters strange events — footsteps and whispering voices, chairs moving by themselves, an unseen child's footprints on the floor, doors suddenly shutting and locking, and breath rising from the cracks in the floor.
The prevailing tone throughout the story is one of rationality. The story has its mandatory haunted house which sounds scary enough until we learn that it "is situated on the north side of Oxford Street, in a dull but respectable thoroughfare" (Haunted and the Haunters:381). In a world, therefore, "which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world" (Messent, ed. 1981:5 33). The narrator who investigates the haunting is frank, business-minded and clear- headed. Bulwer-Lytton approaches the supernatural from an empirical, sensible point of view. He "creates the illusion of experimental verification and scientific objectivity by the insistence on firsthand observation, by the presentation of similar results by numerous observers, and by the depiction of intelligent, reliable witnesses who shun inaccuracy or exaggeration" (Bayer-Berenbaum 1982:121).
The narrative breaks for Bulwer-Lytton (through the narrator) to explain his thesis about the impossibility of the supernatural. (This digression is the same technique as the Faber-Fenwick dialogues we will encounter in A Strange Story.) The theory is that the supernatural does not exist, and what the world calls supernatural is merely something presently inexplicable in the laws of nature. All such marvels — spirit 57 manifestations, odd sounds, automatic writing, levitation, and spirit ectoplasm — supposing no imposture, must have "a human being like ourselves by whom, or through whom, the effects presented to human beings are produced" (Haunted and the Haunters:396). This is true, he claims, of the now familiar phenomena of mesmerism or electrobiology, for "the mind of the person operated on is affected through a material living agent" (Haunted and the Haunters:396). The miraculous occurrences are not divine but mortal in origin. "That this brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into movement, that it is malignant and destructive, I believe" but — it remains unequivocally human (Haunted and the Haunters:409).
Trust in this pragmatic narrator is quickly established so that when he wonders how the ghost could be in the next room without first walking through his own room, an uncritical reader would automatically accept the existence of ghosts and probably wonder the same thing. The premise of the story is that forces within the reach of science may produce effects like those ascribed to evil magic. All the narrator has witnessed so far in the house in Oxford Street must originate in some human being "gifted by constitution with the power" to create such remarkable events (Haunted and the Haunters:396). The narrator is proud that this theory is more philosophical than superstitious.
After this digression, he encounters a horrible series of apparitions. He becomes aware of a darkness shaping itself into a human form of gigantic dimensions with two malignant, serpent eyes looking down at him. Multicoloured bubbles appear, and from them, as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things explode into the room — bloodless and hideous larvae. By focusing his will against the shadow, the narrator overcomes its intense evil. When he lights a candle, the narrator discovers that his dog is dead with its neck broken.
The narrator resolves to clear up all the mysteries associated with the house. His theories on magic reflect Bulwer-Lytton's. Refusing to attribute the mysteries to imposture, the narrator prefers to believe the house contains some power similar to mesmerism but far superior to it. To prove his theory, the narrator convinces J , the owner of the haunted house, to open the walls and remove the floor
33 Citing Tzvetan Todorov. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. 58 of the room he believes to be the source of all the manifestations. Once this is done, they discover a secret room below the haunted room containing an iron safe fixed to the wall. Inside the safe they find a number of occult instruments – bottles of colourless liquids, glass tubes, lumps of rock crystal and amber and a lodestone of great power. Also found is a curious miniature portrait of a middle-aged man with a serpent-like face. Engraved on the back of the miniature is a pentacle with a ladder; the third step of the ladder has the date 1765 on it. There is a name on the miniature which the narrator recognises as belonging to a charlatan who made a great sensation in London years earlier before fleeing the country to escape the charge of murdering his mistress and rival.
They also find a small, thin book placed upon a saucer of crystal filled with a clear liquid. A compass floats on the liquid with its needle shifting rapidly around the dial face. When the narrator touches the saucer he feels a strong electrical shock throughout his body. The walls of the room shake as the contents of the broken saucer spill on the floor. He opens the book and discovers it contains a single sheet of vellum, on which is written in old Latin: "On all that it can reach within these walls – sentient or inanimate, living or dead – as moves the needle, so work my will! Accursed be the house, and restless be the dwellers therein" (Haunted and the Haunters:416). Finding nothing else, they burn the book. Later the owner makes alterations to the house and the evil magician's influence in the house disappears forever.
The Haunted and the Haunters is, then, a "dramatization of Bulwer's theory of magic", namely that magic is merely a phenomenon beyond scientific explanation (Campbell 1986:118). The author has the rational protagonist say what he believes: "Now, my theory is that the Supernatural is the Impossible, and that what is called supernatural is only something in the laws of nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant. Therefore, if a ghost rise before me, I have not the right to say, 'So, then, the supernatural is possible,' but rather, 'So, then, the apparition of a ghost is, contrary to received opinion, within the laws of nature — i.e., not supernatural' (Haunted and the Haunters:395). Always private about his belief in the supernatural, this is the closest that Bulwer-Lytton ever came to giving a public declaration about his belief in magic. He seems to imply that the natural and supernatural are separated by an "illusionary gap" which has been created by ignorance (Bayer-Berenbaum 1982: 121). 59 It should be borne in mind that, even though this may be Bulwer-Lytton's public declaration it is, after all, still only his belief and is not necessarily true.
There is strong evidence that this short story is based on seances which Home conducted at Bulwer-Lytton's home, Knebworth. Home's widow had always resented Bulwer-Lytton for not publicly acknowledging her husband's supernatural abilities. In 1890 she wrote a book called The Gift of D. D. Home where she claims that some of the phenomena in the story are exactly as they took place at Knebworth. She had let this personal vendetta cloud her judgement. As Wolff says: "Home had no patent on such manifestations" and Bulwer-Lytton "hardly owed Home an acknowledgment when he used them in fiction" (Wolff 1971:255).
A Strange Story A Strange Story, The Haunted and the Haunters and Zanoni all share the "same supernatural machinery" of magic (Wolff 1971:309). The magic in Zanoni is natural theurgy. In The Haunted and the Haunters the magic is ascribed to humans aided by magical equipment. In A Strange Story the magic is in the form of clairvoyance and mesmerism — more in keeping with the nineteenth-century trends (although ancient alchemy also plays a big part). Wolff suggests that A Strange Story also "carries with it, as Zanoni did not, an important religious message" (1971:309).
A Strange Story is set during the mid-nineteenth century and addresses the concerns of that time, dominated to a large extent by the tension between science and religion. The novel provides Bulwer-Lytton with a vehicle to explore the "topical reason-faith dichotomy" (Roberts 1990:187) and is as "valuable in its descriptions of mid- nineteenth century magnetic and occultist preoccupations as Zanoni is for the late eighteenth century" (Schuchard 1975:569). It foregrounds the malaise of the time whilst attacking the prevailing scientific materialism of the age. That malaise was the "absorbing tyranny of every-day life", a disintegration of the past being replaced by an uncertain present and future (A Strange Story:331). Bulwer-Lytton puts forward the alternative occult view that the universe is integrated, animated and may be touched or controlled through esoteric ritual. 60 A Strange Story sets out most directly to contradict the materialistic with the occult. Fradin endorses Bulwer-Lytton's view that the nonmaterial nature of man yields as much knowledge about mankind, or perhaps more, than materialism alone. Commenting on A Strange Story, Fradin writes that the novel is concerned with the idea that "man's experience in trance may be as revealing of his essential nature and the nature of reality as the daylight world of his senses ... From trance may well up the most profound truths. [Bulwer-Lytton] ... was seeking in the deepest levels of consciousness some secret power which might transcend the 'absorbing tyranny of everyday life', a power which might make whole again the world disintegrating about him" (1961:13-14).
In A Strange Story Bulwer-Lytton is employing a two-part structure which was designed to juxtapose the real and the mystical. Accordingly, he had to set up the structure of the work to depict both the skeptical and visionary worldviews. In Fenwick, these two worldviews eventually conflate as the avowed Lockean physician is converted, incrementally, to a belief in mysticism. This conversion Fradin calls "a journey of discovery, of the nature of his self and the world. Forced into a confrontation with the inexplicable powers for good and evil, Fenwick learns not only that there is a higher reality, a realm of the spirit, but also that reason and science cannot discover it" (1961:8). Bulwer-Lytton's grandson relates how A Strange Story originated from a dream "even more interesting and striking than the longer story which was afterwards founded upon it" (Life 2:340-341). The work was completed in 1860, serialised weekly, anonymously from 10 August 1861 to 8 March 1862 in Dickens's magazine, All the Year Round (at Dickens's invitation').
The temperamental novelist needed and received much hand-holding particularly from Dickens during the period of writing. Any editorial suggestions by Dickens had to be sugar-coated or else Bulwer-Lytton would take umbrage. In one letter Dickens has to justify certain suggestions he had made: "Be sure that I am perfectly frank and open in all I have said ... and that I have not a grain of reservation in my mind. I think the story is a very fine one, one that no other man could write ... [If Dickens were at Knebworth at that moment he would] swarm up the flagpole as nimbly as Margrave and nail the Fenwick colours to the top" (Wolff 1971:290, and below). Not content
34 Dickens named a child after Bulwer-Lytton. 61 with only Dickens's accolades, Bulwer-Lytton wanted feedback from the managing editor of All the Year Round, Wills, who was also "enchanted by the story ... and thinks it will certainly make a sensation".
In fairness to Bulwer-Lytton , A Strange Story was close to his heart and he wanted to do justice to it. In a letter to his son (14 September 1861): "I fancy this will be my best work of imagination. I fancy it deals with mysteries within and without us wholly untouched as yet by poets. It is not my widest work, but I think it is perhaps the highest and deepest" (Life 2:345).
With little over a week before publication, the apprehensive author wrote a letter to John Forster (both Dickens's and Bulwer-Lytton's manager) expressing reservations about the book's public reception (albeit it was published anonymously!): he was "by no means sure of its effect either with the few or the many" (Life 2:345). As it transpired, the work was not understood by his contemporaries. Bulwer-Lytton wished that a German critic might have reviewed it; such would have been more sensitive to its interior meaning. Instead, the Anthenaeum reviewer reflects the typical English response: A Strange Story is a place where "magic and science ... meet ... in a sort of witch-dance" incomprehensible to those who have not "eaten of the insane root" (Wolff 1971:303, quoting from The Anthenaeum No. 1790, 15 February 1862). The only character who did meet with its approval is Mrs Poyntz.
This is a significant indicator of just how misunderstood A Strange Story was because Mrs Poyntz represents everything Bulwer-Lytton did not believe in. When the book begins, common sense rules and occult matters are mentioned only to be scorned. The social world is described "with all the attention to ordinary detail of a realistic satire ... as though it was intended to be a novel of manners" (Eigner 1978:207). It is no wonder that critics were sad to see Mrs Poyntz disappear. She "has no truck with mesmerism, visions, or indeed anything of the mysterious ... except insofar as ... [they] represent a certain social danger" (Fradin 1961:10). To this extent she is a "symbol of the weight of social convention and restraint, of the smothering force which society exerts on the individual" (Fradin 1961:11). In her own words, to Fenwick: "I do not know whether mesmerism be false or clairvoyance impossible, and I do not wish to know. All I do know is, that I saw the Hill in great danger; young ladies allowing themselves to be put to sleep by gentlemen, and pretending they had no will of their 62 own against such fascination! Improper and shocking!" (A Strange Story:75). In a letter to his son dated 15 April 1862 (Life 2:349), Bulwer-Lytton says: "Vulgar critics say I dismiss Mrs Poyntz too soon. So do I if the novel is only a novel. But if you look into its deeper meanings, Mrs Poyntz [the polite world] vanishes exactly where the polite world does vanish to the intellectual seeker, viz.: — Fenwick, for he escapes from it ..." to be converted in the solitude of Australia.
At the end of the book — now set in the Australian wilderness — the occult dominates: Ayesha supplants Mrs Colonel Poyntz35. Ayesha is the subject of a quirky book by Basham (1992:178-181, quotes below) who sees Ayesha as an Occult Mother and as the Dweller of the Threshold whom met in Zanoni. Ayesha "dominates the uncertain borderlands, whether psychic or geographical" and contains within herself "the energy of enormous paradox and the lethargy of barely sustained contradictions, the Occult Mother appears as a distinctly Victorian configuration for the expression of a profound metaphysical anxiety". I agree with Basham when she says that Ayesha "evokes and attracts the forces of evil" but "does not herself embody them". This explains how she can be Margrave's travel companion and yet assist Fenwick in keeping the spirits at bay assisting, as it were, the bad and the good.
One reason for the poor reception of the novel could be because the genre in which it is written was misunderstood. Readers of the day were more likely to understand realistic literature; which explains the critics' approval of Mrs Poyntz who represents the world of reality. But A Strange Story is a Rosicrucian novel written within the metaphysical (or romance) sub-genre. This type of novel is "real" only to the extent that there is a narrative. But the story-line is merely a framework on which to hang the metaphysical intentions of the novelist. Bulwer-Lytton employed this genre to put forward some of his interests such as "mankind's desire to reintegrate with nature", mankind's desire "to become conqueror of death" and the problems associated with "prohibited knowledge" used to try and achieve these ends (Roberts 1990:198).
Since Bulwer-Lytton is using this metaphysical genre, there is a certain style, a way in which the novel is presented and written. According to Eigner, novelists using this
35 Eigner mentions that Bulwer-Lytton "acting on Dickens' advice made the beginning of A Strange Story more realistic, and, interestingly, Dickens did so at almost precisely the same time when Bulwer-Lytton was persuading Dickens to change the ending of Great Expectations in the direction of romance" (1978:208, with footnote reference to correspondence between the two). 63 genre present their worldview at the end: "the metaphysical novelists, even Bulwer on most occasions, contented themselves by presenting their preferred and uninterrupted worldview last in the sequence. It is, after all, their final word, and we should try to take this fact as aesthetically sufficient" (1978:226). The worldview at the end of A Strange Story is occult, Rosicrucian.
One of the characteristics of the metaphysical novel is arguably also its shortcoming: the characters serve a dual purpose. They help to move the story along but they also represent types. They are stylised, similar (as we have seen) to the characters in Shakespeare's late romance plays. The preface to A Strange Story and a letter to Dickens (Life 2:345-6) help explain the functions of the three main characters Fenwick, Margrave and Lilian as types.
In the preface the author explains that Margrave represents "Firstly, the image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as the Materialist had conceived it. Secondly, [Fenwick represents] the image of Intellect, obstinately separating all [his] inquiries from the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny of man ... And, Thirdly, [Lilian represents] the image of the erring but pure-thoughted visionary, seeking over-much on this earth to separate soul from mind till innocence itself is led astray by a phantom". In his letter to Dickens he makes further comments: "Margrave is the sensuous material principle of Nature ... Fenwick is the type of the intellect that divorces itself from the spiritual, and disdaining to acknowledge the first cause, and the beliefs that spring from it, is cheated by the senses themselves, and falls into all kinds of mistakes and illusions ... [and] Lilian is the type of the spiritual divorcing itself from the intellectual, and indulging in mystic ecstasies which end in the loss of reason" (Life 2:345-6).
All three main characters are fictional manifestations of de Biran's teachings which Bulwer-Lytton explains in the preface. The novel did not always have a preface and it is perhaps as well that Bulwer-Lytton did include one because it holds some valuable keys to understanding the work. In 1862 A Strange Story appeared in book form after it had appeared as a series in All the Year Round. It is in book form that Bulwer- Lytton tried to vindicate himself against the harsh reviews: he included a short preface to explain the story — something Dickens had been vigorously against. In an undated letter to Dickens after serialisation had started he says: "No doubt every story should 64 contain in itself all that is essential to its own explanation — and to a thinker I hope mine does ... [but] how far is it necessary to anticipate the objections of those who don't think" (Life 2:345). The author was in favour of such elaboration but on Dickens's advice he had let A Strange Story appear in All the Year Round uncluttered by interpretations.
Mentioned in the preface is Pierre Maine de Biran (1766 — 1824) whose thinking (in Bulwer-Lytton's opinion) was superior to that of de Biran's teacher, Condillac (1715 - 1780). According to Condillac all our ideas, even our mental operations and faculties originate from sensation alone. This is the animal life and one which appeals to Fenwick the materialist, "a self-confessed follower of Condillac" (A Strange Story: 20). De Biran expands on Condillac's theory, however, adding two more stages to man: free will or self-consciousness, and a soul. Wolff located a volume on de Biran by Ernest Naville, Oeuvres Inedites (1859), which Bulwer-Lytton used when writing the preface. He quotes de Biran's three stages, the stages de Biran personally went through. It is worth producing in full since this is the philosophy upon which A Strange Story is founded:
Animal life, which is characterized by impressions, appetites, and movements, organic in their origin, and ruled by the law of necessity. Human life, which results from the appearance of free will and of self-consciousness. The Life of the spirit, which begins at the moment when the soul, set free from the yoke of its lower attractions, turns toward God, and finds in God its power and its rest.'
The preface explains the controlling philosophical arguments in A Strange Story, as do two lengthy dialogues between Faber (Fenwick's mentor) and Fenwick (a young doctor from a good family). As Wolff says: "These conversations will weary the modern reader, but they are essential to an understanding of Bulwer's own ambivalences about religion, science, and the occult" (1971:278). Fradin is not as gracious as Wolff and views these long dialogues as indicative of Bulwer-Lytton's own insecurity about his subject: "his uncertainty in handling his ideas, his unwillingness or inability to commit himself to the full implications of his material,
36 Wolff 1971: 298, quoting from Naville. 65 weaken and confuse the novel". He was unsure of himself, says Fradin, "and this accounts for a good deal of dross in the novel" (1961: 4, 12).
The Faber-Fenwick dialogues are about trance and dream states, hypnotism and telepathy, and about the probability that what science rejects (rejected knowledge) as "illusion or mental aberration may in fact be inexplicable ways the mind has of revealing truths about the world" (Fradin 1961:12). Fradin in fact associates the internal, psychological conflict Fenwick experiences with the unconscious and how "the unconscious is intimately linked with the occult" (1961:12). And this is wholly in keeping with Bulwer-Lytton's own description of A Strange Story as a "psychological curiosity" (Life 2: 344) and how de Biran, on whose teachings the novel is premised, is regarded as the founding father of the science of psychology (Wolff 1971:297). Through these dialogues, Bulwer-Lytton displays his many years of intelligent investigation of clairvoyance, mesmerism, spectral manifestations, of the "wonderful phenomena in our being all unknown to existing philosophy"; of the "mysteries within and without" (Life 2: 44, 345).
The dialogues with Faber suggest that Christianity is the true belief and the "parade of scientific authorities is marshalled only in the service of religion" (Wolff 1971:310). This blend of Christianity and occult beliefs is as confusing as it is contradictory. Those who "worried most about their feelings of 'honest doubt' often found themselves forever mimicking the language and thought processes of the Christianity they were leaving behind" (Hoppen 1998:427). Even the critic Wolff in his insightful analysis of Bulwer-Lytton goes a bit off track when he says: "Even the final occult words, 'above as below', point only toward a Christian future life" (1971:310). This axiom — "that which is above is as that which is below" — is an alchemical concept attributed to Hermes' Tabula smaragdina and has or may have a Christian connotation only to the extent that alchemy was followed by Christian mystics.
The first dialogue takes place after Fenwick has been released from prison on suspicion of murdering Derval. Through a number of inexplicable events he has become convinced, against his will, that supernatural forces are at work. Faber, however, successfully argues that "there is nothing here which your own study of morbid idiosyncrasies should not suffice to solve" (A Strange Story:295). Fenwick is not insane, Faber argues, but under an illusion. With many references to academics, 66 Faber succeeds in reverting Fenwick back to his natural inclination to accept only rational scientific explanation thereby undoing the painful lessons he has learnt. But Faber is himself puzzlingly inconsistent. If the supernatural appears evil, he explains it away yet he is a "believer in the main divisions of phrenology" (A Strange Story:305). In Lilian, he says, "ideality, wonder, veneration are large ... but they are balanced by other organs, now perhaps dormant, which will come into play as life passes from romance into duty" (A Strange Story:305). This ambivalence might be because Faber is religious. He cannot approve Fenwick's rationalistic book on physiology because it is Godless. He gives Fenwick a Bible and urges him to pray.
The second dialogue occurs near the end of A Strange Story when the two are in Australia, both having experienced too much exposure to the supernatural to refute it. Referring to all that they have experienced, Fenwick now insists that Faber account for "facts which you cannot resolve into illusions" (A Strange Story:411). In a surprising about turn Faber answers: "... here we approach a ground which few physicians have dared to examine. Honour to those, who, like our bold contemporary Elliotson, have braved scoff and sacrificed dross in seeking to extract what is practical in uses, what can be tested by experiment, from those exceptional phenomena on which magic sought to found a philosophy and to which philosophy traces the origins of magic" (A Strange Story:411).
This reference to Elliotson relates to the controversy created by Dr John Elliotson, a friend of Bulwer-Lytton's and a firm believer in mesmerism. Elliotson, who edited Zoist, a journal devoted to mesmerism, was asked by the Royal Society of Medicine to give an address to them. He chose the "still enormously controversial subject of mesmerism" (Wolff 1971:236) and came under severe attack from the Society.
Faber continues: though he has not personally experienced the wonders "ascribed to animal magnetism and electrical biology" (as Elliotson had), mankind has always thought that "in some peculiar and rare temperaments [there is] a power over forms of animated organisation, with which they establish some unaccountable affinity; and even ... over inanimate matter" (A Strange Story:412). Referring to a number of people, ancient and modern (including Eliphas Levi), Faber — beginning with open praise for Elliotson — now voices the theories of Bulwer-Lytton himself: the mystical powers of certain temperaments, the strange attributes of electricity, the ability of 67 magicians to provoke hallucinations in other brains and his emphasis on the independent power of the imagination (Phantasy) to create apart from the senses. Faber thus departs from his former insistence on purely rational explanations; neither denying nor admitting his obvious shift in position since their last long debate. As this dialogue occurs at the end of the novel; in keeping with the style of the metaphysical novel, we can assume this is Bulwer-Lytton's last word on his philosophy and the one he wants his reader to believe.
Whereas Faber is Bulwer-Lytton's static mouthpiece for his theories, Fenwick supplies the dynamic action in the novel as the reader watches him convert from a materialist to a believer in the supernatural. Fenwick undergoes a dramatic conversion in A Strange Story; he accepts that there is also a metaphysical dimension and that man has an immortal soul. Until this materialist is re-educated he represents the Enlightened thinker so fully as to almost be a caricature. Fenwick explains his sense- experience of the world: "I clamped and soldered dogma to dogma in the links of my tinkered logic ... till out grew Intellectual Man, as the pure formation of his material sense; mind or what is called soul, born from them and nurtured by them alone" (A Strange Story:457). At this stage he does not recognise the concept of a soul. To this extent Fenwick represents those Victorians experiencing a crisis of faith precipitated to some extent by Darwin's theory which did not take the immortal soul into account.
Fenwick is a man of science who cannot believe that the boundaries of "legitimate science", the domain of the "Academe of decorous science", extend to incorporate the "fables of wizards" (A Strange Story:19). In this belief Fenwick is "cheated by the senses" (Life 2:346), living by the half-light of intellect. In his benighted state he is writing a wholly materialistic work — a book to disprove the existence of God and soul. Fenwick is a typical nineteenth-century scientist, according to Eigner, in that he believes that "by a painstaking study and analysis of each separate part of nature, man will come ultimately to an understanding of the forces which baffle him" (1978:225). This Baconian method is contrary to the holistic occult worldview of an animated, inter-related universe. As events unfold, however, Fenwick is confronted with situations for which his intellect alone has not equipped him. In being confronted with inexplicable powers of good and evil he learns, not through reason and science, but empirically that there is another reality — a spirit world. When Fenwick arrives at the country town of L to take up the practice of a retiring colleague of his, 68 Faber, he is a follower of Condillac. He accepts nothing without evidential proof, particularly the existence of the human soul. To Fenwick death means the end of body and mind and he disbelieves in the existence of the soul.
It is no surprise that he cannot agree with the town's other medical man Dr Lloyd. Fenwick scorns Lloyd for being a follower of Puysegur, a mesmerist. Lloyd is "not only an enthusiastic advocate of mesmerism, as a curative process, but as an ardent believer of the reality of somnambular clairvoyance" (A Strange Story:20). Fenwick engages in a pamphlet controversy with Lloyd, and has the best of it. When Lloyd calls Fenwick to his deathbed he denounces him and predicts his punishment: "In those spaces which your sight has disdained to explore, you shall yourself be a lost and bewildered straggler ... The gibbering phantoms are gathering round you" (A Strange Story:25). Much of the novel is about how Fenwick does experience this punishment but triumphs and learns from it. Fenwick is working on a book, Inquiry into Organic Life, which will include a chapter on "Cheats of the Senses and Spectral Phantasms". Whilst he is writing he hears a sigh and sees something like a phantom of Lilian but plans only to include the anecdote in his book.
The conversion process which Fenwick undergoes starts when he meets and falls into conversation with Derval at a ball given by the Mayor of L , ironically to celebrate the opening of a museum of stuffed animals collected by the late Dr Lloyd. Sir Philip Derval, a man who practices the occult for the good of mankind, is in England in search of an evil man called Margrave. An Arab girl clairvoyant has shown him where Margrave is, and reveals that Fenwick will help in the pursuit. Derval tries to persuade Fenwick that the study of mesmerism "may enable you to perceive the truth that lies hid in the powers ascribed to witchcraft; benevolence is but a weak agency compared to malignancy; magnetism perverted to evil solve [lies at the root of] half the riddles of sorcery" (A Strange Story:176, and below). He suggests that Fenwick has been too hasty in dismissing clairvoyant phenomena: "trance is as essential a condition of being as sleep or waking ... [it] is producible in every human being however unimpressionable to mere mesmerism".
Derval then goes on to explain three kinds of trance: the ordinary mesmeric state, to which animals are susceptible; the mental trance, in which the mind travels over great distances like a rocket. Here Bulwer-Lytton is explaining his own theory incorporated 69 in an essay of his, On the Normal Clairvoyance of the Imagination. The third trance is a spiritual trance, in which the soul entirely supersedes the action of the mind. Derval likens the three trance states to that between the solid, liquid and gaseous states of matter. In both the physical and metaphysical, it is heat which physically changes matter from one form to another and metaphysically determines which of the three types of trances occur. Already the mention of heat alludes to alchemy, a theme developed more fully later.
Fenwick refuses to believe that he could be put into a trance, or to make a distinction between the mind and the soul. Derval, knowing that Margrave is also at the ball, asks Fenwick to bring Margrave to him and asks if he can put Fenwick into a trance to demonstrate his point. Fenwick brings Margrave to Derval, who puts both of them into a trance. Fenwick sees Margrave as he had been three years earlier in Arabia in Haroun's house in Aleppo, before taking the elixir of life. He is aged, withered and vicious.
Fenwick's vision extends to the inside of Margrave's brain, and in it he sees flashes of light in three colours: red signifying the animal nature, pale azure the intellectual nature, and a silvery colour the spiritual nature. In this trance-state, Fenwick can see life return to all the stuffed animals, including the "mockery of man", the giant ape (A Strange Story:169). The animals have the red and azure but not the silvery flashes. Only in Margrave is there "the starry silver spark" representing the soul — de Biran's third stage of man. The Gnostics believe that man "contains a spark of God, and of the necessity of awakening from the half-life he leads on earth — described variously as numbness, sleep or intoxication — to a full consciousness of his divinity and of how it has been ensnared in matter" (Webb 1974:199). Man, according to the Gnostics, is composed of a body and a soul, which belong to the material world, and a divine spark, or pneuma, which is the godly element within him. As long as man is kept in ignorance, he will continue to be a prisoner. Knowledge, or gnosis, is the most important weapon in freeing the spirit from its bondage (McIntosh 1980:25).
The reference to the ape is Bulwer-Lytton taking a stab at evolution. The attack is too intense and melodramatic for Fradin — "Bulwer's intense reaction" is "an overflow of nervous anxiety which splashes disconcertingly over the surface of the novel" (1961:5). Yet he does concede that, in 1861, evolution is precisely the type of issue 70 with which Bulwer-Lytton should have been grappling. One of the dilemmas evolution raises is: if man is linked to animals by an evolutionary chain, could man have an eternal spark in him? If all life is is a battle for survival, a blind process, where does God fit in?
As Fenwick watches the flashes in Margrave's brain, he actually sees Margrave's soul depart: "I knew that it was imploring release ... And suddenly the starry spark rose ... into space and vanished" (A Strange Story:188). The red light burns vividly. He sees Margrave's body restored to youth by his murder of Haroun and his theft and drinking of the elixir, but his soul, unable to bear the crime, has left him. The azure light of the mind is also still present but it has "lost its faculty of continued and concentrated power" (A Strange Story:188). Margrave is then truly what Fenwick has observed — a being with superb animal strength and a good though capricious mind, but with no soul at all. Fenwick is at last convinced that there is a human soul as distinct from the human mind.
Wolff takes issue with Fradin on the point of whether Margrave's soul remains or departs. Fradin ends his commentary on the museum scene with the following: "which shows that the soul remains inviolate even when surrounded by evil" (1961:6). Wolff, however, contends that Bulwer-Lytton's purpose was to "portray a human being who had lost his soul" (1971:273). Although this is in keeping with the description of Margrave in the preface ("soulless Nature"), it does not really support Bulwer-Lytton's argument against evolution. If the spark represents the human- defining attribute and if it leaves the moment it encounters evil, does this mean the person ceases to be human? Wolff s view is supported by the story itself The wise sage Haroun told Derval of instances where the human soul had departed: "The human animal without soul ... might ravage and destroy ... and the moment after would sport in the sunlight harmless and rejoicing because like the serpent and the tiger it is incapable of remorse" (A Strange Story:185).
It is important to settle this point because the museum scene addresses one of the key themes of the novel: the contrast of the animal and the human and an insistence on some separate spiritual essence that exists only in man. If man can also become soulless, Bulwer-Lytton's argument fails. Perhaps the way out of this impasse is to take the departure of the soul as a literary device facilitating Fenwick's conversion. 71 The occult is used to transform empirical reality by bringing into being forces of the invisible world that act on visible things. Fenwick believes only in the real but here he witnesses how the invisible has changed the real. This persuades him to convert. Seeing the soul depart and the mind remain convinces Fenwick that man does have a human soul, and that it is distinct from the human mind. Wolff (1971:307, 363 n72) refers to a letter from Chancey Hare Townshend to Bulwer-Lytton praising A Strange Story where he says of Margrave: "I vow I almost accept the soulless being as a truth". By using the word "almost" he seems to imply "but of course you and I know that that cannot be true".
Taking a step back to look at the trance scene as a whole, it provides Bulwer-Lytton with another opportunity to weave in the Blakean belief of the possibilities of visionary experiences which Schuchard terms "somnambulistic lucidity" or "magnetic ecstasy" (1975:569). Schuchard says that "Bulwer had experienced this state himself' but unfortunately does not provide a reference. What he does also say, however, needs no substantiation: "it is one of the clearest accounts of the ecstatic trance state in literature" (1975:569). In this trance-state Fenwick feels "a wonderful calm", "a release from torture", "a consciousness of some lofty intelligence immeasurably beyond that which human memory gathers from earthly knowledge" (A Strange Story:184). He can now "survey the mechanism of the whole interior being" (A Strange Story:185). Fradin makes the perceptive observation: "Fenwick 'sees' most deeply when the conscious mind and reason are asleep" (1961:6).
This ability to see inside "was ... the means of magnetic healing, practised by so many of Blake's associates and described by Blake in Milton and Jerusalem" (Schuchard 1975:570). This is the ability Lilian has had all her life. She seems to be one character especially created under the influence of Blake. Schuchard points out (1975:570) that when Lilian becomes completely absorbed into a somnambulistic state, Bulwer- Lytton describes her drawings as Blake-like: "the drawings were strange and fantastic; they had a resemblance to those which the painter Blake, himself a visionary, illustrated the Poems of the Night Thoughts and The Grave, — faces of exquisite loveliness, forms of aerial grace, coming forth from the bells of flowers, or floating upwards amidst the spray of fountains, their outlines melting away in fountain or flower" (A Strange Story:336). It is worth noting here Story's opinion of Blake's 72 visionary drawings: "They are carefully drawn, and rather pleasing in expression, albeit somewhat feminine" (1894:261).
I believe that much of Bulwer-Lytton's mention of Blake is attributable to John Varley (1778 — 1842). They mixed in the same circle at Lady Blessington's and in all liklihood met there (Story 1894: ). Varley was introduced to Blake through a former pupil of Varley's, Linnell in 1819. The friendship lasted until 1826. Their friendship revolved around art and that "they were perfectly at one in regard to their belief in the possibility of the ghosts or spirits of men dead making themselves visible to the living" (Story 1894:260). Linnell would sit in on visits between Varley and Blake and recalls the events which transpired. Blake would put on his seeing cap, see a spirit ("There he is!") "and pencil and paper at hand, he would begin drawing with the utmost alacrity and composure, looking up from time to time as though he had a real sitter before him; ingenuous Varley meanwhile straining wistful eyes into vacancy and seeing nothing..." (Story 1894:260). Story's accounts (1894:261) of Blake's ghost-drawing have an air of the matter-of-fact about them:
Sometimes Blake had to wait for the Vision's appearance; sometimes it would come at call. At others, in the midst of his portrait, he would suddenly leave off, and, in his ordinary quiet tones ... would remark 'I can't go on, — it is gone! I must wait till it returns'; or, 'It has moved. The mouth is gone'; or, 'He frowns; he is displeased with my portrait of him,' which seemed as if the vision were looking over the artist's shoulder as well as sitting vis-a-vis for his likeness.
This matter-of-factness extends even to when Blake, in a visionary trance, chats with the ghost of a flea. Varley says (recounted by Story 262-263) :
As I was anxious to make the most correct investigation in my power of the truth of these visions, on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him [Blake] if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw. He instantly said, 'I see him now before me.' I therefore gave him paper and pencil, with which he drew the portrait ... I felt convinced, by his mode of proceeding, that he had a real image before him; for he left off and began on another part of the mouth of the Flea, which the spirit having opened, he was 73 prevented from proceeding with the first sketch till he had closed it. During the time occupied in completing the drawing, the Flea told him that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men as were by nature bloodthirsty to excess, and were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects; otherwise, were he himself, for instance, the size of a horse, he would depopulate a great portion of the country.
When Bulwer-Lytton associates both Lilian and Glyndon (in Zanoni) with Blake, he invites the reader to identify his characters with this supreme visionary.
Margrave's character is the opposite of Lilian's. Critics liken him to two fictional characters: Faust, and Jekyll and Hyde. As we have seen, Margrave represents de Biran's animal life ruled by impressions and appetites, by the law of necessity and organic in origin. He is seen by Roberts as a Faustian figure "who is determined to discover the Rosicrucian secret of immortality" but who "overlooks the spiritual preparation to be made by the individual before partaking of such sacred knowledge" (1990:187, 193). He renounces his soul in order to try and gain perpetual life but instead becomes "an incarnation of evil ... [reverting] almost atavistically to the level of a creature governed by mere animal appetites" (Roberts 1990:19). Derval calls him a monster "for without metaphor, monster it is, not man like ourselves" (A Strange Story:87).
If he is a monster, Fenwick describes him as an attractive one: "Never have I seen a human face so radiant as that young man's ... an indefinable something that simply dazzles ... In the features themselves there was a faultless regularity ... stature ... about the middle height. But the effect of the whole was not less transcendent. Large eyes, unspeakably lustrous; a most harmonious colouring; and the form itself so critically fine that the welded structure of its sinews was best shown in the lightness and grace of its movements. His vein of talk ... peculiar, off-hand, careless, shifting from topic to topic with a bright rapidity ... In one sentence he showed that he had mastered some late discovery by Faraday or Liebig; in the next ... he was talking the wild fallacies of Cardan or Van Helmont" (A Strange Story:121).
Fradin's interpretation of Margrave is that "At one level ... [he] is an 'image' as `conceived' by Fenwick; that is, allegorically, something within Fenwick, and the 74 novel may be read as an allegory of conflicting forces within the human personality" (1961:9) — Fenwick as Dr Jekyll and the Margrave "within" as Hyde. Within Fenwick's unconscious is the capacity for good and evil, as in all humans. His refusal to acknowledge the spirit dimension curbs the development of his personality and makes place for a Margrave to enter and reside. It will take a union with Lilian to exorcise Margrave from him. Fenwick's turning to Lilian comes "only after he has allegorically come to recognize the psychic depths and has absorbed their effects into his total personality" (Fradin 1961:10).
When Haroun tells Derval of instances where the human soul had departed and one moment might ravage and destroy and the next sport in the sunlight, he has someone like Margrave in mind. When Margrave and Fenwick are on a walk, Margrave rushes up a tree in pursuit of a squirrel. It bites him and he furiously wrings its neck and tramples on its corpse. He shows as little concern when he carelessly drops and hurts a child he has been carrying on his shoulders. The next moment he is saying to Fenwick: "Man! Man! ... Could you live one hour of my life you would know how horrible a thing it is to die", and bursts into tears (A Strange Story:135). He is rich, fascinating and fickle. Margrave is eagerly seeking the elixir but needs someone of Lilian's psychic attributes to assist — someone "in whom the gift of the Pythoness is stored, unknown to the possessor, undetected by the common observer, but the signs of which should be as apparent to the modern physiologist as they were to the ancient priest" (A Strange Story:146). Not even murder will stand in his way in this pursuit.
After the museum incident Fenwick is imprisoned on suspicion of killing Derval. Margrave helps Fenwick clear his name and he is released. In fact it is Margrave who arranged this murder through supernatural means. The reasons Margrave did this was to make Fenwick indebted to him so that he would be more inclined to help Margrave make the elixir of life and to keep Fenwick out of the way while he tried to persuade Fenwick's fiancée, Lilian, to assist him with her gift of clairvoyance, since she is the Pythoness he speaks of
Fenwick next meets up with Margrave at the late Derval's house where Margrave is staying. Margrave has a magic wand, an Egyptian cane with a dark blue stone on it. Holding it gives Fenwick a sensation like an electric shock and makes him feel lighter. At Margrave's request, Fenwick copies onto a piece of paper Solomon's seal, 75 the six-pointed star. Having touched the magic wand and personally drawn the symbol, Fenwick has unwittingly set himself up to be part of a magical evocation. He is summoned in the middle of the night by a shining corpse (the Scin-Laeca of Scandinavian legend), an apparition of Margrave, which forces him to perform a magical evocation. This ritual is similar to the one that Eliphas Levi performed when he attempted to evoke Appolonius of Tyana in London, at which Bulwer-Lytton is said to have been present (Wilson 1971:197, for full account.)
Margrave draws a pentacle' in a nine-foot circle on the floor and this is set alight. Fenwick is made to stand in the circle and repeat words in an unknown tongue. Dogs howl, the ground trembles and shadows are glimpsed thronging. Terrified and unwilling to continue, Fenwick is just about to be forced to do so by the apparition when he hears Lilian's voice saying "Hold!" and sees her. He escapes to bed, convinced that it is all a hallucination. In the morning, Margrave has gone, leaving the cane, which Fenwick takes. The pentacle is still visible on the floor: it was no dream. The ostensibly passive and indifferent Lilian does love Fenwick; she called out the warning to him in her sleep. Fenwick has experienced moving between the visible and invisible worlds, through the use of symbols. The symbols act as an agent between the visible and invisible worlds. To this extent the symbols are "an empirical referent capable of being grasped by the senses", "an image, gesture, phrase, physical object" — "anything which can act as an interchange between the two worlds, a point of contact between the manifest and hidden reality" (Tiryakian 1974:5).
The final stage of Fenwick's conversion takes place at the end of the novel in the so- called 'cauldron scene'. At the end of A Strange Story Margrave has traced Fenwick to Australia. Fenwick agrees to help Margrave create the elixir. All that is necessary is a natural substance found near gold deposits (there is one on Fenwick's estate), which must be cooked in a cauldron for six hours and mixed with other ingredients already in Margrave's possession. To protect themselves against the "invisible tribes that abhor men", who appear when the borders of knowledge are crossed, the cauldron is set up within a wide circle traced on the ground; within it are four interlaced triangles (A Strange Story:514). About the circle twelve lamps are placed, and four more mark the points of the triangles. These Fenwick must constantly feed with a special fluid, of
37 Wilson's interpretation is that man is the microcosm whose symbol is the five-pointed star (pentacle) and the universe is the macrocosm and its symbol is the six-pointed star - Solomon's seal (I 971:231). 76 which there is a limited supply. Ayesha, the Arab woman who has accompanied Margrave from the east, is also present to assist.
During the making of the elxir the ground trembles, as it did earlier during the evocation at Derval's house. The spirits gather: a great eye is seen in the distance, and other eyes appear; some of the fuel for the lamps is spilled; Ayesha's chant temporarily quiets the aggressive spirits, but a giant foot, belonging to one of the demons, crosses into the circle and is only temporarily halted by Ayesha's and Fenwick's courage. Then a great fire in the bush behind them precipitates a stampede of cattle. At the last moment, when the six hours are almost over, the crazed animals overrun the magic circle and tip over the cauldron. Margrave dies trying to lap up the elixir that has been spilled on the ground. Foiling the ambush planned for him by Margrave, Fenwick makes his way back to his house through the burning forest. With Margrave's death, Lilian has completely recovered. In the novel good prevails, demonstrated when Ayesha says: "the Spirits who oppose us have summoned a foe that is deaf to my voice, and — "And", exclaimed Margrave ... "and this witch [Ayesha] whom I trusted, is a vile slave and imposter, more desiring my death than my life ..." (A Strange Story:525).
I believe that the foe who is deaf to her voice is Lilian. If this is so, then it is in keeping with the intention of the cauldron scene: it is not right that the creation of the elixir should go through to its successful conclusion because that would mean that even an evil person like Margrave could make the elixir of life. And yet the cauldron scene is necessary to bring Fenwick to the conclusion of his re-education as a materialist. When Ayesha perishes with Margrave only good is left to prevail. Margrave's reasons for wanting the elixir are purely selfish but, using literary license, it is a way for Bulwer-Lytton to bring Fenwick and Margrave together at the end — the one to live, purged of evil; the other to die because of evil. At the end of the story there is a "curious twist" where Fenwick achieves the immortality he at first did not believe in but Margrave loses the mortality for which he had killed. These.two were indeed in a "strange symbiotic relationship" (Roberts 1990:192). However, it is only under the good influence of Lilian, that Fenwick is able to withstand the ordeal.
This scene sees the death of Margrave who throughout the novel has been trying to manufacture another supply of the elixir of life. The belief in an universal, alchemic 77 medicine which could cure diseases, reverse old age or bring one back from the brink of death has always been compelling and appeals widely to mortal humans — not least Margrave. He wants Fenwick to perform experiments in order to "replenish or preserve to each special constitution the special substance" that it needs to keep its health in balance (A Strange Story:133). Early on in the novel, when Fenwick is not yet prepared to help Margrave create the elixir, he jokingly asks Margrave if "the Rosicrucians" have "bequeathed him an elixir of life" (A Strange Story:134).
Bulwer-Lytton manipulates this Rosicrucian tradition relating to the making of the elixir. The tradition is that not just anyone can make the elixir; a Rosicrucian had to obey certain rules and be pure within: an inner and outer alchemy had to be achieved before the mixture was efficacious. In fact, extending a Rosicrucian's life-span was not for gratuitous reasons but so that the member could carry on doing good works. I do not see the way the Rosicrucian tradition is portrayed in the novel as damaging to the tradition; agreeing with Roberts that more important is "the artistic possibilities presented by the legendary philosopher's stone and elixir of life which has become part of the Rosicrucian tradition" (1990:8).
When the making of the elixir is well underway Margrave says, "See how the Grand Work advances! How the hues in the cauldron are glowing blood-red through the film on the surface!" (A Strange Story: 520). According to Rosicrucian tradition red was the climactic final colour change, signifying rebirth and the development of a new life. Just before the cauldron is overturned Margrave exclaims, "behold how the Rose of the alchemist's dream enlarges its blooms from the folds of its petals! I shall live, I shall live!" (A Strange Story:526). When Fenwick looks, after the six hours have passed, "the liquid ... had now taken a splendour that mocked all comparisons borrowed from the lustre of gems. In its prevalent colour it had, indeed, the dazzle and flash of the ruby; but, out from the mass of the molten red, broke coruscation of all prismal hues, shooting, shifting, in a play that made the wavelets themselves seem living things, sensible of their joy. No longer was there scum or film upon the surface; only ever and anon a light rosy vapour floating up ... And these coruscations formed, on the surface of the molten ruby, literally the shape of a Rose, its leaves made distinct in their outlines by sparkles of emerald and diamond, and sapphire" (A Strange Story:526). These references are Bulwer-Lytton's endorsement of the Rosicrucians: the elixir appears in the form of a rose, their emblem. 78
The cauldron scene is part magical, part alchemical. It is magical to the extent that the circle and triangles on the ground and the protection against the gathering demons are reminiscent of Eliphas Levi's attempted evocation of Apollonius of Tyana. When Fenwick accidentally touches the edge of the circle in the cauldron scene his arm "felt a shock like that of electricity" and fell to his side "numbed and nerveless" (A Strange Story:520). This is a direct reference to Levi's experience; when he touched the supposed apparition of Appolonius of Tyana, his arm was stunned and swollen, remaining sore for days (Wilson 1971:197, for full account).
The cauldron scene is also alchemical. Alchemy flourished between the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries but then came under increasing ridicule and attack by the partisans of rationality, beginning with the Age of Enlightenment — "so much so that for the majority of 'positive minds' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is no longer any doubt whatever that the art of metallic transmutations, that ancient chimera cultivated by people enamoured of the absolute, is definitely lifeless, given the progress of the chemical sciences" (Faivre et al 1992:71). So might agree a staunch positivist such as Fenwick. That is why Bulwer-Lytton's portrayal of alchemy in A Strange Story is all the more pronounced when we see this arch-positivist Fenwic)!_ fully convinced of alchemy in this quintessentially alchemic experiment. Fenwick, regretting his earlier disbelief in alchemy says: "Oh! that I had not so disdainfully turned away from ... nothing guiltier than lawful experiment [alchemy]. Had I been less devoted a bigot to this vain schoolcraft, which we call Medical Art, ... had I said `these alchemists were men of genius and thought; we owe to them nearly all the grand hints of our chemical science' ..." (A Strange Story:457).
Those who believe in alchemy condemn themselves to "social and cultural marginality" (Faivre et al 1992:72). Those who have chosen this voluntary self-exile from society, such as esoterics, do so because they see in alchemy "an ever-vital spiritual and creative fecundity" (Faivre et al 1992:72). Based as it is on the art of fire, alchemy is "at once [a] laboratory practice and [an] illuminative gnosis — a `metallurgical mysticism' (Faivre et al 1992:72, 73). The general aim of the alchemists is to "carry out in the laboratory, as far as possible, the processes which Nature" carries out (Hall 1928:cliv). Through the art of alchemy, however, the effects "are produced in a comparatively short time which requires Nature almost endless 79 periods to duplicate" (Hall 1928:cliv). The attraction for believers in alchemy is that, being at once a practice and a divine knowledge, it acts as a "mediator between the realms of matter and Spirit" (Faivre et al 1992:74, and below). This concept is not religion-specific which is why alchemy is practised by those holding various religious beliefs. Alchemy has, however, found a particular place in Christianity "the religion of incarnation par excellence" where Christ acts as mediator between heaven and earth.
In alchemy there are three important symbolic substances in the chemical world: mercury, sulphur and salt. These substances have their counterparts in three other worlds: God — Father, Son and Holy Ghost; Man — spirit, soul and body, and Elements — fire, air and water. Those who only wish to use alchemy for selfish ends (such as Margrave) do not realise that mercury, sulphur and salt exist in these other forms in all four worlds — they are not only chemical elements but have spiritual and invisible counterparts. The Philosopher's Stone exists in "each of the four worlds and ... the consummation of the experiment cannot be realized until it is successfully carried on in four worlds simultaneously according to one formula. Furthermore, one of the constituents of the alchemical formula exists only within the nature of man himself, without which his chemicals will not combine" (Hall 1928:clvi). Those with mercenary intentions will not be able to conduct successful experiments because they have not achieved this inner alchemy. Even though he follows every step carefully and accurately, someone such as a material scientist (Fenwick) or someone who harbours evil (Margrave) will fail because "the subtle element which comes out of the nature of the illuminated and regenerated alchemical philosopher is missing in his experimentation" (Hall 1928:clvi). The phoenix is regarded as a symbol of this required inner alchemical transmutation, "a process equivalent to human regeneration" (Hall 1928:xc, and below). In esoteric groups it was common to refer to initiates as phoenixes since, like the phoenix which dies by fire, but rises out of it renewed, the initiate dies to the world and is "born into a consciousness of the spiritual world".
The purpose of the fire is to animate and activate by "delivering metals from their imperfection and humankind from death" (Faivre et al 1992:76). Alchemy is the art of fire which alchemists liken to the secret Fire in Nature which the anima mundi, the spirit of the earth, uses to animate and activate "even the smallest particle of matter" (Faivre et al 1992:76). This interpretation of fire "is sometimes associated with the active imagination, alone capable of 'informing' and animating matter; it is not a 80 simple support or pretext for spiritualization, but the 'place' [the crucible] wherein the instrument whereby transmutation takes place (temporally and spatially), permitting the corporealization of the spirit and the spiritualization of the body" (Faivre et al 1992:77).
This interpretation emphasises the important role of the imagination — an importance the Romantics, including Bulwer-Lytton, also attached to the power of the imagination. Associating alchemy with the active imagination helps explain why Romantics had such an affinity to the esoteric, and why materialists did not, given their preference for the material over the imaginative. Alchemy is based on the premise that matter is animated, "in contrast to the proofs which the physical and chemical sciences supposedly bequeathed to the nineteenth century and which are themselves today brought into question by modern conceptions of matter'" (Faivre et al 1992:79). Shocked and affronted by the "rationalist clarities" of the Enlightenment, "romanticism proceeded towards an inversion of the values of day and night" and tended to make the night the domain in which all revelations arose" (Faivre et al 1992:83, and next two). The evocation at Derval's house and the cauldron scene both take place at night. Romantic thought, then, is marked by a "mystical nocturnal order of the imaginary — by its uterine involution, its propensity to dream, indeed, by its derealization". It is no less true that "the romantics sometimes considered their passage through the night to be the promise of a civilizing dawn yet to come".
The remainder of the novel sees Fenwick truly united with Lilian: "heart to heart, mind to mind" to which Fenwick adds "And soul to soul ... Above as below, soul to soul!" (A Strange Story:537). The words "above as below" are the occult words implying the correspondence between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of the individual.
Released from the evil influences of Margrave, Fenwick has now enters into a union with Lilian where all three states of de Biran's man now enjoy equal status. Fenwick's
38 For example, the wave-particle duality of matter in terms of quantum theory. In some experiments matter exhibits wave-like properties and in other experiments particle-like properties. It appears that "when we look at an electron the act of looking disturbs the system" (Collins and Pinch. Frames of Meaning. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1982:67). This type of 'observer-effect' might well be linked to the power of the imagination. 39 Both in literature, for example, Novalis's Hymnen and die Nacht (Hymns to the Night), 1800, Kerner's The Seeress of Prevorst, 1829 and in quasi-science, for example Mesmer (1734 - 1815) with his magnetic experiments. 81 discovery that man has a soul is hard-won: "he repudiates those who accept with credulity what they cannot explain by reason, including a belief in God and the existence of a human soul" (Campbell 1986:124). This may undermine the blind religious faith of the Victorian Evangelists but Bulwer-Lytton creates Fenwick this way in order to align him more closely to de Biran who also subscribed to empirical metaphysics. His conversion is authentic and devoid of evil elements according to Fradin: "When Fenwick arises symbolically reborn from the ashes of the climatic ritual, he has done two closely related things: he has faced the metaphysical evil which his 'science' had earlier refused to acknowledge, and which his new faith transcends; and having recognized and embraced the unconscious, he has triumphed over its destructive element" (1961:10).
The Coming Race The Coming Race (1871), written two years before his death, would be Bulwer- Lytton' s last work with an occult theme, "the climax and summing up of [his] ... long love affair with the supernatural" (Wolff 1971:323). The science fiction novel is considered to have been perfected by H G Wells ° and yet The Coming Race is clearly science fiction and preceded Wells by twenty years. It has a veiled reference, I believe, to nuclear power as the Vril-ya have developed "destructive powers which our science could not ... cope with" (Life 2:465).
Published anonymously, The Coming Race was a great success and highly praised by "precisely the reviewers who would have been most uncivil to the author if they had guessed him" (Life 2:469). In June 1871 Bulwer-Lytton wrote to his son: "I don't think people have caught or are likely to catch the leading idea of the book" (Life 2:468); again demonstrating his remarkable distrust in the intellectual ability of his readers. Perhaps he feared that the wrong people would read his work and seemed to be at pains to sell the occult to those who would not ordinarily have bought it. This fear of misinterpretation did happen, however, some fifty years later in a way that Bulwer-Lytton never envisaged.
4° The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature. Oxford: OUP 1987:400 82 Bulwer-Lytton sets the action within the earth; making literary use of an idea which has been in and out of vogue over the centuries: that the earth is hollow'. He did not seriously believe in the hollow earth theory calling his book "a fantastic story of an imaginary race ... a tale of adventure" (Life 2:462). In The Coming Race Bulwer- Lytton has veiled much of the occult teaching he holds to be true.
The novel begins by stressing that the account is pure fiction: an unnamed American visits an unnamed mine in an unnamed country. He slides down a shaft and finds himself in a pleasant, artificially-lit world. He is confronted by a tall being, just below the height of a giant, shaped like a man but of another race, the Vril-ya. The creature is winged and carries a metal staff. This staff contains a unique power called vril. His face is calm and beautiful. When this angel-like being places a hand upon the stranger's shoulder and touches him with the staff, all fear is replaced by a sense of contentment, joy and confidence in himself The pair then enter an ornate building with music in the background, birds caged everywhere, and automata for servants. The traveller is put to sleep and when he awakens he is surrounded by more of these superior beings. In the interrogation which follows, he senses that they are trying to decide whether he should live or die. In the end, he is taken home by the one who first found him, where he is welcomed by the family.
At this point the novel separates into three strands based on different theoretical and philosophical constructions. These form the basis of the story. This technique of a slender plot and various digressions is no different to what we have experienced in The Haunted and the Haunters and A Strange Story. The difference is that we not only hear the views of the human protagonist who represents the surface culture, but we can compare these views to those of the underground culture. This technique allows Bulwer-Lytton to present ideas from several points of view which deepens the perspective.
The first strand involves the traveller and the being who first discovered him, Alph- Lin, who explains his culture's history, art, religion, political science, and technology. He appears to be describing a utopia. The Coming Race is ostensibly a "typical early instance of an evolutionary utopia" which "may be considered the starting point for
41 Haining (1977:10-23) gives various examples. 83 the modern development of utopian fiction" (Gerber 1973:18). Bulwer-Lytton is, however, satirising the utopia to such an extent that it becomes a dystopia. In a letter to John Forster, his publisher, Bulwer-Lytton says that The Coming Race is based on "the Darwinian proposition that a coming race is destined to supplant our races" (Life 2:464). Since A Strange Story a decade before had an anti-Darwin aspect (and Bulwer-Lytton's views on evolution had not changed), this Darwinian premise is by no means accepted; it sets the novel up as a satire, as a dystopia. The Coming Race is an early example of the dystopia genre that was to culminate in Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. How much novels such as The Coming Race influenced later authors could be the subject of further study.
Through evolution, the race has developed to such an extent that a "new species" would develop "itself out of our old one" (Life 2:465). It is a satire in that this new race actually fully realise those areas which mankind wishes to develop. Bulwer- Lytton lists them as: "Universal peace, perfect liberty of the individual, the equality of both class and sex, the highest development of mechanical invention, perfect physical well-being ... and social well-being of the community". These achievements, however, "resulted in a race that was at once mild and terrible, highly intellectual, and insufferably dull" (Life 2:462, and above). The chief target of the satire is the concept of equality, which the Vril-ya have achieved. The seed for this controlling theme of The Coming Race was sown in 1842 where Zanoni says to Nicot "the first law of nature is inequality" (Zanoni:102). There Zanoni is trying to convince the painter how impossible and undesirable it would be for the French revolutionaries to achieve equality, seeing democracy as nothing more than the rule of the most ignorant. Such equality would stifle human development — the citizens of such a "beautified community ... would either die of ennui or attempt some revolution" and no great people (good or bad) would emerge (Coming Race:230). This supposed utopia becomes a dystopia when the very conditions aspired to to make a utopia are fully realised; it fails not for "its vices but its virtues" (Life 2:468).
The second strand of the plot involves the child, Tae, son of the chief magistrate, Tur. The superior abilities of this child draw attention to the childishness of the traveller — a surrogate for all ordinary human beings. The two actually play together but the relationship is more that of youthful master and exotic pet: "He [the boy] felt that sort of pleasure in my society which a boy of a similar age in the upper world has in the 84 company of a pet dog or monkey" (Coming Race:162). The stranger's presence is never really accepted and Tae is instructed to kill the traveller, who is not only a dangerous and inferior animal, but a threat to the racial purity of the community. The death is averted when Tae asks his father's permission to kill himself as well as the stranger.
The third strand addresses the theory of evolution 42. Although the novel is satirical in tone throughout, the most biting satire is saved for Darwin's theory of evolution. The satirical "debate" centres on whether the master race developed from a frog or the other way around. The relative values of man and frog are discussed "in an absurdly serious way which is meant to be a parody on some of the more extravagant evolutionary controversies" (Gerber 1973:23). The traveller discovers that the Vril-ya trace their origin to a very ancient philosopher. They point to a portrait of the philosopher, a magnificent specimen of a Giant Frog. The traveller is amazed at this, and the Vril-ya explain that in the wrangling or philosophic period of history, there were great disputes over their origin. One faction held that they were descendants of the frog. The opposing faction held that it was the frog that was the improved development of them. For one thousand years war and massacre followed the dispute. Philosophers on both sides were butchered until it was clearly established that the • had descended from a tadpole.
Knepper views evolution as the "sine qua non of the novel" (Rabkin 1983:23). His careful analysis of the frog scene shows that Bulwer-Lytton was not against the evolutionary theory per se in that he supported teleological evolution which preceded Darwin's mechanistic chance-cause brand. Before Darwin was Jean Lamarck (1744 - 1829) who was a teleological evolutionist. A teleological approach holds that the changes are made with a purpose, a master plan. In the case of the Vril-ya, the master plan is to withdraw from earth in order to perfect itself so that it can return to rule over those who did not develop. In the novel, this is shown when Zee refers to an ancient legend which held that "we were driven from a region that seems to denote the world you came from, in order to perfect our condition and attain to the pure elimination of our species by the severity of the struggles our forefathers underwent; and that, when our education shall become finally completed, we are destined to
42 A fuller discussion on evolution follows in the next chapter. 85 return to the upper world, and supplant all the inferior races now existing therein" (Coming Race:106). This passage affirms that the evolutionary process has a will and a direction and is not driven by blind chance. A teleological evolutionist believes that creation is dependent upon will and purpose, demonstrated by design in nature. The teleologist argues that progressions indicate a design and therefore a designer. They fought a losing battle against the mechanistic interpretations of Darwin (Rabkin 1983:12-13).
Another (teleological) development is that the Vril-ya have developed a power called not found in their ancestors. It is this ability which has enabled them to reach their highly advanced state. In a letter to John Forster dated 20 March 1870 (the date is prior to publication), Forster must have misinterpreted the purpose of vril because the ever-touchy author dashes off a letter explaining its use. "I did not mean Vril for mesmerism", he says, "but for electricity ... and including whatever there may be genuine in mesmerism which I hold to be a mere branch current of the one great fluid pervading all nature" (Life 2:466). Bulwer-Lytton does not want people to think that he was talking about the current vogue of Victorian drawing-room spiritualism. He has the protagonist of The Coming Race say that he had heard tales of mesmeric clairvoyance in the world he came from but that imposture had led to its rejection.
In the discussion on The Coming Race so far, I have explained how the Vril-ya lived in the hollow of the earth and how they had acquired the vril power through evolutionary processes. Zee mentions how the Vril-ya believe that one day they will re-emerge to conquor the upper world. The Vril-ya assumed that the inhabitants of the "upper world" would be exterminated by the vril power since with the use of this power the Vril-ya can do almost anything man can think of The subterranean people are strikingly handsome and have attained a complete inward peace which illuminates their features: "The beauty of their countenances is not only in symetry of feature, but in a smoothness of surface, which continues without line or wrinkle to the extreme of old age, and a serene sweetness of expression, combined with that majesty that seems to come from consciousness of power and the freedom of all terror, physical or moral" (Coming Race:104). They are "truly supermen and constitute an ideal which
43 Which is where Bovril gets its name (Wilson 1971:328). 86 cannot possibly be achieved by ordinary men within the next few generations" (Gerber 1973:19).
Fifty years after publication of The Coming Race, however, with the emergence of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, this novel was declared by them to be "based on fact. The Fuehrer and several of the members of his High Command believed quite literally in the existence of a race of super beings below the earth and directed extensive research to be carried out" (Haining 1977:16).
Dr Willy Ley, a German rocket scientist, is said to have commented: "So convinced were they of the actuality of Bulwer-Lytton's Vril-race that they formed 'The Vril Society' or 'Luminous Lodge'. The authors of The Morning of the Magicians, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, claim to have learnt this first-hand from Ley who had fled from Germany to France in 1933: "It was from him [Ley] that we learned of the existence in Berlin shortly before the Nazis came to power, of ... [this] spiritual community that is of great interest to us" (1964:147, both above). Ravenscroft mentions the Luminous Lodge in more detail. According to Ravenscroft, when Hitler was in Landsberg Fortress he met a man called Karl Haushofer who had made a study of the Aryan race in Atlantis and was the source of the "biological mystique of the racism of the Nazi Party" (1972:243). Ravenscroft says that "Haushofer became the leading figure in a secret society called the `Vril' or 'Luminous Lodge' which was founded in Berlin". It was an "exclusive satanic circle" which attracted members "from all quarters of the globe" (1972:243, and above).
According to Ravenscroft the main aim of the Lodge was to make further researches into the origins of the Aryan race and the way in which magical capacities lying dormant in the Aryan blood could be reactivated to become the vehicle of superhuman powers. They believed that the super race would emerge one day from their subterranean world, and therefore set about developing their own Vril-power (or energy) so that they might be the equals and not the slaves of the subterraneans. Hitler's attraction" to The Coming Race is not difficult to understand: its proposal of a super race ruling the world matched his own design, just as he saw himself as Tur,
44 Hitler's attraction to The Coining Race does seem plausible and is more than likely true — he was fascinated by, for example, theosophy, astrology, fortune-telling etc. Unfortunately all the authors cited: Haining, Pauwels, Bergier and Ravenscroft have not written in a scholarly way — their writing is emotive, at times biased, and they do not substantiate themselves. 87 dictator of the Vril-ya, who considered democracy as something "belonging to the infancy of political science" (Coming Race:54).
Records discovered at the end of the war indicate that Hitler actually sent expeditions to explore German, Swiss and Italian mines to try and find the entrance Bulwer-Lytton had written of, yet refused to locate (because it was fiction!). According to Haining "As early as 1936 ... the Nazis were sending teams of elite corpsmen into caves and mines in Europe. They were checking on a possible entrance into the land of Vril-ya. Entire crews of spelunkers prowled caves hunting for the new, advanced man" (1977:16). Despite the failure of mission after mission, Hitler refused to give up. The Fuehrer even believed he had seen one of the members of the super race, as he told Hermann Rauschining, the governor of Danzig. 'The new man is living among us now,' he is reported to have said. 'He is here! I will tell you a secret. I have seen the new man. He is intrepid and cruel. I was afraid of him' (Haining 1977:16).
The Coming Race ends with the traveller being returned to earth alive. He has Zee, daughter of Alph-Lin, to thank for this. During the night she takes him away from the community and, using the special powers of vril, she blasts a way back into the mineshaft and restores the traveller to humanity. She blasts the shaft shut again and is heard of no more.
Wolff commends Bulwer-Lytton on his foresight when writing The Coming Race. Referring to the vril power, Wolff says: "Only a man extremely well-read in the sciences ... could have then gone on to make the connection between matter and energy". Vril is like atomic energy which can be used for great good or mass destruction. And just like atomic power today, it is the "mutual possession of vril that acts as a deterrent" (Wolff 1971:331, both above): "if army met army, and both had command of the agency, it could be but the annihilation of each" (Coming Race:56). I cannot agree with Knepper when he says that "it hardly matters whether Bulwer- Lytton was highly learned in scientific matters or whether the names of distinguished practitioners in many fields ... [is] merely window-dressing" (Rabkin 1983:26). It does matter. Bulwer-Lytton did not use these names gratuitously; his wide reading shows in ways the modern reader often takes for granted. For example, Zee can stir life into mechanisms which seem lifeless. Her explanation is that "no form of matter is motionless and inert; every particle is constantly in motion and constantly being 88 acted upon by agencies, of which heat is the most apparent and rapid, but vril the most subtle, and, when skilfully wielded, the most powerful" (Coming Race:116). This type of observation would need a fairly in-depth knowledge of science. 89
Chapter 3 — The Science—Religion—Occult Paradigm
The nineteenth century was a "noisy, industrial century ... perhaps the most energetic century in mankind's history" (Wilson 1971:324). It was also the century which saw the occult revival which Wilson attributes to "a revolt against coarse-grained reality" (1971:324). Other explanations for the occult revival have been put forward: "breakdowns of modernisation", "flights into the irrational", "escapes from the strains imposed by the complexity of the technological social order" or "aberrations from the major lines of progress" (Tiryakian 1974:1). Moore sees the revival as "one way in which the generations whose social patterns were most shaken by the changes wrought by science and technology reanchored themselves" (1977:5). The period was not only a time of great enterprise, bold thought and innovation but also one of deep confusion and anomie. There was a feeling that society had lost is norms and boundaries, and that the uncontrollable forces of change were destroying all order and moral tradition.
Anxiety afflicted the nineteenth century. It is "not arbitrary to define a period of great uncertainty extending roughly from the downfall of Napoleon to the outbreak of the First World War" (Webb 1974:6). As the effects of the Industrial Revolution were practically observable (society started to change so quickly it could almost be seen changing), so man's always "precarious hold began to slip upon the more intangible aspects of his relationship with the universe" (Webb 1974:6). The occult seems to start to surface in times of anxiety and uncertainty. The reasons for this are not clear — "perhaps a regression to infantile attitudes, or to beliefs acquired early in life and afterwards suppressed; or perhaps as a means of obtaining some sort of illusory control over a frightening situation" (Webb 1974:11). An early definition of anxiety, one that was used in Victorian times, is that it is "a characteristic psychic posture exactly opposite to that which prevails when we are in the presence of what we discover or believe to be good, beautiful, worthy of love" (Appleman et al 1959:248). Bulwer-Lytton, in England and the English, also speaks of this malaise: "We live in an age of visible transition — an age of disquietude and doubt ...To me such epochs appear ... [during] the times of greatest unhappiness to our species" (1874:281). 90 The rapid changes in Victorian society in England brought with them a good deal of anxiety. Matthew Arnold's opening lecture as professor of poetry at Oxford (1856) was on 'depression and ennui'. Houghton calls the Scholar- Gipsy "Arnold's classic statement of Victorian melancholia" (1957:76).
For what wears out the life of mortal men? `Tis that from change to change their beings rolls; `Tis that repeated shocks, again, again, Exhaust the energy of strongest souls And numb the elastic powers. 45 also
But we, brought forth and rear' d in hours Of change, alarm, surprise— What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?
Like children bathing on the shore, Buried a wave beneath, The second wave succeeds, before We have had time to breathe." and, lastly, the often-quoted Dover Beach which ends with the line:
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Houghton interprets this as a clash of contending ideas — "the disputes, distractions, fears of an iron time which not only make certitude and peace impossible but isolate the individual, and so provoke the cry for the companionship of love" (1957:87).
Arnold also wrote prose, for example Culture and Anarchy which originally appeared to Victorians in the Cornhill Magazine July 1867 - September 1868 (Altick 1974:94). Periodicals such as these were important in that they helped mould "part of the constant debate which brought differences into the open and engaged the minds and emotions of their readers" (Altick 1974:72). Arnold's Culture and Anarchy uses the past-and-present device comparing his time unfavourably to a past age, in this case Greece. He reflected the mood of many Victorians by questioning whether the so-
45 Matthew Arnold, The Scholar - Gipsy (11142-6). 46 Matthew Arnold, Stanzas in Memory of the Author of 'Oberman' (1169-76). 91 called progress of the nineteenth century was in fact an improvement on earlier times or merely the 'sick hurry' (Arnold's phrase) of modern times. As Altick says, "he lent no comfort to the optimists" (1974:109).
Matthew Arnold experienced an erosion of faith which caused him, together with others such as George Elliot and Arthur Clough, to jettison their childhood religion. Although intellectuals such as these rejected their orthodox religion, "their need for faith was stronger than that of their forebears, simply because the ground of faith had become so elusive" (Altick 1974:236). Since this rejection of orthodox beliefs was made only after rigorous intellectual scrutiny, Arnold saw the intellectuals — the saving 'remnant' as he called them — as being the ones who would usher in a new culture. To use his comparisons found in Culture and Anarchy, all three conventional classes of society were unsuitable as society's civilising agents: neither the aristocracy ("Barbarians") because of their indifference, nor the middle-class ("Philistines") because of their intellectual inability and preoccupation with wealth; nor the working class ("Populace") because their only ambition was to rise to be Philistines (Altick 1974:264, paraphrased). Arnold referred to the society he lived in as the "Hebraism" of the Philistines, meaning their preoccupation with worldy matters as opposed to the "ideal compound of sweetness and light", referred to as "Hellenism" which he saw as only residing within the remnant, the intellectual elite. Arnold was one of those who were "devoted to discovering, cultivating and propagating the truth as apprehended by the genuinely disinterested mind" (Altick 1974:264). We see then, how Arnold strongly advocated moral regeneration whilst at the same time not being convinced that organised Christianity was able to deliver this.
At the time Darwin published, the Victorians were deeply suspicious of the effect science would have on individuals. Matthew Arnold was concerned about the "impoverishment of the individual's mind if he were permitted to specialise in science and set aside the liberal arts" (Appleman et al 1959:32). In the nineteenth century, attaching a mystical, spiritual significance to life helped some find meaning and fulfilment in their lives. Carlyle said that "[t]he Nineteenth Century stands before us in all its contradiction and perplexity; barren, mean and baleful'''. The German romantics such as Goethe and Schiller present a fresh way of viewing the world which
47 Quoting from State of German Literature [1827], The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London, 1899), XXVI, 65-66. 92 makes it "no longer mean or barren, but enamelled into beauty in the poet's spirit; for its significance is laid open ... For these men have ... the clear eye ... They have penetrated into the mystery of Nature" (Eigner 1978:145 48). Bulwer-Lytton echoes Carlyle in 1840 in the Preface to his novel Maltravers where he says that he wanted to produce "life as it is" by which he did not mean "the vulgar and outward life alone, but life in its spiritual and mystic as well as its more fleshly characteristics".
Historians, as interpreters of Victorian history, have had to become more sophisticated under pressure from an increasingly disparate readership. Shared assumptions have gradually evaporated and there is now no longer a common vision between historian and reader. In a recent book on the mid-Victorian period, Hoppen begins by saying that "the building-blocks of the story, its reasonable and meaningful demarcations and divisions, the continuities and discontinuities, the priorities of different varieties of history, the place of narrative — all these things are now much harder to agree on" (1998:vii). Readers now require that previously suppressed voices, such as occultism, be taken cognisance of
As early as 1954 C S Lewis was advocating making space in historical accounts for other voices. He said that "some think it is the historian's business ... to grasp in a single intuition the 'spirit' or 'meaning' of his period ... I submit that this is exactly what we must refrain from doing. I cannot convince myself that such 'spirits' or `meanings' have much more reality than the pictures we see in the fire ... The 'canals' on Mars vanished when we got stronger lenses'. A more powerful focus on the Victorian period does not mean "empirical nihilism" (Hoppen 1998:1). It means a more perceptive, refined look at the period highlighting formerly hidden, subtle aspects of the period, such as the interplay between science, religion and the occult. Historians need to make room "to offer a series of linked interpretations" of the "essentially ragged and confused nature of the past" (Hoppen 1998:2). The science- religion-occult paradigm becomes "interlocking spheres" in which the "culture of the period ... was generated, not by a series of influences operating separately, but by means of developments resonating reciprocally" (Hoppen 1998:3-4). Whereas science and religion have always received historical attention, a closer examination of the
48 Ibid. 49 C S Lewis. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama. Oxford 1954:63-4. 93 period sees the occult surviving interstitially between science and religion: often ignored but there nonetheless in the crevice.
The interplay of religion and the occult and religion and science, works itself out in both concert and conflict. Religion defines for itself what is acceptable and unacceptable; identifying the unacceptable as occult (Neusner and Flesher 1989:Preface, paraphrased). Science and the occult work in negative association, their similarities make them competitors or alternatives; science having replaced the occult in Victorian and modern times. Religion, on the other hand, is considered in terms of its difference or contrast to science (Neusner and Flesher 1989:261, paraphrased). Out of the two, religion and occultism, the latter was the one which provoked any real response (good or bad) from the scientists. To this extent the occult acted as "a horsefly that stings the scalp of knowledge [science] to prevent it from sleeping" (Moore 1977:243 5').
Modern historians can now no longer isolate the history of the occult completely from the histories of religion or science. Religion, science and the occult may appear to be distinct from each other in theory — the religious worship, the scientific explain and conquer nature and the occultists try to dominate and command nature by supernatural means. Yet "in real life attitudes are not kept in separate compartments and the distinctions are frequently blurred" (Cavendish 1990:1-2). In discussing science, religion and the occult, I have kept them in discrete compartments but this artificial structure has to break under the strain of actuality. When it does, the three blur yielding a more interesting, gestalt view than the simple tripartite structure.
Although the wholesale retreat from orthodox religion did not take place until after 1900, its arrival was foreshadowed in the early part of the nineteenth century where already the church was unable to recruit "with anything like their former vigour" (Hoppen 1998:470). The problem lay not so much in a "leakage of existing adherents as in the absence of new ones" (Hoppen 1998:470). More important than any "internal `crisis of faith' was that 'crisis of plausibility' which had begun to erode the place of organised religion within a wider society decreasingly predisposed to take a religious view of things" (Hoppen 1998:470).
5° Moore uses Charles Fort as an example. Damon Knight. Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained. Garden City, N Y: Doubleday 1970:206. 94
This marked decline in membership in traditional religions was for reasons other than because a private belief in, and the need for, the supernatural had dropped off. Accordingly, there was a "a large population pool available for conversion to new, unorthodox religions, including those of the occult variety" (Lehmann and Myers 1985:358). As more people moved to the cities, human suffering increased and Christianity failed to provide a humanitarian face. In fact, practical science provided more relief by providing, for example, better housing, sanitation and purified water. It was not science alone which led to a falling-off of Christianity but also arguments and criticisms drawn from ethics and history, particularly German biblical criticism. All these were set to "shatter traditional concepts of cosmic order" (Oppenheim 1985:60). This new cosmos was frightening: chaotic, hostile and random, accidental juxtapositions with man inseparable from the animals fighting to be the fittest.
The process of ceasing to believe "can never be fully chronicled but personal and public writings of the times indicate that many Victorians were spiritually disorientated. That the Victorian age was a period of religious uncertainty is beyond question, but the reasons for those doubts are not capable of precise examination" (Oppenheim 1985:1). Realising that the position of organised religion had become insecure and ambiguous at a time when men and women wanted certainty, many turned to spiritualism and psychic phenomena "for some incontrovertible reassurance of a fundamental cosmic order and purpose; especially reassurance that life on earth was not the totality of human existence" (Oppenheim 1985:2). This falling off of religion came at a time when science was establishing itself as a humanistic, godless philosophy with an emphasis on the material. To counter this, spiritualists tried to prove that spirits functioned in the immaterial just as surely as matter existed. Many turned to spiritualism and psychical research as a refuge from "bleak mechanism, emptiness, and despair" (Oppenheim 1985:4, and below). They did so as part of a widespread effort in this period to believe in something. Their concerns and aspirations placed them "far from the lunatic fringe of their society — squarely amidst the cultural, intellectual, and emotional moods of the era".
The Victorians had their skeptics of spiritualism, such as T H Huxley, but they were in the minority compared to the many who treated the psychic phenomena as a serious 95 business and who believed that they were the "courageous pioneers hoping to discover the most profound secrets of the human condition and of man's place in the universe" (Oppenheim 1985:4). At that time, in its infancy, few were to know that psychical research would not grow into the new science many believed it would. The 'unholy' alliance of materialism and atheism created a great impetus for the occult. With a worldview altering almost daily, the conviction of the existence of an unknown and invisible world became important to the Victorians. And if that invisible world became at certain times visible and palpable, so much the better. The 'holy' alliance of church and faith being under threat caused many clergymen to retaliate.
The word 'occult' remains elusive. Little has been found in the way of a physical body, so the analysis must be confined to a study of tracks and footprints, hints and clues. If a newcomer to the vast quantity of occult literature begins "browsing at random, puzzlement and impatience will soon be his lot, for he will find jumbled together the droppings of all cultures, and occasional fragments of philosophy perhaps profound but almost certainly subversive to right living in the society in which he finds himself' (Webb 1974:192). The term occult has a variety of meanings. To many it is the antithesis of science and the bugbear of religion" (Tiryakian 1974:244). The word is derived from the Latin occulere, 'to hide' and denotes "that which is hidden, mysterious, known only to the initiated, imperceptible by normal senses" (Shepard 1991:971).
But the term 'occult' is much wider than merely 'hidden'. It is "an extraordinary mélange of ideas, beliefs, practices and forms of both prescientific and scientific exploration and explanation, held together by the idea of mystery and of some relationship to what we call the supernatural" (Lehmann and Myers 1985:348). Under "this widely misunderstood heading [occult] is grouped an astonishing collection of subjects: hypnotism, magic, astrology, water-divining, 'secret' societies, and a multitude of similar topics of doubtful intellectual respectability" (Webb 1974:11). The occult could encompass "Blavatsky's theosophy, Eastern religion, astrology, geomancy, the Tarot cards ... , and a hundred and one apparently dissimilar beliefs. ... Any strange, unorthodox, but semi-religious belief can form part of the occult complex" (Webb 1974:155). The occult has also been defined as that which is "beyond the range of ordinary knowledge; mysterious; secret; disposed or communicated only to the initiated; of or pertaining to magic, astrology, and other 96 alleged sciences claiming use or knowledge of [the] secret, mysterious, or supernatural" (Tiryakian 1974:243). In this dissertation I use the term 'occult' as described above but also as synonymous with 'mysticism' and 'magic'.
The occult spans a range "from the objectively unsupportable at present to the demonstrably absurd" (Lehmann and Myers 1985:353). A few examples of these absurdities are:
A medium flies through the streets of London. One moment Mrs Guppy was writing the word 'onions' on her shopping list "when she was suddenly snatched away and whizzed through the air the two or more miles to central London. Considerable publicity was accorded to this event which was the more remarkable in that Mrs Guppy was enormously fat" (Brandon 1983:105).
Ruth Pierce called on God to strike her dead if she was not telling the truth — whereupon she instantly fell dead and was subsequently shown to have been lying (Brandon 1983:105').
Incidents of spontaneous combustion mentioned by Wilson (1971:505 52).
A man could imagine images which would then be developed as a photograph from an unused spool (Wilson 1971:506).
A woman proved, at least to the satisfaction of a certain Dr Kerner, that she could read a book placed face downwards on her stomach. (Wilson 1988:28).
Lombroso, a confirmed materialist, studied a girl who could see through her ear and smell through, at first, her chin, later, the back of her foot. Unpleasant smells brought close to her foot made her react with disgust (Wilson 1988:28).
Lombroso also studied a girl who counted thirty-three worms in her stomach, the exact number she excreted (Wilson 1988:28).
51 There is a plaque in the English town of Dervizes to commemorate this. A full account is given in Tucektt, I. The Evidence for the Supernatural. London 1911. 52 Interestingly, the examples mentioned indicate that this phenomenon might be real. 97
Paracelsus believed that a man can live without food if planted in the ground like a tree (Webb 1974:223, citing Thorndike, History of Magic, vol V New York 1941:627).
Levi's recommended method for attaining ecstasy is to stare fixedly at the end of your nose to induce paralysis of the optic nerve. (Webb 1974:263, citing 4 th ed of A E Waite's translation of Eliphas Levi, History of Magic. London1938:74-8).
Lacuria (1806-90), a priest defrocked because of his occult beliefs, in a fit of pique sat writing in a tiny room for sixty years, seeing only a few visitors (Webb 1974:269).
Saint-Yves (1842 - 1890) developed the Archeometer which he claimed was the key to all the religions and all the sciences of antiquity. It was "a disc of coloured cardboard with some very complex diagrammatic arrangements" (Webb 1974:273).
In 1843 Alcott established a vegetarian community near Harvard called Fruitlands. They only ate 'aspiring' vegetables — those which grew upwards (Webb 1974:346).
In the 1880s, the 'Seer of Poughkeepsie' Andrew Davis, a qualified medical doctor, was prescribing "for a poisoned finger, frog's skin was to be applied; for deafness rats' skins behind the ears, or oil from the legs of weasels" (Webb 1974:28).
When the spiritualist Home was touring Europe, he was warned that the Catholic Church considered his activities undesirable. Home's conciliatory reaction was to become a Roman Catholic. He was given an audience by the Pope and assigned a confessor. But the spirits would not behave and when Home was leaving Rome his confessor, Father Ravignan, raised his hand in a parting benediction. This was the spirit's cue to let out the equivalent of a "ghostly raspberry" (Wilson 1971:468). 98 These examples were chosen for their demonstrable absurdity or humour but other occult beliefs are, possibly, about "knowledge and techniques which science has yet to validate or investigate" (Tiryakian 1974:244). The occult is full of 'absurdities' that offend the logical mind. Occultism, viewing life from the margins, is a critique on the stability of life showing that "our normal, sane, balanced standpoint" of life is more likely "built upon quicksand" (Wilson 1971:502).
Questions which should be considered when defining the occult are: who is labeling the beliefs as occult, where is the labeling being done (the social context), and at what time is the designation being made (the historical period) (Tiryakian 1974:245, paraphrased). There is a tendency "whenever we are faced with the 'odd' ... to push it into a compartment of the mind labeled 'exceptions', and forget about it" (Wilson 1971:24). A common-denominator for most (if not all) perspectives labeled occult (by anyone) is that they have in some way concerned themselves with things anomalous to our "generally accepted cultural-storehouse of 'truths' ... we are dealing with claims that contradict common-sense or institutionalized [scientific or religious] knowledge" (Tiryakian 1974:245-6, and below). This contradiction of accepted beliefs is the very thing that makes the occult somehow strange, mysterious and inexplicable. It is the very character of the occult that it deals with "dissonant or contradicting knowledge claims".
The occult is "rejected knowledge ... actively rejected by an Establishment culture" because "the Powers That Be have found it wanting. Either it is a threat and must be buried, or simply useless, and so forgotten" (Webb 1974:191,192). By rejecting the occult, these 'Powers' act as gate-keepers of what is legitimate and illegitimate knowledge. Alternatively, occultists choose voluntary rejection and set themselves up as appositional because they believe their knowledge is incompatible with the prevailing wisdom. Participants in a "fringe activity ... see themselves as freed from certain of the attitudinal norms of everyday society" (Moore 1977:226). They do not have to be 'sensible' about life. When "people believed ... that their most important ideas had been rejected out of hand, the temptation arose for them to make common cause with the champions of other rejected ideas" (Moore 1977:226). This removal of the occult from the establishment is in keeping with the hidden nature of occultism "hidden because of its immense value, or reverently concealed from the prying eyes of the profane" (Webb 1974:191). The creation of whole new religions from ancient 99 materials is in itself an interesting phenomenon because "a discernible opting for rejected knowledge, especially on the part of the artistic, literary, and articulate worlds ... [It] means a rejection of the Establishment. This rejection ... springs from anxiety about social change, also from an inability to accept the bleak findings of the scientific method about man's place in the universe. The flight to the Secret Traditions represents an escape from insignificance" (Webb 1974:280)."
The occult knowledge is material which a social order discards: "order implies restriction; from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made and from all possible relations a limited set has been used" (Douglas 1966:94). This discarding of the occult implies that that which has been rejected can be patterned outside of the social order and that such "patterning is indefinite" (Douglas 1966:94 54). The patterning could be fashioned in a way that is destructive to existing social patterns — it presents both power and danger Disorder is potent: "In the disorder of the mind, in dreams, faints and frenzies ...[one finds] powers and truths which cannot be reached by conscious effort" (Douglas 1966:94). An example of this is how the Parisian Sobrier, in his trancelike state, helped precipitate the 1848 revolution.
Occultists are prepared to risk venturing into disordered regions, beyond the confines of society. Those who return from these "inaccessible regions" bring with them "a power not available to those who have stayed in the control of themselves and of society" (Douglas 1966:95). In Zanoni, Glyndon takes this risk by becoming Mejnour's initiate but, through his impatience, he will not acquaint himself with the rituals of the occult order which are there for his protection. Accordingly, he prematurely invokes the Dweller of the Threshold. Douglas (1966:96) says of this unsure state of being that:
danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry to his new status. Not only is
53 This retreat to ancient knowledge systems is not peculiar to the nineteenth century, but discussion on it is limited to this period in order to stay within the scope of the dissertation. 54 Douglas is speaking of discarded material in general; I have limited it to occult knowledge. 100 transition itself dangerous, but also the rituals of segregation are the most dangerous phase of the rites.
We see how Glyndon is a danger to himself and others by the way both he and his (innocent) sister are affected by horrible visions brought on by Glyndon invoking the Dweller of the Threshold when he was not yet ready. His sister dies from these visions. If one takes Coates' view (1984), as I do, that Glyndon represents the impatience of the French Revolutionaries to bring in a new political order, we see how their misguided actions caused large scale suffering to others (also innocent like Glyndon's sister). Douglas explains that those in this marginal period are "temporarily outcast" (1966:96, and below). Having no place in society, they do not have to conform to society's rules and are "licensed to waylay, steal, rape". The precaution against danger from these outcasts of society has to come from society itself; a partial explanation for the backlash against occult societies.
The stock of knowledge which is publicly shared and publicly accessible is called "exoteric knowledge" mostly acquired by our direct experience through our senses (Tiryakian 1974:4). Institutional society reacts against the occult because: "the direct tapping by a human agent of the ultimate forces of the world is a short-cutting of established, traditional and legitimate authority structures" (Tiryakian 1974:7). The occultist, in a strong subversive society, could pose threat to civil authority.
For most people reality and what is real is limited to that which is tangible, physical and capable of measurement. From this concept arises the philosophy variously called materialism, empiricism, realism or positivism. Yet some believe that what is visible is only part of the total picture of the world and that the visible and tangible is actually an illusion. They believe the familiar everyday world is contingent on the operations of a knowable but hidden reality, one not accessible via the senses. Those who believe this say that those who gain knowledge of this hidden reality are superior to those who do not. Such knowledge of hidden truths is therefore a source of power since "knowledge of the workings of forces that govern the manifest world implies the ability to use these forces to bring about changes in the appearance of things, to transform the world of appearances. And, since the transformation of the world of appearances affects people's lives, it is a source of social power"(Tiryakian 1974:4-5). 101
In many ways, the occult is a "residual category, a wastebasket, for knowledge claims that are deviant in some way, that do not fit the established claims of science or religion" (Tiryakian 1974:245). Although some occult knowledge gains acceptance within established science or religion, it is invariably tarred with the occult brush. Thus, to many people spiritualism is a religion and graphology and hypnotism are not occult studies but sciences yet none of these have gained total acceptance within the establishment.
One explanation as to why some, particularly scientists, reject the occult is the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance advanced by Festinger in 1957. A cognition is something a person knows about himself, about his behaviour, or about his surroundings. Dissonance is when two cognitions, occurring together, are inconsistent according to the expectations of the person, such expectations having been built up on the 'accepted' way of being in the world. The discords under discussion are occultism or positivism. A drive builds up within the person to get rid of the uncomfortable situation, like eating when hungry. A choice is made and one or the other woridview is chosen. The worldview chosen is invested with such high emotional cost that the rejected way is denigrated and derogated because to reconsider it again would cause even more acute distress. (LeShan 1974:209-210, paraphrased). LeShan believes cognitive dissonance offers an explanation to the reaction of many scientists who see no middle ground: "either the universe is run completely on `mystical' lines or ... 'mechanistic' lines ... there seems to be no middle ground for many" (1974:208).
Further refinement has been made to this early view of cognitive dissonance. Some people can maintain occult beliefs which science debunks and yet be willing to abandon other (non-occult) ideas which have been disproved by science. Lehmann and Myers question why occult beliefs are an exception to this customary deference to scientific authority. They have observed that "people are adept at compartmentalizing incongruent beliefs... [that we] can comfortably live with disparate scientific, religious, and common sense approaches to different beliefs, and employ the belief approach most suitable to the personal need at hand" (1985:358). And if "cognitive dissonance does occur in maintaining an occult belief' which flies in the face of science, a simple 102 rationalisation — 'scientists don't know everything' — usually suffices to alleviate the discord (Lehmann and Myers 1985:359). Using the emotive nineteenth-century debates on science, religion and mysticism as an index, I believe the earlier, 'either / or' view would probably have been followed by the majority of Victorians. In modern times, we are confronted with so many conflicting beliefs that compartmentalization seems a better coping mechanism. I believe that Bulwer-Lytton had the ability to resolve cognitive dissonance in this more modern way.
Webb maintains the nineteenth-century occult revival took place in what he calls the Age of the Irrational, a "reaction against the logical consequences of too much logic" of the Age of Reason (Webb 1974:5). Just when rationalism seemed to be bearing fruit, the occult revival resurrected archaic forms of beliefs thought buried; "so it might have appeared to a disheartened Rationalist" (Webb 1974:8). A study of the occult in Victorian society is particularly appropriate as that period represented a rapid advance towards modernity and away from the ancient. Occult beliefs "are likely to form under two conditions: environmental uncertainty ... and the low 'cost' of harbouring the belief. Belief in the paranormal may "alleviate feelings of helplessness and anxiety under uncontrollable or unpredictable circumstances, and in this sense may be functional" (Lehmann and Myers 1985:357").
The decline in Christian orthodoxy created this pool of people who still had a belief in the spiritual but who would not subscribe to Christianity. This blockage gave way to a heterodoxy of various occult and spiritualist groups. Although the boundaries between occultists and spiritualists were porous, generally the spiritualists and psychical researchers rejected the secretive and ritualistic aspects of occultism. The concept of the occultists that the key to all wisdom lay in the "dogged study of venerable texts" (Oppenheim 1985:159) revealed to a select few was not in keeping with the psychical researchers' "absolute devotion to the standards of open, rational, empirical inquiry set forth by modern science" and who viewed the occultists as "remnants of magical mumbo jumbo from bygone ages" (Oppenheim 1985:159). The objection of spiritualists to the occult is explained by E R Dodds:
55 On the same page the authors mention a modern example. Baseball batting attracts a plethora of superstitions whereas baseball fielding does not because fielding can be virtually guaranteed through skill and practice. 103 The occultist, as his name betokens, values the occult qua occult: that is for him its virtue, and the last thing he will thank you for is an explanation. He is an intellectual anarchist, a rebel against the concept of natural law, and his unconfessed aim is a destructive one: he would like, if he could, to undermine the whole arrogant structure of modern science and see it crash about our ears ... The genuine psychical researcher may feel this fascination, as I have sometimes done, but he has disciplined himself to resist it ... Far from wishing to pull down the lofty edifice of science, his highest ambition is to construct a modest annexe which will serve, at least provisionally, to house his new facts with the minimum of disturbance to the original plan of the building. 56
The rise in spiritualism in Britain drew much strength from indigenous cultural and anthropological traditions, in which religious faith and magical rituals were closely intertwined. When spiritualism reached Britain in the 1850s, it was "nourished on rich deposits of spiritual lore from previous ages" and fuelled by the "specific conditions created by the troubled relations of science and religion" (Oppenheim 1985:27). Mediums were thrust into the limelight as the catalysts for this flux. Those who wanted spiritualism to succeed "were ultimately dependent on the quality and integrity of the mediums to whom they turned" (Oppenheim 1985:27). Mediums were expected to straddle between religion and science and synthesise them. Standing "midway between the opposing schools [of faith and science], it [spiritualism] gives to the one a scientific basis for the divine things of old, whilst it restores to the other the much needed evidence of its expressed faith in the duality and continuity of life" (Oppenheim 1985:27 57).
Spiritualism did not want to be a marginal activity whereas occultism saw this as essentially part of its identity. Spiritualists were worried that anything science would not investigate would be marginalised: to "leave the great questions of life to speculative metaphysics guaranteed their trivialization within a generation" (Moore 1977:26). But science was not about to start studying metaphysics: "without denying the existence of God and the soul, [science] merely ignored them" (Moore 1977:26). The spiritualists and psychic researchers knew that science's attitude to study only the measurable would in time define the limits of what constituted mankind.
56 Dodds E R. Missing Persons. An Autobiography. Oxford: Claredon Press 1977: 97 - 8. $7 Citing Farmer J S. Spiritualism as a New Basis of Belief London. E W Allen 1880. pp v-vi. 104
And yet there was also an allegiance between the spiritualists and occultists in that both were fighting the evil of materialism. Both embraced a view of the universe as living and interconnected, as having a spirit or force. For the occultist there is no distinction between matter and nonmatter. Mediums claim that they attract spirits if the conditions are right and they are no more magical than a magnet which attracts iron filings. Despite wanting to distance themselves from the occultists, there are examples (such as Swedenborg) of spiritualists who felt no self-contradiction in embracing Western mysticism. (Moore 1977:224-6, paraphrased). However different the forms of practice may have been, "occultists, spiritualists and psychical researchers often spoke about issues in terms that were familiar to each of them" (Moore 1977:227). Sparked by reasons similar to the popularity of spiritualism — dissatisfaction with positivism — many spiritualists became occultists or at least sympathised with them "in order to liberate themselves from matter and materialism. The lure of the occult ... lay precisely in its antipathy to the strictly rational, empiricist outlook that was increasingly perceived as the hallmark of Victorian thought" (Oppenheim 1985:161).
Occultists and spiritualists did not see themselves as dabbling in the supernatural (a view both science and religion took) but as expanding the limits of the natural world. The "common rejection of the word supernatural ... made the line between spiritualism and occultism a relatively easy one to cross" (Moore 1977:233). By virtue of them both dealing with nonmatter, much of their vocabulary was shared. The word supernatural suited the church because then it could explain spirit activity in either divine or demonic terms (usually demonic). The word suited science because spirit activity was anything beyond "the range of what empirical methodology could deal with" (Moore 1977:234). Both camps made the world beyond the tangible and finite seem remote and potentially hostile.
The growing belief in an empirical explanation for the paranormal led to an interest in spiritualism and psychical research "as possible sources of quasi-religious enlightenment ... producing an efflorescence of interest in all forms of spiritualist inquiry" (Hoppen 1998:501). This increased interest led, in turn, to an increase in the number of mediums: "the mediums arose to supply the demand" (Webb 1974:42). There was a rise in the number of women involved in spiritualism and theosophy. 105 Although many of the mediums were still men, women "were becoming more emancipated and more inclined to show their independence of thought — and how better could they do this ... than to embrace a 'modern' church, which eschewed the old theology and cashed in on the growing prestige of science" (Appleman et al 1959:42).
Although many mediums were men, the identification of mediumship with women was strong58. The picture painted was of a sick, suffering, self-sacrificing female medium whose "ills served to justify the importance of their profession" (Moore 1977:106). This image reminds me of Lilian in A Strange Story who is unwell throughout the novel but is the only one psychically strong enough for Margrave's purposes. As Moore says: "Their everlasting willingness to give of themselves for the spiritual benefit of others — even to the point of their own physical impairment — made mediumship in their eyes a dignified calling" (1977:106). Lilian is not educated like Dr Fenwick. Not being able to boast of a medical degree to justify her professional status, "a long illness preceding and accompanying the career of a successful medium served as a common substitute" (Moore 1977:107).
This is not to say that spiritualism became ubiquitous. The discerning were unwilling to swallow any medicine simply to feel better and would not give their allegiance to the movement. While the "manifestations are often plainly 'genuine' in the sense that they have not been deliberately engineered, they always seem to fall short of being finally convincing. They provide 'phenomena' for those who wanted to believe, and raise doubts for those who want to doubt" (Wilson 1971:459). There were also a number of frauds, possibly the most notorious being the Fox sisters, given that they started the spirit rapping craze in the first place. Oliver Wendell Holmes facetiously referred to the Fox sisters as the "Nemesis of the pulpit". "With the snap of a toe joint", they had begun a theological revolution that ended "with such a crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in all the ministers' studies of Christendom" (Moore 1977:41, fn 3). Holmes's remark came after the Fox sisters had confessed that their rappings were made by cracking their toe joints.
58 Some newspapers referred to male mediums as "addle-headed feminine men" (Moore 1977:105 fn 9) 106 At the time of the sisters' confession, many refused to believe in the prosaic explanation of toe-snapping. Webb comments on this inability to accept a hoax: "with all the evidence to the contrary, with scoffers on every hand, people believed implicitly in the Spiritualist revelation" (Webb 1974:20). Spiritualism can be seen as "pure wish-fulfillment, for despite confessions and exposures, the faith of the converts held secure" (Webb 1974:19). Believers and non-believers in the Fox sisters' hoax exist even today. In 1983 Ruth Brandon (1983:230) took Brian Inglis to task for not believing in the Fox sisters' confession. In 1986 he retaliated by calling her "the latest recruit to the ranks of purveyors of history from the skeptic's point of view" and accuses her book of containing "a range of suggestio falsi and suppressio yen?' (Inglis 1986:245).
And then there was Home, a medium who provided paranormal phenomena for those who wanted to believe. Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-86) was a Scottish-American spiritualist medium. At age 13 he claimed to have discovered his gifts for dealing with spirits, and from 1850 to his death he had a triumphant career as a medium, always retaining his amateur status by refusing money, although he did accept expensive gifts. Home was Bulwer-Lytton's guest at Knebworth in 1855 (Shepard 1991: 990). Brandon calls Bulwer-Lytton a "staunch convert" of Home and "an example of the kind of person a successful medium might hope to meet [being] ... upper and moneyed" class (1983:57).
Dickens found parlour spiritualism degrading. In a letter to Mrs Trollope, 19 June 1855: "I have not the least belief in the awful unseen being available for evening parties at so much per night. Although I shall be ready to receive enlightenment from any source ... I have very little hope of it from the spirits who express themselves through mediums; as I have never yet observed them talk anything but nonsense" (Dickens:63 60). It is uncertain whether Dickens knew, but Mrs Frances Trollope together with Thackeray, Ruskin and the Brownings had all attended Home's seances (Oppenheim 1985:12).
Dickens also tried to dissuade his friend Bulwer-Lytton from believing in spiritualism. Dickens arranged a seance with a medium (not Home) and invited a French conjurer,
59 Dickens's novel, Edwin Drood, unfinished at his death would be completed by a medium in America. 60 Dickens, Sir Henry. The Recollections of Sir Henry Dickens. London: Heinemann Ltd. 1934 107 Robert-Houdin. Dickens recalls: "Everything the medium did was promptly outdone by Houdin, who really outspirited the spiritualist" (Dickens: 63). Dickens, unable to convert Bulwer-Lytton, tried to blame his gullibility on his deafness. Dickens told Home that Bulwer-Lytton was hard of hearing and did not like to have it remarked on. Home would loudly ask Bulwer-Lytton if he had heard the raps and Bulwer-Lytton would say, "Oh, yes, I hear them per-fect-ly" (Burton 1944:143). This response was more likely because of his vanity than delusion.
Bulwer-Lytton and his son were at a séance given by Home at which Elizabeth and Robert Browning were present. Elizabeth was convinced of the existence of spirits. In a letter to her sister, she says: "To me it was wonderful and conclusive; and I believe that the medium present [Home] was no more responsible for the things said and done, than I myself was" (Browning: 17 August 1855 letter to Henrietta). Describing the event, in the same letter, Elizabeth sees the spirit's hands come from under the table but soon adopts Bulwer-Lytton's more miraculous version: "Mr Lytton saw them
rise out of the wood of the table — also he tells me ... that he saw a spiritual [so-called] arm, elongate itself as much as two yards across the table and then float away to the windows, where it disappeared. Robert and I did not touch the hands. Mr Lytton and Sir Edward both did". Punch shows this incident as unattached hands putting a garland-crown onto a full-breasted goose. Whereas Elizabeth was quite willing to adopt this somewhat magnified version, Robert Browning's aversion and loathing of the whole incident led to his poem — Mr Sludge, "The Medium" (1864) — based on Home and very close to libel.
This incident shows how those who attended these seances could either be taken in by it or reject it as nonsense, such as Robert Browning did — although I think he also took a personal dislike to Home. Browning referred to Home as 'that dungball'. Dingwalls' opinion is that Browning had heard the gossip that Home was a homosexual, and this "struck the sturdily normal and moral Victorian as nauseating" (Wilson 1971:465).
Bulwer-Lytton's reaction is, as usual, ambivalent. Did he genuinely believe in what had happened or were he and his son poking fun at Elizabeth? I cannot agree with Brandon when she refers to Bulwer-Lytton as a 'staunch convert'. Although describing Crowley, Cavendish's description applies equally to Bulwer-Lytton: "he had a salutary impatience with the sillier varieties of occultism", where spiritualism is 108 regarded as superficial occultism (Cavendish 1990:147). A possible reason why he may have attended the seances was for its entertainment value and to get material for his books. We have seen how Mrs Home takes Bulwer-Lytton to task for not acknowledging her husband in The Haunted and the Haunters.
Another reason why I disagree with Brandon that Bulwer-Lytton was a staunch convert is that, whilst he believed in the manifestations at Home's seances, he did not ascribe them to spirits, but to Home's own powers. Bulwer-Lytton "agreed that Home's powers were astonishing, but believed that the phenomena were somehow due to Home himself rather than to spirits" (Wilson 1971:465). It would be a mistake to draw a distinction between "Home's 'own' powers and the power of spirits operating through him; they are one and the same" (Wilson 1971:490). Aldous Huxley, in a letter to J B Rhine, 30 December 1942, makes the point that occult powers stem from the human mind itself, not from gods, demons or spirits: "This means that any religion, if intensely enough believed in, creates the objects of its worship ..." (Wilson 1971:490).
In The Haunted and the Haunters, the narrator is not simply credulous; he believes the power comes from within a particular type of person. The narrator says: "still am I persuaded that these are but agencies conveyed, as if by electric wires, to my own brain from the brain of another. In some constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and these constitutions may produce chemic wonders — in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and these may produce electric wonders" (The Haunted and the Hauntersl:408-409).
Many have tried to discredit Home. The tone of Ruth Brandon's book (1983) is to discredit spiritualism and those who believed in it. To this extent she does a good job in exposing the frauds. It is significant, therefore, that she could find nothing to discredit Home. Where she fails, however, is that her book (subtitled The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) confines "the occult" to the parlour pastimes most serious mystics were equally dismissive of; displacing the passion for the occult with ridicule of it.
Bulwer-Lytton investigated spiritualism from the mid-1850s until his death in 1873. He distinguished between "mediums of probity and honour supported by people of 109 like character" from "paid professionals" in the business of providing seances 61 . This distinction is too simplistic. Home, for example, certainly earned a living by his talents by accepting lavish gifts from his followers yet his seances were free. Home was not without his vices. In 1868 he was convicted "of having used 'spirit voices' to cozen some £24 000 from a Mrs Lyon", a rich old widow (Webb 1974:20). Yet no one could prove Home was a charlatan in the séance-room. Attributed with being able to elongate himself, handle red-hot coals drawn from a fire and float out of one window into another one floor up, he was "the most uncommon of all remarkable mediums"; "a human oddity" (Oppenheim 1985:11).
One unique fact about Home was that he was confident enough to hold seances in at least partial light — "the participants at Home's seances were startled to observe phenomena occurring in fair light" (Oppenheim 1985:14). "Light", Home said, "should be the demand of every Spiritualist ... By no other [tests] are scientific inquirers to be convinced. Where there is darkness there is the possibility of imposture, and the certainty of suspicion" 62. Scientists were still not convinced. Whether held in complete darkness or brilliantly lit rooms, seances could not meet acceptable laboratory conditions. An arch sceptic, Frank Podmore grudglingly acknowledged that Home was never publicly exposed as an imposter; "there is no evidence of any weight that he was even privately detected in trickery" 63. Home "was one of the most uncontroversial mediums who ever lived. If the vast number of reports of his 'manifestations' does not constitute unshakeable scientific evidence, then that term is completely meaningless" (Wilson 1971:474).
To someone like T H Huxley, however, it did not matter whether the medium was credible or a hoax because he would have nothing to do with spiritualism in any form. Huxley, like Bulwer-Lytton, was invited to join the Dialectical Society's investigation of spiritualism. Huxley declined saying, "The only good that I can see in the demonstration of 'Truth of Spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper, than die and be made to talk twaddle by a `medium' hired at a guinea a Séance" (Huxley:240 64).
61 Bulwer-Lytton quoted in Porter K H. Through a Glass Darkly: Spiritualism in the Browning Circle. 1958; reprint ed., New York: Octagon Books 1972:13 62 Home D D. Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism. New York: G W Carleton 1877:394-5. 63 Podmore F. Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism. 2 vols. London: Metheun 1902: 2:230. 64 Huxley L. Life and Letters of Huxley, Vol. 1 London 1900. 110
His wonderful astringency is justified to an extent in that the spirits did not seem to say anything profound. What interests me more is why so many were prepared to listen to "twaddle". A partial answer might be that the Victorians, with their great strides in positive science, needed to prove immortality whereas previous generations were prepared to accept the after-life as an act of faith. If the need for clarity and demystification meant listening to idle chit-chat from the other side, it was at least `proving' immortality. In a rational age the majority of Victorians were perhaps reluctant to accept the unexplained — there had to be a rational justification, a factual underpinning. And yet paradoxically, in a rational age — a boring, mundane existence — there seems to have been an inherent desire for the irrational to triumph; beating the rationalists at their own game by using the scientific methods the rationalists themselves used. Sperber, an anthropologist, views the spirit manifestation itself as a symbol representing the invisible world. Viewed this way, it does not really matter what the spirit says: "If spirits speak by causing tables to turn, they don't ... have much to say ... [but] The existence of spirits [is] ... more fascinating than are their feeble messages about the weather" (1975:6).
The method of proof of spirit manifestations had to be scientific if it was to pass muster with orthodox science. Researchers in organisations such as the Dialectical Society and the Society for Psychic Research believed they were employing such methods yet the established scientific community rejected them. Those who investigated psychic phenomena believed, as they still believe, that theirs is a "science offering unique possibilities for the extension of our consciousness and understanding of the world and, possibly, the next" (Brandon 1983:250). Some of these researchers, such as Hans Eysenck and Carl Sargent, writing as recently as 1982, still believe they are being unreasonably shunned by orthodox science 65 . Brandon believes that the rejection is justified: "Why go to all this bother to dress something up as science when it is clearly not science but ... magic?" (1983:250).
Psychical research still does not enjoy widespread prestige among respected scientists and it remains a marginal activity amongst pockets of 'laboratory' scientists. This non- recognition by orthodox science was of concern to someone like E J Dingwall, a man
65 Sargent C and Eysenck H. Explaining the Unexplained London 1982. 111 devoted to psychical research but who, in 1970, removed himself from the public study of the paranormal whilst maintaining his private belief in it. His reason was that "too many parapsychologists had been closet occultists" (Moore 1977:221). He never defined occultism but his point is that a closet occultist would not pursue a scientific line of study of the paranormal.
There may have been closet occultists among spiritualists but those with a propensity for occultism usually gravitated towards secret societies. These societies occupy a marginal position in Western civilization being "publicly invisible voluntary associations" (Tiryakian 1974:1). Their practices seem out of place in Western society, almost atavistic. Occultism involves some degree of secrecy and exclusiveness, a reliance on ancient texts or teachings that are often heretical by Christian standards. They believe in an interrelated universe in which the causative forces are not mechanical and in the acquisition of powers, through exercises and disciplines, powerful enough to bend cosmic forces to the will of the occultist.
Public awareness of the occult seems to surface only at certain periods. Is there a correlation between this revival and the ushering in of a new cultural paradigm? If this is so then how can it reconcile with those who view it as a breakdown of modernity; as an atavistic trait which is "a throwback to primitive mentality"? (Tiryakian 1974:2). An alternative to the 'atavistic' explanation might be to view the marginal esoteric as a "seedbed of innovations and inspirations" in many areas, art and literature included (Tiryakian 1974:2). This covert side of Western civilization would then act as a catalyst in the modernization process.
Religious and scientific authorities alike have treated the esoteric and the occult as delusions and superstitions. Various responses to such groups have ranged from considering them "innocuous frailties of the human mind" to "heresies — religious, scientific and political — which must be stamped out" (Tiryakian 1974:1). Although publicly condemned and repressed by various social means at the disposal of religious, scientific and political establishments, the occult has survived as social phenomena throughout the development of Western civilization. These groups have "remained on the margin of the socially visible, a covert if not underground aspect of the Western cultural system" (Tiryakian 1974:1). 112 The unknown quantity in secret societies could be a reason why eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authorities viewed them with such an "exaggerated terror" (Cavendish 1990:124). An undercover group poses a threat as an organised conspiracy against those currently in authority. Whether a secret society was 'good' or 'bad' depended on its objective. It is true that some secret societies had malicious intentions but many of them proliferated as a rallying point to sound the "first distant trumpet calls of the reaction which was to develop against rationalism and materialism and the new science and technology" (Cavendish 1990:124). Members of these benign secret societies felt a need "for a supernatural mystique in a world which rationalism was robbing" them of (Cavendish 1990:125). Opposing the establishment, they could not be part of it and so they formed groups outside of those holding articulate power. And when the Vatican and certain European governments denounced Rosicrucian-type societies as subversive, the "occultly inclined" flocked to join them (Cavendish1990:125). There is articulate power, power defined and agreed upon by those in the establishment (especially by its holders): "authority vested in precise persons; admiration and success gained by recognized channels. Running counter to this there may be other forms of influence less easy to pin down — inarticulate power" which exists outside the establishment, efficacious but unacceptable to the powers that be, and difficult to understand. (Cavendish 1990:8 66).
Simmel's67 observations of secret societies reveal that they have two qualities — inner and outer qualities. The secret society is protective in nature. It is the form in which the young seed (of an alternative worldview) can be nurtured and protected against unfavourable external elements. The structure of the group is "often with the direct view to assurance of keeping certain subjects from general knowledge" (Tiryakian 1974:83). The secret society is "the appropriate social form for contents which are ... peculiarly liable to injury from opposing interests ... and in need of defense ... [T]here is a predestination of secret societies for periods in which new life-contents come into existence in spite of the opposition of the powers that be" (Tiryakian 1974:81).
Secret societies have an "inner quality of reciprocal confidence between members ..., a quite specific type of confidence, viz., the ability to preserve silence" (Tiryakian
66 Quoting from Brown P: Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations 21-2. 67 The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies by Georg Simmel (1858-1918). References refer to the translated, abridged version in Tiryakian 1974:79-91. 113 1974:81). An "internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members. This element is needed in a peculiar degree, because the purpose of maintaining the secrecy is, first of all, protection ... It is the weakness of secret societies [that secrets] do not remain permanently guarded" (Tiryakian 1974:80). A heavy onus of silence is placed on the members; "no kind of confidence requires so unbroken subjective renewal" (Tiryakian 1974:82). And it only takes one moment's indiscretion of a member for the mutual guarantee of secrecy to be broken: "The probability of betrayal ... is subject to the imprudence of a moment, the weakness or agitation of a mood, the perhaps unconscious shading of an accentuation" (Tiryakian 1974:82).
In order to try and ensure secrecy, most secret groups have oaths and some have threats of penalties. These physical safeguards against the indiscrete tongue are complemented by psychological protection. Novices are taught the art of silence as "there is a need at the outset of learning silence once for all, before silence about any particular matter can be expected" (Tiryakian 1974:82). The initiate is assessed and can only move up the initiation ladder if he or she appears trustworthy. Novices become privy to the more profound secrets only when they are adepts. This technique ensures that if novices compromise the society, they have only low-level secrets to reveal. When an adept compromises the society, the society usually has to disband.
Apart from physical and psychological protection, there is the socialization aspect. If the members of a secret group were merely a "total of personalities not interdependent", the secret would soon be lost (Tiryakian 1974:83). Secrecy, by its nature, usually means isolation. By satisfying the socializing needs of members within the society, the member feels part of a special community which he would be letting down if he or she revealed its secrets. Thus the "secret society couterbalances the separatistic factor which is peculiar to every secret by the fact that it is society" (Tiryakian 1974:83). Particularly in the case of mystical secret societies, secrecy "is the sociological end-unto-itself. The issue turns upon a body of doctrine to be kept from publicity" (Tiryakian 1974:83).
One secret society to which Bulwer-Lytton has been linked is the Rosicrucian Society. The explanations of Mejnour and Zanoni in Zanoni point to how Bulwer-Lytton regarded this society as inferior to the society to which Mejnour and Zanoni belonged. 114
Both Yates (1975) and McIntosh (1980) put forward convincing, well-substantiated arguments that Rosicrucianism was founded on a hoax, or, to be more generous, a deliberately-created myth. What, then, has kept this hoax alive since the Fama pamphlet was published in 1614? McIntosh concludes his book by saying that Rosicrucianism is not a religion, cult or philosophy but "little more than a name, a symbol, a legend, certain occult associations, and a Gnostic type of outlook" (1980:145). These basic elements are vague enough to allow it to change colour and shape to suit the period, but distinct enough to allow it to survive. The symbolism of the rose-cross motif also assists it to survive. These symbols have an enduring, appealing quality; "a symbolism that is capable of speaking to every age with renewed force ... [which] touches off deep responses within us" (McIntosh 1980:21). Jung maintains that both symbols are so deep-seated within us that they allow each generation to give a fresh interpretation of them. Turner believes that the greater the symbol, the simpler its form: "a moment's reflection on the evocative nature of the Christian cross — simply two perpendicular pieces of wood of unequal length — suggests the truth of Turner's observation" (Moore 1997:233).
McIntosh believes that "the most fruitful way to look at Rosicrucianism is not as a specific doctrine or authority handed down through a succession of groups, but rather as the way that certain individuals have chosen to express an inner quest ... the quest itself is too elusive a nature to ever yield to analysis" (1980:147). In 1895 W B Yeats wrote an essay entitled The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux where his main point is that the importance of Rosicrucianism lies in the impact it has on the imagination rather than as pure fact. He says: "I cannot get out of my mind that this age of criticism is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in a supersensual world is at hand ..." (McIntosh 1980: Foreword, citing Yeats' essay).
In the Rosicrucian myth Western man catches "a glimpse of what ought to be ... what we could be. If we could set about it with with sufficient determination, the grip of `the world' could be broken — or at least weakened until it ceased to induce a constant feeling of alienation" (McIntosh 1980:14). This is what Bulwer-Lytton tried to do in his mystic novels. Even if Bulwer-Lytton was not a Rosicrucian, he understood the spirit of Rosicrucianism better than most of his contemporaries. The spirit of 115 Rosicrucianism was to train an elite wise who would have the power to regenerate society therefore anyone in sympathy with this goal "could consider himself one of the wise and a true Rosicrucian in spirit" (Cavendish 1990:126). A Rosicrucian in spirit would "exalt the worth and potential stature of man as a virtual god. They ... believe in a profound wisdom of great antiquity, lying beneath the surface of different traditions and concealed from the common herd" (Cavendish 1990:132).
Rosicrucianism teaches that "a nebulous idea can be a thing of power if it is cloaked in mystery and at the same time presented in the form of a simple but suggestive symbolism. It also shows that an idea can lead up blind alleys as well as avenues of light ... it has certainly had an enriching effect on art and literature. On balance one could say that the world would have been poorer without it" (McIntosh 1980:146). Among more sophisticated occultists "the Rosicrucian ideal remained a powerful magnet" (Cavendish 1990:138).
A specific type of secret society, theosophy, was started by H P Blavatsky (1831-91), often called `FIPB'. No one did more to encourage an "artificial glamour surrounding Eastern wisdom" than Madame Blavatsky; nor "did any other occult group in this period receive more public attention and press commentary "than the Theosophical Society" (Oppenheim 1985:162). Blavatsky's brand of occultism was an avowed attempt to reconcile science and religion. She maintained: "Occult Sciences claim less and give more, at all events, that either Darwinian Anthropology or Biblical Theology" (Webb 1974:91, quoting Blavatsky in her The Secret Doctrine). The theosophists stated their objective as "to obtain knowledge of the nature and attributes of the Supreme Power, and of the higher spirits by the aid of physical processes" (Webb 1974:92). Webb calls it "the epitome of the pseudo-intellectual" and "an epidemic of woolly thinking68" (Webb 1974:104, 276).
Theosophy was founded in 1875 in New York by Blavatsky and Olcott. The Theosophical Society was at once "a product of the late nineteenth century and the beneficiary of centuries of occult thought" (Oppenheim 1985:163). The creed which she founded, has had a "remarkable influence on the least respectable zones of European mind; and our attention must be focused on what it became rather than its
68 This type of pseudo-intellectual was found within the Nazis. Himmler was thoroughly imbued with theosophic tenets. 116 foundress [with her] flat Mongoloid face with the hypnotic eyes" (Webb 1974:79). The popularity of theosophy (which became even more powerful under Annie Besant) is an indication of the extent to which the irrational abounded. The history of theosophy "increases in significance because it represents so many of the confused aspirations of those who espoused the cause of the irrational" (Webb 1974:93).
The attraction of the society lay not only in HPB's charismatic personality — that certainly helped — but in the teachings which essentially hold that only specially initiated adepts could interpret secret documents that held, in signs and symbols, the key to wisdom. The possibility of "attaining truly godlike power over the natural world" was tantalising to many (Oppenheim 1985:163). Her first work, Isis Unveiled (1877), is a rehash of earlier occult beliefs presented in a muddled and misunderstood manner. It contains errors and plagiarisms brought to public attention as early as 1895 in F E Garrett's Isis Very Much Unveiled, whilst Maskelyne called her "the greatest impostor in history" and "a fibbing, cheating variety performer" (Oppenheim 1985:431 notes 16, 18). Fib and cheat she certainly did but equally certain "is her striking success in capitalizing upon, and further promoting, contemporary fascination with oriental systems" (Oppenheim 1985:164). Her attraction, despite her obvious flaws, indicates the extent to which she was supplying a need: a starving man will make a valiant attempt to catch a greased pig.
Theosophy was clearly marketed as occult. There were passwords, secret handshakes, rites of initiation, inner and outer circles; in short "theosophy was everything nineteenth-century ... spiritualists said they wanted nothing to do with" (Moore 1977:228). Many spiritualists, however, migrated to theosophy once they thought they ought to be doing something more than watching mediums' performances. Blavatsky came from a spiritualist background but founded Theosophy when she observed that "the communications of earthbound spirits formed but a small part of the realm yet unseen by most human beings" (Moore 1977:230). As Blavatsky pontificated: "The difference between us is that the mediums sell spirits and their phenomena for money and the spiritualists buy them as they would sweet candy, while we occultists regard the subject as a religion which should not be profaned" (Moore 1977:230 69).
69 Review of A P Sinnett's The Occult World, BL, June 3, 1882. 117 Theosophy claimed to be an occult science but Blavatsky's definition of science was considerably different to the spiritualist's definition. The phrase "'occult science' suggested a method that fell somewhere between the empirical methods imitated by spiritualists and the inward illumination sought by mystics" (Moore 1977:230). This is a generous interpretation; others have called it "antiscientific" (Neusner and Flesher 1989:245). However, Blavatsky's claim that theosophy is an occult science cannot really be taken seriously given the inaccuracies, plagiarisms and sloppy approach she adopted. This is unfortunate because nineteenth-century occult movements would have benefited from acceptance of the notion of an 'occult science' as an "attempt to recover magic's lost prestige [and] ... a restatement of the old Rosicrucian demand for a new synthesis" between science and the occult. Instead, scientists need only have pointed contemptuously to groups such as theosophy to justify their refusal to validate experiences which challenged their own legitimacy.
Wilson surprisingly refers to Isis Unveiled as "an incredibly erudite work ... [which] can still be studied with enjoyment" (1971:332). Neither Wilson nor Oppenhiem (1985) mention the central part Bulwer-Lytton unwittingly played in the theosophical movement. Webb mentions the "correspondence between the doctrines of Isis Unveiled and the novels of the English politician and occultist Bulwer-Lytton. In addition to direct plagiarism, Madame Blavatsky pays further tribute to Lytton, praising him in extravagant terms. It has even been argued that Lytton was the 'master of my dreams' to whom she referred in a diary shown in an unguarded moment to a devoted friend" (Webb 1974:83). Webb concludes that "from Bulwer-Lytton, or his sources, she drew a garbled version of the occultist's traditions" (1974:84).
Liljegren tackles in-depth the issue of Blavatsky's dependence on Bulwer-Lytton. He does not attack the tenets of theosophy but does try to establish, from a literary point of view, that Blavatsky plagiarised Bulwer-Lytton to a large extent. He also shows how taken up she was with him. On two occasions, when she was in London she tried to meet Bulwer-Lytton but never actually did and "had to be content with admiring him from afar" (Liljegren 1957:29). Liljegren also believes that Bulwer-Lytton's novels inspired her to visit Egypt: "I see no reason for ruling out my earlier thesis that the visit to [Egypt and] London was occasioned by her admiration for Bulwer-Lytton" (1957:54). There is no record left by Bulwer-Lytton that he even knew of Blavatsky's existence. 118
Liljegren is of the opinion that Blavatsky became a believer of Egyptian lore under the impact of Bulwer-Lytton's novels, particularly The Last Days of Pompeii and Zanoni, and "that several of the ideas found in these novels appealed to her as suitable when ... she needed foundations for a new creed" (1957:53). Ideas from the novels helped render her Theosophical Society more "attractive and to surround it with a halo of mysticism and magic" (Liljegren 1957:55). An example of this is the concept of a Dweller of the Threshold where she relied heavily on Zanoni. Liljegren quotes a passage in Isis Unveiled which is an unacknowledged lifting of approximately thirty- four lines straight out of Zanoni (1957:46).
Blavatsky speaks of secret masters who led her to write Isis Unveiled but Liljegren observes that "the only 'master' we can make out before the publication of Isis Unveiled is actually Bulwer-Lytton, and, as a matter of fact, she needed none other" (Liljegren 1957:55). In Isis Unveiled (1877:1, 285-6) she pays tribute to Bulwer- Lytton: "No author in the world of literature ever gave a more truthful or more poetical description of these beings [the soulless elemental beings] than Sir E Bulwer- Lytton, the author of Zanoni ... Now himself a thing not of matter but an Idea of joy and light, his words sound more like the fanciful echo of memory than the exuberant outflow of mere imagination ... Such is the insufficient sketch of elemental beings void of divine spirit, given by one whom many with reason believed to know more than he was prepared to admit in the face of an incredulous public" (Liljegren 1957:14). This quotation gives a sense of the style of the book as well as showing how she idolised Bulwer-Lytton.
Theosophy lay somewhere between spiritualism and occultism, although the line between the two was very porous. Most spiritualists were not occultists, but some occultists were attracted to spiritualism and "dabbled in it, usually finding it wanting because its passive, accepting attitude to the spirit world failed to satisfy their appetite for power" (Cavendish 1990:137). Bulwer-Lytton's description of the magician in The Haunted and the Haunters (414) catches the essence of an occultist:
If you could fancy some mighty serpent transformed into a man, preserving in the human lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea of that countenance than long descriptions can convey: the width and flatness of frontal 119 — the tapering elegance of contour disguising the strength of the deadly jaw — the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as the emerald — and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the consciousness of an immense power.
Bulwer-Lytton's "baleful magician ... is the nearest the human imagination seems to be able to get to the idea of superhumanity" (Wilson 1971:177). The fact that his adept has a hint of menace does not surprise Wilson who notes that that there are no portraits of benevolent supermen in world literature. This is probably because "our lack of sense of meaning means that we understand the negative better than the positive" (1971:177). Wilson believes that the description of the magician is a "fanciful portrait of [Eliphas] Levi" (1971:327).
In the seventeenth-century "magic and science were not yet totally separate areas of exploration" (Cavendish 1990:98). The two were indistinguishable and scientific experimentation took place within the framework of alchemy. Cavendish gives a few examples: Napier, the inventor of logarithms was a student of alchemy as was Van Helmont, the chemist. Newton "was deeply interested in alchemy and spent a remarkable amount of his time and energy working out prophetical calculations from Daniel and Revelations" (Cavendish 1990:98). The Oxford English Dictionary cites the date of the first use of the word scientist as 1840 when Whewell wrote in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences: "We need very much a name to describe a cultivar of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist" (Chapple 1986:1). Science is a word for ever changing its meaning in popular imagination. Today, "science is part of politics" as nations "invest in science and technology and ... organise them as part of the national power complex" (Appleman et al 1959:31). In 1859 science was not even being taught — neither at school nor university level. A progressive Bulwer-Lytton "urged reform and extension of education because of glaring deficiencies ... having glimpsed the importance of scientific technology" (Appleman et al 1959:103).
During the nineteenth century, scientists had developed laws and models which gave an "attractive ... air of predictability" and celebrated the "order of the physical world" (Oppenheim 1985:326). The scientific method itself was hailed, almost reverently, as the surest means of attaining truth. Many Victorians shared the hope that "this method could be adapted to all realms of intellectual inquiry, that all areas of knowledge 120 would prove reducible to scientific law" (Oppenheim 1985:200). Scientists commanded "unprecedented public admiration, for they appeared to hold in their collective grasp nothing less than the future of human civilization" (Oppenheim 1985:200).
One perceptive clergyman, Paul Cams, in 1896 wrote this in Open Court (a Chicago- based magazine): "The truth is that the confidence in science has already become a religious conviction with most of us. The faith in the scientifically provable has ... taken root in the hearts of men. Today it is the most powerful factor of our civilisation ..." (Brandon 1983:252). Science is taught to us as truth and presented to us as if it is secure for all time, untrammelled by religious dogma. The way science is taught "leaves the strong impression that there is some objective truth 'out there' and that science's major effort is to find, to describe, and to analyse it" (Ben-Yehuda 1985:109).
The scientific method is Cartesian — doubt everything which can be doubted and hope that what is left over is the 'truth'. Western scientists view the universe as dead and mechanical making the scientist nothing more than a "glorified accident-investigator" (Wilson 1971:29). This approach worked for nineteenth-century, positivist science, a science of material substances and mechanics because it achieved much by deliberately excluding anything which could not be empirically proven. The spiritualists and occultists argued that as "necessary as positivism had been to the advancement of knowledge, it had become a constricting vision" in need of incorporation of other ideas (Moore 1977:240). The spiritualists and occultists did not believe they were arguing for the irrational but against the "intellectual straitjacket" of positivism which "was the sole determinant of the truth of every proposition" (Moore 1977:240).
In the twentieth century scientists moved away from the large, coarse issues which occupied nineteenth-century science — broad issues such as electricity and magnetism — to the subtlety of concepts such as quantum mechanics. Science needed to go through this understanding of broader concepts, similar to the way an apprentice clock maker starts by repairing large clocks and slowly graduates to small watches. Now the scientist is "turn[ing] to the hidden levels of his being, to the 'occult' meanings and vibrations that have so far been too fine to grasp" (Wilson 1971:31). Wilson mentions 121 water divination which is commonplace and yet it has not been scientifically investigated. And when it is studied "it will no doubt prove to be something as simple as ... the salmon's sense of smell... " (1971:43). This is an example of the study of a subtle phenomenon which, when understood will conflate science and 'magic'. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research suggested that consciousness is a spectrum with our five senses in the middle, our subconscious 'robot' at the red end and at the violet end (and beyond?) superconscious powers — "other powers of which we are almost totally ignorant" (Wilson 1971:141).
It is trite to comment on how quantum theory and relativity have forced twentieth- century scientists to reexamine the Newtonian version of the universe. The nineteenth century backdrop of scientific dismissal of phenomena not provable in a laboratory is understandable and scientific procedures and disciplines have helped expand man's knowledge. In the nineteenth-century this attitude did lead, however, to a certain smugness to the extent that mid-Victorians physicists believed that "they had left their successors with little more to do than clean up a few minor problems" 70. Today's scientists know that any hypothesis they accept is temporary at best and that subatomic physics follows no permanent, repeating pattern yet Victorian scientists condemned psychic phenomena on these grounds.
There are valid reasons why nineteenth century scientists believed that acceptance of the paranormal would weaken the status of causality and scientific laws. They were only recently emerging from a time when clearly absurd beliefs and superstitions (such as examples mentioned earlier) were held to be true and scientists did not want "the way ... opened for the introduction in thin disguise of all the magic and superstition which [science has] fought against so hard and long" (LeShan 1974:198).
Did an actual scientific establishment exist? If so, what was its boundary? Was there a citadel of scientific orthodoxy and a locus of scientific power? The spiritualists felt persecuted by science but never identified their persecutors. Although there were scientific societies (such as the Royal Society and the British Association), there was no "single kind of scientific respectability ... from whose path no deviation could be tolerated" (Oppenheim 1985:392). Crookes was snubbed by both societies for his
70 Hobsbawm E J. The Age of Capital 1848 - 1875. London: Widenfled & Nicolson 1975:269. 122 psychic research yet both societies subsequently elected him as their president. These elections to the two main scientific societies make the identity and location of this supposed scientific authority even more elusive. At worst, there does seem to have been an invisible line which your average Fellow of the Royal Society knew not to cross without being ridiculed.
Scientists and occultists each accuse one another of conceit, prejudice and intellectual dishonesty. Perhaps above all the name-calling and being embroiled in problems of proof and demonstration there was a unifying factor with scientists and psychic researchers approaching the same goal from different sides. There is far more unity in modern times where, for example, the paranormal is being studied in psychology departments at universities. I believe both groups were on a quest for a "hidden pattern, a unifying framework, a fundamental theory, to bring together every diverse particle and force in the cosmos" (Oppenheim 1985:396). To the scientist this may have meant finding a link between heat, electricity, magnetism and light; to the spiritualist or occultist, the connection between mind, spirit and matter. Had they arrived at the same goal from different sides it would have been tantamount to reconciling science and faith — something that may happen in future generations.
Two areas which science, the occult and spiritualism each grappled with in equal darkness were in the trying to understand the concept of the 'mind', and with evolution.
Science was uncertain about the concept of mind as were the occultists and spiritualists for whom it was significant: "the independent existence of mind was ... an essential part of their argument against materialism. Whether dubbed mind, soul, spirit or ego ... such an entity distinct from brain tissue was requisite to rescue man from a state of virtual automatism, a mere bundle of physical and chemical properties" and so "flesh and spirit remained in their uneasy, ill-defined alliance" (Oppenheim 1985:205, 206). Not much had changed since Descartes's mind-body dualism.
The rise of science was "in no way a blow against occultism" because it "lay claim to extra-scientific knowledge" (Wilson 1971:276, 280). For example, a follower of Mesmer, Puysegur, stumbled across what he called 'spasmodic sleep' when trying to `magentise' a shepherd boy. Puysegur stroked the boy's head which caused the boy to 123 fall into a trance in which he obeyed instructions. The outcome of this accidental discovery led to phrenology and mesmerism. As the "mental implications of animal magnetism began to attract the attention of the medical profession, mesmerism finally escaped its degrading associations with the occult and gained a more respectable scientific status as hypnotism" mainly due to the work of Dr James Braid (Oppenheim 1985:214). Bulwer-Lytton took an interest in mesmerism. In A Strange Story, Dr Lloyd practices mesmerism which leads to the pamphlet battle with Fenwick. Dr Lloyd may have been based on one of Bulwer-Lytton's friends, Dr John Elliotson n who, in 1838, was forced to resign his professorship at University College Hospital, London, because of his use of animal magnetism (Webb 1974:25). Hypnotism remained of fringe interest to medical science but was central to spiritualism for it was in trance that the spirits spoke through the medium. Mesmerism, therefore, "expanded effortlessly into spiritualism" with the added advantage that it could use the recently- acquired scientific status hypnotism had acquired to give it a pretence of scientific methodology whilst still giving a silent nod to mesmerism's occult source (Oppenheim 1985:222). Blending the two camps, "the role of the medium ... assumed as much the priest's as the physician's function" (Oppenheim 1985:222).
Bulwer-Lytton not only supported these fringe areas of science but also took a keen interest in mainstream scientists such as Charles Babbage (inventor of computing machines) and Davy and Faraday (electro-chemists). He was one of the few. As a creative writer, Bulwer-Lytton would have become acquainted with scientific discoveries, new hypotheses and procedures from the reviewing journals which circulated at that time — Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review (Chapple 1986:5). The use of such journals with their wide readership and contributions from people of different disciplines meant a more shared discourse between scientist and non-scientist than there is now.
There is evidence that Bulwer-Lytton made use of published scientific material which would only have been made recently available to him. In his novel A Strange Story (chapter 55), for example, he refers to Kidd's Bridgewater Treatise — one of a series (1833-37) — in order to counter evolution by pointing to God's power and wisdom in creation. Many footnotes in A Strange Story attest to his keen and current interest in
'1 John Varley was also interested in phrenology and was also a friend of Elliotson (Story 1894:291). 124 science. These footnotes seem almost incongruous since the novel appeared in serial form in the family periodical All the Year Round.
In another example, Bulwer-Lytton quotes from Faraday who sequentially numbered each paragraph of his Experimental Researches. Part of paragraph 2146 reads "the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action" (Chapple 1986:38). In The Coming Race Bulwer-Lytton quotes paragraph 2146 perhaps to give scientific credibility to vril (The Coming Race:45-46). The dwellers of the underground utopia "consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday ... intimates under the more cautious term of correlation ..." (The Coming Race:45). Bulwer-Lytton "cleverly manipulates his borrowed idea of the correlation, or convertibility, of natural forces" so that a character in the novel, Zee, alludes to universal electric lightening, individual flight, electric shock treatment, laser-like weapons and remote control of robots. (Chapple 1986:40).
The above example in particular illustrates the important point that Bulwer-Lytton introduced revolutionary ideas of a major kind about the nature of physical reality; ideas we take for granted now that they have come to fruition. As Chapple says, "Few authors make such direct allusions and salient use of scientific concepts as Bulwer does" (1986:41).
The second area which science, occultism and spiritualism had to contend with in the nineteenth century was evolution. Darwin's On the Origins of Species'' created a watershed between science and religion in the nineteenth century. The theory of evolution was not invented by Darwin. In 1715 a Frenchman called de Maillet wrote a book called Telliamed73 which is very similar to Darwin's view. It was published posthumously (for fear of reprisal) in 1749, preceding Darwin's book by ninety years. Goethe had also worked on a theory of evolution based on the speculation that "the multiplicity of living creatures had originally developed from a few basic forms or
72 The full name of Darwin's book is On the Origins of the Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). It has been referred to as a "rare instance of a scientific work which is also a literary classic" (Appleman et al 1959:17). 125 archetypes" but scientists of his day regarded him as "an interloper, a clumsy amateur" (Wilson 1980:191). Only after Darwin's On the Origins of Species was published "was it safe to hail him [Goethe] as an inspired forerunner of Darwin" (Wilson 1980:191).
Lamarck (1744 - 1829), also preceding Darwin, believed that species evolve because they want to but this teleological view of evolution was ignored because it inferred nature has a reason for developing in the way she does. The science of the nineteenth century rejected the concept of purpose in nature. Wilson says that "biologists hate the heresy known as 'vitalism', the notion that life somehow 'wants' to produce healthier and more intelligent creatures; they just happen to get produced because health and intelligence survive better than sickness and stupidity" (1980:26). Vitalism is based on teleology, the notion of purpose. The concept was rejected when the idea that the universe operated like a machine was at its height. Sub-atomic science and quantum physics are now indicating that there may be a "ghost in the machine" after all and "it is becoming clear that what scientists will have to face is the prospect of a return to the principle that materialism displaced: vitalism" (Inglis 1986:3). Is it possible Lamarck was right all along?
One reason why Darwin achieved such popularity is that when he published, in 1859, science had truly come to power. Founded on empirical fact, On the Origins of Species helped sweep away past superstitions and gave science a strong foothold in a world where positivism was the order of the day. Darwin's book "was not...the sole great dissolver of faith in mid-Victorian England" but "another stage in the positivist tradition" (Appleman et al 1959:32). The well-timed publication of On the Origins of Species gave the book much of its impetus. Science — "by the general issues it raised and by the manner in which the evolutionary debate of the 1860s coincided with fierce arguments about the historical truth of the Bible — was widely seen as playing a prominent role in the general unsettlement of educated British minds" (Hoppen 1998:497). Positivism was "the most consistently powerful intellectual movement in England" for over two centuries. It "called the tune and forced other modes of thought to dance to it" (Appleman et al 1959:32, both). Being both a method and a disposition
73 His name spelt backwards. Wilson 1980:190, for a full account. 126 of mind, positivism "was put forward as the soundest way of discovering truth about all subjects" (Appleman et al 1959:33).
Darwin confirmed more rigorously what positivism had for long asserted: that the history of the world is the history of progress and that there was no need for supernatural intervention during the ages to account for whatever had happened. This mocked Creation and reduced the Flood to a trickle. The metaphysical significance of such assertions took on great importance and led men such as Bulwer-Lytton to counter Darwinism — subtly in A Strange Story (1862) and unabated in The Coming Race (1871).
An extension of positivism was the way in which historical biblical study was approached, particularly by the Germans. This approach to biblical study is one way in which science encroached on religion. The critical study of biblical sources, which the Germans introduced, became a science in itself and the "material on which the conclusions of yesterday were based was exposed, at ... worst as surmise, gossip, traveller's tales, and myth, and at ... best as documents which carried a meaning for the original writer and his contemporaries quite different from the meaning which had been traditionally assigned to them by the churches and other self-interested parties" (Appleman et al 1959:34). Turning biblical history into a science caused quite a rumpus amongst the clergy who were not used to being asked the question 'Why and how do you believe'. In a moral panic — bewildered and enraged — they fell upon Darwin. The Church lost. As "sometimes happens when the established order in society decides to force an issue and crush a lone danger, the dissident suddenly appears to gather strength from the soil itself and emerges as the leader of an army triumphant with banners flying" (Appleman et al 1959:36).
Bishop Wilberforce is an example of how ill-equipped the Church was against this new threat. He conceded an easy victory to T H Huxley in a debate on evolution held at Oxford. The bishop asked whether Huxley had descended from a monkey on his mother's— or his father's side. Huxley replied: "I would not be ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor, but I would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth" (Wilson 1980:193). Humorous as it is, the debate missed the central concern of religion: Darwin implied that man has no free will and that we are living in a godless and meaningless universe. This might not have been 127 Darwin's intention (himself an orthodox Christian) but natural selection does have the effect of making free will seem superfluous and it weakens the claim that man is utterly apart from the other species.
In the mid-1800s, science usurped the position which religion had held and which mysticism had held before that. Religion was assuming a "prosaic and quasi-scientific posture" possibly to gain credence within the community and be seen as "relevant" (Brandon 1983:252). Personally, I would have liked to have seen religion embrace Darwinism to the extent that it proved that not all Church dogma is an eternal verity, and move into those spheres of mysticism and mystery unaffected by pragmatic science; above scientific critique and argument: creating a space for the absurd and irrational. Darwinism taught that mankind was in charge but such responsibility did not sit easy with many who still craved super-human authority. There is a "deep need in the world just now for guidance — almost any sort of spiritual guidance". Although not written by a Victorian but by Jung in 1960, it is just as applicable to the nineteenth century'. The sustained interest in the unexplained over the years indicates that a leap into the absurd remains attractive, even essential. The timing was ripe for an occult revival.
Evolution influenced other areas, such as politics and society. This may have been because "evolutionary ways of thinking had become so ubiquitous and elastic, ... Darwin's most original contribution — natural selection — was itself rapidly absorbed into a range of (not always compatible) systems of thought (Hoppen 1998:474). By the 1860s, the idea of evolution had come, "not only to imply a view of affairs in which flux rather than permanence represented reality in nature, but to acquire notions of linear direction and 'progress' as well" (Hoppen 1998:474). Victorians were operating in an environment "increasingly shaped by ideas of energy, struggle, and competition" (Hoppen 1998:475).
Darwin's "tolerably specific theories" began to ooze into much vaguer and broader concepts of evolution as it began to exercise enormous power over politics and economics (Hoppen 1998:476). Darwin ostensibly shrank from the general public but in fact encouraged the conflation of biology with politics and economics, fueling this
74 McGuire W and Hull R F C. C. G. Jung Speaking - Interviews and Encounters. London 1978:398. 128 catholicity of ideas by contributing some of his own sayings. Thus, to paraphrase him, `many a mickle make a muckle', the 'race is to the swift' and 'handsome is as handsome does'''. This `evolutionese' was not limited to Darwin. Foster, a Cambridge physiologist, speaks of mammals living up to their physiological incomes whilst cold- blooded creatures save for the future. To me, imputing wise and unwise investments to an animal shows the extent to which those in the nineteenth century were swept up with the idea of evolution willing it almost to be an explanation for all the ills of the day.
The occultists' and spiritualists' attitude towards evolution was ambivalent. The progressive view of human development — that man was getting 'better' — was in keeping with their worldview but they did not like too close a relationship between humans and animals because that threatened the belief that man alone has an immortal spirit. A number of spiritualists could easily reconcile Darwin's theory with their own beliefs because Darwin complemented the spiritualist's view of the afterlife. Darwin explained from whence humanity had come; spiritualists could account for the spiritual evolution of mankind in the spirit world. The spiritualist's view is that after death the spirit evolves at a much more rapid pace, unimpeded by physical constraints. Oppenheim says that "[i]t gave spiritualists no small pleasure to illustrate how evolutionary theory gave ... lie to repressive beliefs concerning man's fall from grace" (1985:270).
The more discerning occultists, however, were critical of those spiritualists who embraced Darwinism with such alacrity because these easily-converted spiritualists either ignored or were ignorant of the biological implications of what Darwin was saying. If natural selection accounted for man's place in nature then humans must have evolved from an earlier organism which did not make him qualitatively different from the animals. If the peculiar characteristics of humanity — mind, spirit, consciousness — were shared with other animals then man was not as unique as he thought. The 'onward and upward' mentality might be a nice idea but the other ramifications of evolution were more ominous. Even Blavatsky incorporated evolution into her theosophy giving it "a particular appeal to a generation threatened by the theory of evolution ... It was the genius of HPB to apply Darwin's theory to produce a
75 C G Gillespie. The Edge of Objectivity. London 1960:303. 76 G L Geison. Michael Forster and the Cambridge School of Physiology. Princeton 1978:350. 129 hopeful resolution of the human condition ... Man had evolved from apes — perhaps; but he ... was on his way to higher and better things" (Webb 1974:90).
The characteristics of any past age are revealed "by the manner in which contemporaries tried to explain their situation in time and place and by the language and concepts in which such explanations were formulated and discussed". In the case of mid- and late Victorian Britain the "ambiguous and slippery notion of 'evolution' generated perhaps the most striking cluster of concepts around which the governing ideas of the time were put together and assessed" (Hoppen 1998:472, both). Victorian minds were so imbued by the idea of evolution that is has ever since remained indelibly dyed into the fabric of British thought and British life. 130
Conclusion
Bulwer-Lytton wrote a series of essays for a periodical called Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. This magazine was started in 1817 as a Tory rival to the Whig Edinburgh Review, and became a "medium for imaginative literature, publishing English poetry, essays and especially prose fiction, and pioneering the presentation of 'European literature [particularly German] to a British audience" 77 . In his essay "On the Normal Clairvoyance of the Imagination" 78, Bulwer-Lytton sums up the distinction he has so often made that there are frivolous and serious forms of clairvoyance and that he only identifies with the latter. Since this distinction is so eloquently put by him, I make extensive use of his essay in this conclusion — letting Bulwer-Lytton himself have the last word both from his prose and his fiction.
In Zanoni we have seen how Mejnour the adept begins his training of Glyndon, the neophyte: The elementary stage of knowledge is to make self, and self alone, thy study and thy world ... To perfect thy faculties, and concentrate thy emotions, is henceforth thy only aim!" (Zanoni:199). Next Mejnour teaches the initiate the trance: "man's first initiation is in TRANCE. In dreams commences all human knowledge; in dreams hovers over measureless space the first faint bridge between spirit and spirit, — this world and the worlds beyond!" (Zanoni:221).
In A Strange Story Derval speaks to Fenwick prior to putting Fenwick into a trance:
Of mesmerism ... I can well understand that medical men may hesitate to admit it among the legitimate resources of orthodox pathology ... because ... it must, at the best, be far too uncertain in its application to satisfy the requirements of science ... But as to that which you appear to reject as the most preposterous and incredible pretension of the mesmerists, and which you designate by the word `clairvoyance,' it is clear to me that you have never yourself witnessed even those very imperfect exhibitions which you decide at once to be imposture. I say imperfect because it is only a limited number of persons whom the eye or the
77 URL: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk.ilej This site features the full texts of these (and other) magazines. The full text of Bulwer-Lytton's On the Normal Clairvoyance of the Imagination was obtained from this site.
78 Bulwer - Lytton E. On the Normal Clairvoyance of the Imagination. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 91, March 1862 pp 303 — 308. 131 passes of the mesmerist can affect; and by such means, unaided by other means, it is rarely indeed that magnetic sleep advances beyond the first vague shadowy twilight dawn of that condition to which only in its fuller developments I would apply the name of 'trance' ... trance is as essential a condition of being as sleep or as waking. By means within the range of science that explores its nature and its laws, trance, unlike the clairvoyance you describe, is producible in every human being however unimpressionable to mere mesmerism" (A Strange Story:176).
Lastly, when Faber and Fenwick are engaged in one of their dialogues, Faber says to Fenwick: "IMAGINATION! that faculty, the most glorious ... because it is the faculty which enables thought to create" (A Strange Story:409).
The extracts from A Strange Story indicate that Bulwer-Lytton did believe in 'mere mesmerism' but ranks it below 'trance'. Both mesmerism and trance are loosely labelled 'clairvoyance'. It is in trance, he argues, that the power of the imagination is unleashed. In Zanoni his position is similar when he says that human knowledge arises out of trance. It is significant that in the twenty years between writing Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1862), Bulwer-Lytton's view on the power of trance and imagination did not alter but improved. A Strange Story first appeared in serial form from 10 August 1861 to 8 March 1862 in Dickens's magazine, All the Year Round. In the same month the serial finished, March 1862, Bulwer-Lytton's essay appeared in Blackwood's confirming exactly in prose what he had said in fiction.
His essay begins with the words: "Most men are sceptical as to the wonders recorded of mesmeric clairvoyance" (303). He agrees with the argument a "cautious physiologist" might put forward that mesmerism is "capricious", "uncertain", "unreliable", "that experiments ... invariably fail when subjected to those tests which the incredulous not unreasonably demand" and that "it does not improve by practice" (303(3), 304(1), 305(1)). He is disappointed with "[h]ow little ... mesmeric clairvoyance [has] realised the hopes that were based on the early experiments of Puysegur!" (304). Mesmerism "has not solved one doubtful problem in science", cannot "tell us what is heat or electricity", "cannot tell us the cause of an epidemic ... has not added to the pharmacopoeia a single new remedy". Mesmerism "can read the thoughts hoarded close in your heart, the letter buttoned-up in your pocket, — and 132 when it has done so, cui Bono! you start, you are astonished, you cry 'miraculous!' but the miracle makes you no wiser than if you had seen the trick of a conjuror" (304).
Having defined mesmeric clairvoyance as "very limited ... very precarious, unimprovable, [and] unprofitable", Bulwer-Lytton then asks the question: "[D]oes it never strike us that there is something much more marvellous in that normal clairvoyance which imagination bestows upon healthful brains?" (305). This 'normal clairvoyance' is the power of the imagination, the ability to "traverse, in spirit, the region of time and space — 'see,' says Sir Henry Holland'', 'through other organs than the eyes,' and be wise through other faculties than the reason" (303). This "gift of seeing is more or less accurately shared by all in whom imagination is strongly concentred upon any selected object, however distant and apart from the positive experience of material senses" (306). The Oxford Dictionary defines clairvoyance in a similar way — as "the supposed power of seeing in the mind either future events or things that are happening or existing out of sight". Bulwer-Lytton posits that imaginative clairvoyance is stronger, more reliable and more efficacious than mesmeric clairvoyance. He mentions how his friend, Dr John Elliotson, would surely agree: "No man has sacrificed more for the cause of mesmerism than Dr Elliotson, and perhaps no man would more earnestly warn a neophyte ... not to accept the lucky guesses of the Pythian for the infallible response of Apollo" (304). Rather than fickle mesmeric clairvoyance, "the clairvoyance of wakeful intellect has originated all the manifold knowledge we now possess" (305).
Bulwer-Lytton argues that mankind creates through the power of the imagination: "Every art, every craft that gives bread to the millions, came originally forth from some brain that saw it first in the typical image" (305). The human origin of this power is mentioned in the Haunters and the Haunted (subtitled The House and the Brain). The miraculous occurrences which occur in the haunted house are not divine but mortal in origin: "That this brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into movement, that it is malignant and destructive, I believe" (Haunters and the Haunted:409 ) but — it remains unequivocally human. Bulwer-Lytton mentions Shakespeare as someone whose imaginative power was so strong that "it is amusing to read the ingenious hypotheses framed by critics who were not themselves poets, in
79 Holland (1788 - 1873), physician to Queen Victoria and author of Chapters on Mental Physiology which considers the relationship between the mind and the body. 133 order to trace in Shakespeare's writings the footprints of his bodily life" (305). Thus whereas the critics believe Shakespeare had to have actually, for example, been an attorney's clerk, a medical student or have lived in Italy in order to have written so persuasively, Bulwer-Lytton attributes this ability to the power of the imagination. This power is, to a greater or lesser extent, present amongst "novelists, even third-rate and fourth-rate" where ...[c]lairvoyance is the badge of all their tribe"' (306). The power of the imagination is not limited to poets and novelists — "Newton's clairvoyance is not less marvellous than Shakespeare's. To imagine the things they have never seen, and to imagine them accurately, constitutes the poetry of philosophers, as it constitutes the philosophy of poets" (307).
This ability to imagine prototypes emphasises the importance of trance, where the mind has to be in a trancelike state if the imagination is to be effective. Bulwer-Lytton is of the opinion that the "the faculty of glassing images"' only occurs when "the imagination is left clear from disturbing causes — ... clairvoyance ... is lucid in proportion [to it being] unruffled by the shift and change which are constantly varying the outline of things familiar" (308). He ends his essay by again affirming the superiority of the imagination:
I cannot pass half-an-hour in my library [and not read of] ... instances of normal clairvoyance immeasurably more wonderful than those erratic gleams of lucidity in magnetic sleep, which one man reveres as divine and another man disdains as incredible" (308).
Bulwer-Lytton's public statement on the power of the imagination helps explain other aspects of his life and writing. It explains, for example, his affinity towards John Varley, the artist and astrologer and William Blake, the visionary. When Varley recalls how Blake would "suddenly leave off [drawing a vision], and ... remark 'I can't go on, — it is gone! I must wait till it returns' (Story 1894:261), I am reminded that Bulwer-Lytton says that "clairvoyance ... is lucid in proportion [to it being]
80 Bulwer-Lytton immodestly ranks himself as first-class when he says: "I am not sure, indeed, that I could not describe the things I imagine more exactly than the things I habitually see" (307). 81 The image of glass is also used by Mrs Atwood in her book Early Magnetism, in its higher relations to Humanity as veiled in the Poets and the Prophets (1846), cited in Regardie 1970:99 - "The trance state when justly and perseveringly ordered for that end, affords the metaphysical condition pre- eminently perfect, for it removes the sensible obstruction and presents a clearer glass before the mind than it can ever regard in the natural state". 134 unruffled by the shift and change which are constantly varying the outline of things familiar" (308).
Bulwer-Lytton uses the metaphysical novel as his genre of choice to convey his ideas of the imagination. In a letter to his son (14 September 1861) he says of A Strange Story: "I fancy this will be my best work of imagination. I fancy it deals with mysteries within and without us wholly untouched as yet by poets. It is not my widest work, but I think it is perhaps the highest and deepest" (Life 2:345). Eigner (1978) argues that Romantic movement influenced the development of the metaphysical novel of the nineteenth-century. The Romantic belief in the power of the imagination was seen as a way to combat the materialism prevalent in the Victorian era and as a key to unlock human potential. Bulwer-Lytton, according to Eigner, is the most eloquent champion and spokesman of the metaphysical novel, which places this author as a living link back to the original Romantic movement. This position is strengthened when we consider the strong affinity Bulwer-Lytton had with Varley and Blake.
Elsewhere I have shown that the Romantic movement was largely underpinned by occult philosophy. Bulwer-Lytton had a rich and genuine occult learning that earned him the respect of all the leading figures of the occult revival. He carried on the tradition of German and English Romanticism where imagination and intuition was held high. Occultism — with its emphasis on the imagination — fell within the legitimate province of the metaphysical novel genre: "The worldview of the romantic movement is occultism ... Consider the greatest names out of thousands — Shelley, Blake,... Goethe, Novalis [Bulwer-Lytton is mentioned on the next page] ... If all these great figures had merely dabbled, if it were only a matter of table turnings and the like, we should dismiss it as a diversion of genius; but occult ideas are involved in their greatest works" (Senior 1959:50).
Bulwer-Lytton, we know, did not merely dabble in the occult, having actively and seriously studied the occult since his school-days (Wolff 1973:148-9). This well- versed metaphysical novelist puts forward Rosicrucianism with its alchemical beliefs as an attractive worldview, alternative to the nineteenth-century positivist view. The essay entitled The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux written by W B Yeats in 1895 has as its main point that the importance of Rosicrucianism lies in the impact it 135 has on the imagination rather than as a pure historical fact. He says: "I cannot get out of my mind that this age of criticism is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in a supersensual world is at hand ..." (McIntosh 1980: Foreword, citing Yeats' essay).
The Rosicrucian belief that the Philosopher's Stone is created out of intense heat also relates to the power of the imagination. The purpose of the fire is to animate and activate by "delivering metals from their imperfection and humankind from death" (Faivre et al 1992:76). Alchemy is the art of fire which alchemists liken to the secret Fire in Nature which the anima mundi, the spirit of the earth, uses to animate and activate "even the smallest particle of matter" (Faivre et al 1992:76). This interpretation of fire "is sometimes associated with the active imagination, alone capable of 'informing' and animating matter; it is not a simple support or pretext for spiritualization, but the 'place' [the crucible] wherein the instrument whereby transmutation takes place (temporally and spatially), permitting the corporealization of the spirit and the spiritualization of the body" (Faivre et al 1992:77).
When Bulwer-Lytton is considered as author of certain occult novels, he emerges as a worthy contender for the title of spokesman for the metaphysical novel by re- introducing into his society the positive aspects of Romanticism. It is this capacity that I find one way in which this man particularly contributes to English literature, a contribution which, I believe, has perhaps been ignored. The thrust of his occult novels in confronting the nineteenth-century paradox of investigating the mystical from a vantage point of rationality is probably unique among English writers of the period nor is it easy to find another English writer who embarked on such active investigation as Bulwer-Lytton or who displayed such an open mind and such commitment in the field of mysticism. This judgement is shared by the scholarship 82 of those I have discussed who have put forward convincing reasons to assert that Bulwer-Lytton created in the higher, rather than the lower, register of his craft.
82 In particular Campbell (1986), Christensen (1976), Eigner (1978), Fradin (1961), Liljegren (1957), Roberts (1990), Sadleir (1931), Schuchard (1975), Senior (1968) and Wolff (1971). Together these critics form a considerable corpus. 136
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