The Philosophy of Mystery — Story, Setting & Ideas

CASTALY. We have roamed, dear Ida, among the classic lands of the far-off Mediterranean: we have looked, from her pinnacles of snow, on the silvery gleaminess of Switzerland, and from purple sierras on the sunny splendour of Spain; yet these English meadows, with their fringes of wild bloom, come o’er the heart with all the freshness of an infant’s dream. Yon majestic crag of Wyndcliff is flinging its purple shadows athwart the water, and floods of golden glory are streaming through the beech-woods of Piercefield: and see, our little sail, white as the wing of a swan, is wafting us towards Abbey Tintern, along this beautiful valley, where the river almost doubles on itself; meandering among its mead-flowers and its mosses, as loth to leave its luxuriant bed. Listen! the breath of evening is among the trees that dip in the ripple of the Wye their leaves of shivering gold. What a scene for minions of the moon to revel in! Say, shall we charm the lingering hours of this midsummer night among the ivied cloisters of the abbey? But where is Astrophel, our moon-struck student, who, like Chaucer’s scholar, keeps

——“at his bed’s head, A twenty books clothed in black and red, Of Aristotle and his philosophy?”——

They have not taught him courtesy, or he would not steal away from the light of our eyes to commune with owls and ivy-bushes.

Yet we promise him our smile for _your_ sake, Evelyn. Indeed, I am thinking his mysteries will chime in admirably with the solemnity of this lone abbey. We appoint him master of our revels.

EVELYN. Let your smile be in pity, fair Castaly, on the illusions of Astrophel. Ensconced in his dark closet, within a charmed ring of black-letter folios, he has wofully warped his studies, and has read himself into the belief that he is a GIFTED SEER. Yet love him, lady, for his virtues; for his history is a very paradox. His heart is melting with charity for the beings of earth, yet his mind is half-weaned from their fellowship. At his imminent peril, he leaps into the Isis to save a drowning boy, and the world calls him misanthrope, withal. It is the fate indeed of many a cloistered scholar, whose

——“desires are dolphin like, And soar above the element they live in.”

IDA. He looks his part to perfection. There is a shadowy expression in his dark eye, as it were poring over the volume of his own thoughts. Beneath the slender shaft of yon eastern window, behold this proselyte to the sublime science of shadows. He approaches.

EV. The _hour_ is on him yet.—Astrophel!

ASTROPHEL. Whisper, and tread lightly, Evelyn, for this is haunted ground. Underneath this velvet turf rest the mouldering bones of a noble. I have held communion in my slumber with the spirit by which they were once animated and moved; and the mysteries of the tomb have been unfolded to me. The _eidōlon_ of Roger Bigod has thrice come across my sight.

EV. And Astrophel believes the truth of this vision! Such phantasy might well become the Cistercian monks, who once stalked along these gloomy cloisters, but not an Oxford scholar.

ASTR. And why not an Oxford scholar, Evelyn? I _do_ believe in the existence of beings out of the common course of nature; and, indeed, the history of the world has ever proved the _general_ leaning to this belief, and my own mind feels that this universal adoption is a proof of _reality_ of existence. Smile at, or reason with me, you will not shake my faith, for I believe it true; and even Johnson confessed, that “although all argument might be against it, yet all belief is for it.”

EV. The diffusion of this fallacy, Astrophel, proves only the universal sameness of the constitution of mind. You may, indeed, cite the high authority of Johnson, that “a belief in the apparitions of the dead could become universal only by its truth.” Yet, if this one word, _apparition_, be rightly interpreted, it will not imply the _existence_ of real phantoms, however ethereal, _before_ the eye, for the notion so construed would have been a grand error of Imlac; no, he adopts an _indefinite_ expression, conscious that mere metaphysics were not illustrative of this subtle question.

There was one Theophilus Insulanus, who, I think, calls all those who have not faith in phantoms, _irreligious_, because, forsooth, “these ghosts are never employed on subjects of frivolous concern.” I may be under the ban of this flimsy enthusiast, but you will not gain me as a proselyte, Astrophel, for, like our great poet, I have seen too many ghosts myself.