Chapter 4 NARRATIVE OF THE REVEREND CHARLES CLIFTON.

I am indebted for education to a bachelor uncle, who, after our great bereavement, received at his house an infant sister and myself. I was at that time about twelve years old. My relative enjoyed a handsome annuity, which he spent with the utmost liberality. As I was rather a thoughtful, though not very studious boy, it was determined that I should go to college. I entered with some difficulty soon after my seventeenth birthday,-an age somewhat later than the average at that time.

Two years before me in college was the class of 18-. Upon the roll of its fifty-two members stood the name of Herbert Vannelle. Rich, an orphan, inclined to thought and study beyond the limited academic range of those days, endowed with personal fascinations of a very rare and peculiar kind,-there seemed only one possible shadow to darken his career. In his family there had been said to exist a tendency to eccentric independence of action, which vulgarly, perhaps justly, passed for insanity. His father, who died soon after Herbert entered college, had given much uneasiness to the wealthy and respectable city-circle with which he was socially connected. Upon the death of his wife he had retired to the Vannelle homestead in the northwestern part of Connecticut, and there lived in studious seclusion. There he insisted upon bringing up his only son, deprived of such recreations and companionships as are suitable to youth. He had, indeed, superintended his studies with patience and thoroughness, and had not failed to accomplish him in the grace of physical power, at that time little recognized as a part of education.

So much was known of Vannelle when he appeared at college among the young men of the Junior Class. And little more was known of him when he left America on the day his class graduated. His connections with the other students had been very slight. He had never cared to acquire that fluency in retailing the thoughts of others upon which college-rank depends. An access to the library was all that he seemed to value in his connection with the institution. And here he busied himself, not with the openings to the solid and rational sciences, but with the bewildering sophistries of the school-philosophies, and their aimless wrangling over verbal conceits.

At that time I happened to be taking a young man's first enchanting rounds upon the tread-mill of metaphysics. At the library I often encountered Vannelle in search of some volume of which I had just possessed myself. This led to an acquaintance. I was soon fascinated by a power which streamed from his large, expressive eyes, and persuaded by a voice modulated in a pathos and sweetness that I have heard in no other person. His influence upon me at this time was not unlike that which the mesmerists had just begun to exercise. Yet, while he showed an interest in directing my inquiries along the paths to which they naturally tended, he never communicated the results of his own studies, or offered me the slightest assistance in generalizing my random observations. What he thought himself, or by what writers he was influenced, it was not easy to fathom. He was deeply acquainted with the writings of the New-England Transcendentalists, then at their greatest notoriety, yet never for an instant seemed giddy upon the hazy heights where those earnest spirits soared.

Vannelle spent two years in Germany, and returned to America about the time that my college-course was finished. The little I knew of him during his absence was from the scattered notices of newspaper-correspondents, who intimated that Herbert possessed the privilege of friendly intercourse with men most distinguished for knowledge in the Old World. Just before Class-Day, I received a letter dated from X--, in Connecticut, inviting me, in terms which seemed almost a command, to spend the summer at the Vannelle homestead. Herbert had returned, and thus abruptly summoned me. Intending to postpone until the autumn the study of a profession, I promised to come to him for a few weeks,-a visit which might be extended, were it mutually agreeable.

There was, at that time, a day of weary staging after leaving the cars, before arriving in the village of X--; there were also six rough miles of carriage-conveyance before the traveller could attain the old house by the damp river-marsh whereto I was destined. When I arrived there, Vannelle stood at the door to greet me.

"We have six months' concern together," he said, as if delivering himself of some studied speech,-"we have six months' concern together; then we may stand at the parting of the ways,-we may cleave to one another, or separate forever."

A low, dark house. The south-side planted out from the sun by pines and cedars. The parlors covered with well-worn Turkey carpets, chafed into dusty ridges. The wretched window-glass breaking and distorting the pine-trees without. Little oval mirrors distorting the human countenance within. In the living-room (so called by those able to live in it) loomed a rusty air-tight stove of cathedral proportion,-a ghastly altar which the bitterest enemy of the family might feel fully justified in protecting. A square, cellarless room, about twenty feet from the house, had been the study of the elder Vannelle. Tables covered with a confused mass of writing-materials. A jumble of retorts and other chemical apparatus about the floor. Cabinets of the ugliest pattern reached to the ceiling;-at first I supposed them to be made of painted wood; afterwards I discovered they were of iron, and filled with rare books and manuscripts.

"My father built this study," said Vannelle, as we passed into it. "He wished to get rid of those periodical clearings-up from which there is no escape in a New-England household. Mrs. Brett, the wife of our farmer, could never resist the feminine itch to put things to rights. She was always contriving to arrange papers and books in symmetrical piles where nothing could be found. My father could never turn his back but she was sure to annihilate important scraps of writing that were lying about the floor, and, under pretence of sweeping, invoke a simoom of dust that hours were insufficient to allay. But when he built this room, and kept the key of it, there was no more trouble."

I shudder as I hurry through these descriptions, for a confession which I hardly dare to put into words must accompany them. All these surroundings, seen by me for the first time, had a fearful familiarity. In some occult state of spiritual existence I seemed to have known them all. I have learned that the soul may enter into communion with other minds otherwise than through the senses,-nay, more, it may thus take an inexplicable cognizance of material things. Of this I have had such proof as it would be infatuation to doubt. I was compelled to test this startling suspicion for the first time.

"You need not take me up-stairs, Herbert," I said, as we returned to the house. "The picture of your father, which hangs in the large chamber projecting over the porch, was doubtless a good likeness of the mask he wore at city club-houses and family-dinners,-but the man as you knew him here, how little does it resemble! As for the Chinese cabinet which stands between the windows, it has associations, no doubt, but it is sadly out of repair. Those pink tiles about the fireplace may be interesting to antiquaries; but I rather prefer the blue variety, as corresponding to the mental state in which their infinitely pretentious subjects and execrable drawing always put me."

The lightness of speech was painfully forced. Vannelle turned to me and said, slowly,-

"Have you been here before?"

"No."

"Has any one described to you this house or its contents?"

"No."

"Then thought has been conveyed from mind to mind in unconditioned purity. It is as I had supposed. We are brothers forever."

The next day, after an early breakfast, Vannelle summoned me to the study. I glanced distrustfully at the confusion of the room, which seemed in strange contrast with the exquisitely neat and even fashionable attire of its proprietor. A smile of proud pity touched the lips of Vannelle, as he seemed to divine my thought. Then, as if I had read them in letters of light, these words seemed to answer me:-

"Shall we, the stewards and guardians of the highest interests of mankind, fret our souls at trifles,-we, who are to be instruments in marshalling the race from slavery and folly to wisdom and freedom? Behold, in one bound, the hovels and palaces of earth shall be alike, and, floating free in spiritual space, we will win such dominion as the highest graduates in saintship dimly perceived, but were never able to declare!"

These thoughts, energizing the brain of my companion, seemed thrown into my consciousness with far more distinctness than if they had been uttered. It was with awe that this mystic correspondence between mind and mind was made plain to me. One man out of this myriad-bodied humanity had sought me out, and in his presence I was never more to be alone. The gigantic shadow of self passed from me; I was as clay in the potter's hands!

At length Herbert spoke.

"Our work in this world is determined for us; mine is allotted to me,-not by my own choice. I return to this house never to leave it till I go to join my father, with his great work more nearly completed than when it came to my hands. At that table he died, with some glimpses of the promised land whither he tended,-where he prayed that I might enter."

There escaped from me a feeble remonstrance,-no utterance of the heart, but rather a dry rattling of such conventional proprieties as lingered in the memory.

"And you intend to leave this wholesome world,-you, whose career might be such as few have it in their power to choose? You know, you must know, the wonderful gifts which you possess; you cannot alone be ignorant of the fascination you might exercise over man and woman."

"I know all these temptations, and others that you cannot surmise," exclaimed Vannelle, "and I will conquer them,-if not through spiritual grace, then by some bodily penance of lasting effect. I discern in you certain qualities of mind that may serve to regulate the equipoise of mine. I have the means to provide for us both during the high speculations in which we shall engage. Let us be comrades in this undertaking. I seek to bridge the great gulf that separates the natural from the spiritual. My father firmly believed in the possibility of obtaining an absolute ground for the philosophy which should include all things human and divine. He passed onward before the inestimable gift he seemed to have won could be set forth in the symbols of the world. To see is not difficult, but only to contrive a popular adaptation through which others may discern the thought. I seek the means to express the truth which he saw, and of which I can catch some glimpses through such colored mythologies as represent the higher religions of the world. Man has found out the knowledge by which a universe was evoked from chaos: shall he not perfect that knowledge in the Law which includes the divine element by which the universe is informed? How can we love with our whole heart what we do not know with our whole mind? Clifton, I declare to you that knowledge of the Law by which the Creator is and acts is possible to man!"

I shall seem to you weak and unstable in no common degree to have been moved by utterance like this. Remember that I can reproduce only the words, not the wild power of that persuasive voice, not the aspiring courage that struck me from his eye. Almost against my will there was produced in me a plasticity of mind that seemed to demand the impress of some foreign mould. The tree of knowledge was set in the midst of the garden, and again were audible the seductive serpent-tones: "Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

I found Vannelle so far my superior in the knowledge of all earthly lores, that I at length came to think it possible he might be the appointed instrument of communicating the singular intelligence that he sought. He proposed to review the different systems built by human thought before applying himself to the problem of finding a system of philosophy which should include them all. His idea was, that from the extreme negation of the so-called transcendental position-when that position had been legitimately attained by a thoroughly conscientious thinker-some new light must break upon the mind. His was no shrinking from the conflict with real things to indulge in vague yearnings after the inaccessible, but a definite effort so to place the soul and discipline the understanding that wisdom could be realized without process or media. Unlike most inquirers of that time, he had no love for the abstract and the controversial, but entertained them freely as finally discovering some path to the concrete and the unquestioned. He declared that only to superficial persons was skepticism the terminus of speculative deism. Let me also say this for my friend,-that his directing stimulus to action was neither ambition nor curiosity, but what, had it been directed to any recognized end, the world would have called a religious principle. He was never guilty of the shallow wickedness of seeking self-culture as an end; he sought the highest self-culture only as a state of more passionate yearning for regeneration.

What need to tell how I was fascinated, mesmerized, into a humble companionship? how I became inspired with his own mighty belief in the feasibility of the object he strove to attain? We read together certain manuscripts of the elder Vannelle, in which, wrapt in a gorgeous symbolism, seemed dimly to approach a great truth, which, at times, could be faintly perceived, but never mastered. There were hints, apparently of the deepest significance, which, when the mind endeavored to grasp them, vanished like a vision.

Day after day, almost night after night, for five months, I passed with Vannelle in the room I have described. And during that vivid period I knew an intellectual intoxication which seemed the pure ecstasy of spirit wholly delivered from the burden of the flesh. Vannelle talked like one inspired upon the higher problems of metaphysical research, showing, or appearing to show, in what sense the speculations of the philosophers were true, and in what sense absolutely false. We seemed to have cut ourselves adrift from the human race, and to look down upon it from a position whence its basest moral corruptions and most detestable oppressions marked the rhythm in a majestic poem. The infinite vagaries of crime, the unspeakable ecstasies of blessedness, were equally wholesome as equally full of Law. At times it seemed impossible that any words could so mould themselves as to give distinctness to the thought which flashed through our minds. At times a representation corresponding to what Vannelle so eloquently uttered seemed embodied in every phase of opinion man had known. But, alas, there were also periods of doubt and despair analogous to those which succeed physical intoxication. The grosser systems of antiquity were not only considered, but actually personated in our experience. Here it was necessary for us to penetrate into some of the darkest recesses of the human soul, and to test how nearly allied is that which exalts man to that which degrades him, how the noblest virtues plunge headlong into the maddest passions. Yet we learned to welcome these convulsions of Chaos and Old Night, as blindly bearing us onward towards our destined goal.

-But enough of this. I would only faintly express how terribly real was the delusion (the world would so call it, and who am I to gainsay it?) which has overhung my earthly life.

Let me tell in briefest words how the spell was broken,-partially broken. During those months of passionate exaltation, letters from friends once dear to me had been thrown aside half-read, and wholly valueless. On the eleventh of November I started,-as a black seal was to be broken. My uncle had suddenly died. The last instalment of his annuity had been paid, and my little sister, an orphan and penniless, was thrown upon me for education and support. Shame to me that I then hesitated! Yet it was some hours before I could persuade myself to put the letter into Vannelle's hand, and say that I must abandon him forever. Let me forget the bitter temptation. Of course my friend begged to provide for my sister from his own ample means, and even offered her an asylum at his house. I still retained sufficient sanity to perceive the wrong of bringing a young child to that dismal place to wither removed from all human companionship and sympathy. A spirit not in a condition to be sustained and elevated by the society of Herbert would be confused, and finally petrified. Had this refined probing and questioning deadened all sense of duty? Was this the end of my Absolute Philosophy, that the intellect should usurp the place of the conscience and the moral law? Shame to me that I could have paused to ask such questions! yet any claim but one tittle less urgent I should have bantered aside. I seemed to realize the torture described in the dream of Dante,-two souls struggling together in one frail body. I had been applauding good and condemning evil when it cost me nothing but the sentiment; but when the fiery test came, my purpose cracked and shrivelled before it. Yes, I conquered; but the scars that purchased the victory have ached through my life.

There was but one calling wherein it seemed possible for me to earn my bread; for how could I descend to chaffer in the market, to trim and huckster through the world,-I, who had thought to condition the Spirit of the Universe? But there were metaphors faintly shadowing divine things, symbols adapted to the limitations of the popular mind, and with these I might do an honest work for the souls of men. Honest? Yes,-unless Augustine was a hypocrite, when he declared that he spoke of the Unseen as unity in three persons, less to say something than not to remain altogether silent. To a certain order of minds among the clergy this is the daily cross,-the necessity of maintaining a fixed position, and ever looking down from it to teach, instead of ever yearning upward to be taught.

It is enough to say, that, supporting myself and my sister by school-teaching, I achieved such courses of reading as are supposed to qualify for enrolment among the liberal clergy of New England. Until the time when my sister left me by marriage I was settled at N--, on the Connecticut. Soon after this event, died old Dr. P-- of Foxden, and I received a call to his vacant parish. I knew that the sort of society to be found in that place would minister to my most urgent need. I craved some intellectual clanship which should never seek to rise to an equal spiritual companionship. For there was only one man to whom I might speak freely, and from him my path ever diverged. How far apart the years had led us! Sometimes there came a whisper that I had been snatched from the hand of Satan, killer of souls; sometimes my only opportunities of salvation seemed left in that sad, damp homestead. I could never return to him; I could never be wholly free from him. Ever was I controlled by a shadowy force which reached me from his abundant power. No occupation was so absorbing as to protect me from the invading presence of Herbert Vannelle.

* * *

The first Sunday of the present month brought the twentieth anniversary of the day that I parted from Vannelle. In the morning I had preached a written sermon on those solemn words of the Apostle, "Whatsoever is not of faith is sin." For the first time I shrank from the consciousness that the words uttered were true to me in a very different sense from that in which the congregation received them. I found it difficult to poise in tremulous balance between Truth and its available representation to common men. It is my custom to preach extemporaneously in the afternoon. Upon rising, after the introductory services, I could perceive that my pulse and breathing were accelerated. A certain numbness of the brain seemed pierced with convulsive, fugitive shocks. An inexplicable influence, a command for cerebral sympathy, seemed beating at my forehead. I turned the sacred pages before me, but could find nothing upon which to base my remarks. But to my lips would come incessantly a passage from Sir Thomas Browne. At last I gave it voice:-

"There are, as in philosophy, so in divinity, sturdy doubts and boisterous objections wherewith the unhappiness of our knowledge too nearly acquainteth us. More of these no man hath known than myself; which I confess I conquered, not in martial attitude, but on my knees."

An extraordinary impetus seemed imparted to my mental powers. Men have said that I spoke with a fluency and eloquence unknown to them before. Indeed, I was conscious of a capacity to receive and convey such portions of divine wisdom as corresponded to their needs. To speak in figure, my heavenly race was as if the Lord of Evil pursued my soul.

Thoroughly exhausted by the effort, I returned to my study and threw myself upon a sofa. More fully than ever before, I entered that state where one far distant may make himself perceived and known. The occult power of foreknowing events, the delicate perception of forbidden things, worked their abnormal invigoration in the brain. I became conscious that a carriage miles off was rolling nearer and nearer; I knew that it would stop at my door. I waited, waited long into the night. One by one went out the scattered village-lights. Another consciousness of twenty years seemed compressed into those brilliant, bitter hours. My lamp flickered. I rose with effort and supplied oil; it would now burn till morning. The carriage came nearer. I knew that Vannelle was in it. At last the heavy rumble ceased at the door.

A figure stood before me. The old fascination in the eyes; a soul burning with lofty enthusiasm looked through and kindled them. But the face,-it was ghastly, livid as the face of a leper: it was spectral,-blanched and dried with the white flames of his exalted vigils. Ah, black eyes, well may you shine in terrible triumph! The old idolatry this man demanded of me would not be repelled. I gazed upon my visitor as upon a phantom from another sphere, and knew no reckoning of time. His magnetism was upon me; I could only crouch into myself-and wait. At length the silence was broken.

"Charles Clifton, teacher of the people, listen that you may be taught! For the last time I have come down into your world of passion and sense. The impulses with which you vainly strive and wrestle are behind me. Alone, alone, I have risen from the abysmal depths of personality. I have struggled fiercely. I have also conquered."

The livid face showed no change. It suddenly came to me, that, by some voluntary disfigurement of his exquisite beauty of feature, this man had cut away the lusts for pleasure, fame, and influence. What woman would kiss that ghastly cheek? What sycophant could fawn and smirk in that chilly presence? The injunctions concerning the offending eye and hand Vannelle had interpreted literally.

"I hold," he continued, "the noble prize of intellectual satisfaction seized by effort. Multiply the self-satisfactions of earth by infinity, and you may guess a little of the sublime contentment which wraps me round! Does the best stage-trick of your liberal clergy help them to anything but a plasticity of mind to be moulded into artistic forms of skepticism? How can you feel the delight of a definite, positive affirmation which accounts for and includes all creeds and lives of men? How can you come out from your partial dogmas to enter Truth and find it alone dogmatic and compulsive? Clifton, I pity you. I would rescue you from this haze of thought and feeling,-I, who have even now discarded Intelligence and enthroned Wisdom."

"I hope to be pardoned," I said,-"the current of this life sets so in favor of Utility and the Practical; men long to be fed with sentiment,-why try to give them ideas?"

"Fulfil, then, forever your little round of decencies and proprieties," exclaimed Vannelle; "I judge you not. Perchance your weakness is the pardonable weakness of one who has done his best. You may be guiltless in failing to attain the strength, the glory, of a true conviction."

"Is it too late?" I asked, faintly.

"It is the question I must put to you," replied Herbert. "I bring you in this manuscript the result of my life,-the result of two lives. Here is written, as clearly as can be written in gross symbols of human language, that which may suggest the Absolute, the Alpha and Omega, the System, not humanly built upon hypothesis, but divinely founded upon Law."

I knew that a package had been placed upon the table at my side.

"If you can so far command the fragmentary life you lead as to give this manuscript the sober, searching thought which it invites, the truth may be brought to you. But if these twenty years have only filled you with the pride of inventing arguments and detecting analogies, if they have only given you the petty skill of a petty scholar, why then dally on with a tinsel variety of superficial attainments, and give others the blessed privilege you are not strong enough to accept."

"Take it from me," I said. "It has haunted me too long. What you may have found, it is for your honor to promulgate."

"The finding is enough for one life," replied Vannelle. "The spiritual manhood is indeed complete, but the shell which enclosed it totters towards earth. My responsibility in this matter is at an end: yours will now begin."

A tremor ran through my frame as he spoke these words. A mystery rigid as Fate seemed to shackle me. Without seeing him go, I knew that Vannelle had left the room. Again was I conscious of the carriage-rumble growing fainter, fainter, fainter in the distance. A dream of passionate excitement, a phantasmagoria of old wishes, old hopes, of the life I might have led, flew before me. For a moment the energy of Vannelle seemed to have transfused itself through every fibre. An unquenchable thirst that I had never summoned struck into my brain. I seized the manuscript, and devoured page after page. Then I felt the approaches of a supreme despotism that might annihilate all I had been, all I hoped to be,-that might compel me to denounce all that I had taught, to hear all that was respectable and healthy in the world jeer at me as an impostor, an enthusiast, a madman. It was not that I was simply invited to come above the ordinary doctrines of the day, and stand supported and encouraged by a few advanced minds; but I was called to place myself where the most earnest souls-unless a second birth could be granted them-would scoff with the ignorance and intolerance of the mass.

At last the gray light of morning shone upon me.

One of my deacons, whistling sturdily, passed along the street. A physical emanation from his healthy vitality partially counteracted the influence of the night. Gathering up every muscle of my feeble will, I closed the manuscript forever. Hereditary imperfections of body and mind confine me to a sphere of reputable usefulness. If I have sinned in the past, I have also suffered. If, as I sometimes suspect, I have thrust from me the grandest opportunity ever offered to man, the loss through all eternity will be mine.

In eight days I heard of the death of Herbert Vannelle.