IMMORTAL MORTALS.
WHAT a curious amount of common-placeness there is in men, even in men of weird imagination and in moments which they themselves think inspired ! It is difficult to imagine au idea more likely to excite a romance-writer than that of a man who has for any reason become exempt from the sentence of capital punishment under which our race is condemned to live, for whom death has no terror and no hope, life no limit, the rela- tions of time scarcely a meaning, and yet how common-place the treatment of that idea has almost always been ! The novelists and even the poets who have taken it up always seem to have selected immortality on earth as they select an inheritance or a love affair, as a piece of machinery supplying motive power, and that is all, never appear to have elaborated their own conception, or even to have thought it out with any of the care they expend upon the plot or upon the delineation of ordinary character. They have never, for example, so far as we know, devised for their hero an original method of securing his isolation from humanity, but have servilely followed one or other of two very ancient hints. The speech of Christ recorded by early tradition as addressed to one who reviled him, " Tarry thou till I come," has been the foundation for ages of a legend about a man who has lived since the Crucifixion upon earth, and both Eugene Sue and Dr. Croly have employed that legend as their machine,—the one to produce a man who does nothing except walk about and watch a little over descendants, who of course know nothing of him ; and the other to evolve a rather melodramatic hero, who does nothing an ordinary man might not do except escape a few physical dangers, and feels his mysterious separateness mainly as a reason for being exceedingly brave,—an idea which we may remark, en passont, is prima facie erroneous. A man exempt from death, but not exempt from pain, would probably be horribly afraid of suffering, lest perchance, he having no gift of prophecy, pain should prove as immortal as himself, the thought upon which Southey has founded the catastrophe of "The Curse of Kehama." In such a being the fear that a blow on the head or a sunstroke might involve madness enduring through countless ages, or that a fire might leave him blind
but immortal, might quell courage as the fear of death has never been known to do. Every novelist or poet who departs from the legend, or its original suggestion in the pseudo-Gospels, seems to be driven back upon the doctors and his own stomach, and declares the elixir of life to be a drug. Because a colocynth pill may relieve a dyspeptic patient, therefore some wondrous compound of drugs may not onlyprove a panacea against disease, which is conceiv- able, though not probable, but may arrest the mysterious process of exhaustion to which all that lives is subject, and even perform the impossible, renew the past,—the very youth which has fled. The Greekemade that error about Medea's cauldron, which was not to arrest decay and stereotype health, but to renew youth; that is, either to recall or to create ; and Lord Lytton, in " The- Strange Story," has, consciously or unconsciously, followed them.
There is indeed in that story the suggestion—one of the most weird in our literature—that Louis Grayle succeeded, pur- posely or accidentally, in banishing his soul and living on as a human animal without it ; but the banishment and the renewed youth he enjoys are alike clue to Haroun's potent elixir, and Grayle ultimately perishes in the effort to manufacture a fresh supply of the drug. Southey, in " The Curse of Kehama," even while in the act of employing a machin- ery of a far more transcendental kind, the supreme and executive volition by which Kehama, the Man-god, splits the tomb and bids the " Anatomy" arise, still makes his hero drink a wonderfully compounded draught, the draught which, as the realistic Hindoo poets sang, the gods had obtained by churning the sea with the endless snake of Immortality wound around Mount Meroo, a thought which, after all, is not very much over the head of a dairymaid. We had hoped, when we first heard of " Septimius," that Hawthorne, of all mankind, would quit this groove, for Haw- thorne wrote "Transformation," that marvellous, though unequal book, in which a novelist tries to solve the mystery of sin, and comes nearer, if not to an explanation, at least to an intelligible reason—the impossibility of conscience in an animal incapable of sin—than the majority of theologians. We had expected that he would at least have risen to Lord Lytton's level, who, in a
paper in Blackwood, which is apparently an anticipatory sketch of " the Strange Story," suggested the thought that
the will might be cultivated till in its dominance it could arrest decay, as there seems reason to believe it can arrest certain forms of pain, for instance, itching ; or to that higher level yet of the Hindoo dreamers, who think that self-sacrifice and obedience pushed to their highest limit may wrest power from the Being or the Destiny on whom the Gods depend; or to that of this other
thought, which to our minds seems to shine dimly through many a
strange Scandinavian and Aryan legend, the possibility of the capture of one vitality by another, and its transference to the captor, surely the idea underlying all preparations of witch-broth out of the flesh of children. Or one might conceive in a dreamy mood of stranger things yet, of the acquisition from a superior being, either by inheritance—the thought worked out in the strange farrago of Talmudic story, rubbish, and poetic fancy which Howitt calls " Pantika," and which we fancy has almost disappeared—or by service, or better yet, through some celestial friendship, some share of that glorious vitality which, if there be angels or good spirits, they must in some way possess. Do we never acquire from our friends intellectual potencies which become fused within our own ? But no ; Hawthorne was intent on hie metaphysical problem, or what we suppose to be it, the relation of immortality to love, or on expressing his own deep-seated horror of immortality on earth, and is going to all appearance to represent Septimius as acquiring his fatal gift through a receipt for an elixir distilled from some plant which is to be set in a grave. Whether this elixir arrests decay or renews youth we do not know ; we know only that it does not prevent accident, and so, as Lord Lytton says in his first paper on Louis Grayle, snap the will of the Almighty.
The use of so vulgar a device is a disappointment to us, an evidence of the difficulty which men of powerful imaginations feel in getting quit of their earthly surroundings and imagining perennial health and long-enduring life—absolute immortality is not suggested in any of these tales, because immortal man would imply an im- mortal earth—derived from something higher than a bolus. Is there no one among us, bard or romancer, who can forget that he has a stomach ?
The same objection of unexpected vulgarity clings to novelists' description of earthly immortals' minds. Some notion of the durability of domestic affection seems to have existed in Eugene Sue's mind, and there is even a faint suggestion of that mystic relation arising from the continuity of cause and effect which must exist between every man and his remotest descendant—and which has been hinted at though not worked out by Lord Lytton in " Zauoni," and by every author, Hawthorne and Scott included, who has touched on the possibility of a supernatural pedigree for a mortal—but his Wandering Jew is left too shadowy a form for speculation. But no one, not even Lord Lytton, with all his Rosicrueian lore, has ever attempted to face the problems involved in the supposition of continuous in- tellectual life,—how the inevitable exhaustion of the mind can be repaired, how far experience would kill freshness, how long emotion can survive habitude, how much of knowledge the memory will bear, how far the strangest of intellectual phenomena, that com-
bined action of will, memory, external circumstance, and some- thing else which compels us to "take an interest" in this and yet leaves us without an interest in that perhaps more important thing, would survive an experience indefinitely wider than the human brain was constructed to endure. There is no limit to knowledge for man, for to know all is the attribute of infinity, but there must be a limit to what the human brain can carry. What would Ahasuerus forget and what remember, what care about and what neglect, what desire and what abhor, when living with the grand condition of life, its fleetness, removed from him, and from him alone? What could he even find to talk about, when mere ex- perience, the mere wealth of memories seizing on his brain, must make all human topics, save perhaps science or theology, seem tedious, must make him feel as Herschel would feel if eternally talked to out of a Manual of Astronomy for beginners, and when all human beings must be to him as children when they talk too much of what they do not understand ! How he would fret at human misconception of events he knew. Louis Grayle as Margrave finds perennial joy in nature, because nature changes from instant to instant, and perpetual occupation in the pursuit of the knowledge which is to aid his search for the drug that will restore his youth, but the speculation there is complicated by the absence in him of a human soul. Kehama throughout is fighting God, which is of course an endless task, but neither Croly, nor Sue, nor Bulwer outside " The Strange Story " ever rises to the possibilities his own thoughts have opened up, ever strives even to soar out of human experience. And yet a study of the mind exhausted by its own acquirements, or slowly perishing of decay while yet the material instruments through which it works are in full health, or vivid only because the Will strengthened by the discipline of ages is strong enough to compel it not to overweight itself, might, one would think, be a task for the dreamer or the poet. Goethe thought experience all ; would not Ahasuerus declare and prove experience worthless ? Is it not probable, nay, is it not certain that the man who could not die till the world died, would give himself up at last to the one persistent effort to rise out of his Nessus shirt the body, to rise to a higher altitude of being, •even if such higher altitude granted nothing but power to visit other planets, and failing, merge all faculties in the one endless moan that the gate of the dread staircase, wide open for all other mortals, was closed for him alone? Would not the generations of men pass- ing in endless succession seem to him but shadows, or would he be seized with the curiosity so strong and so ennobling, and yet so pitiless, of the entomologist, who disembowels an insect to see if its head has separate existence? The Hindoo or the Buddhist thinks, as we read their creeds, that the condition of such a man would be endless acquiescence, passivity without any nuance of despair ; and that, one would fancy, must have been the thought of the Egyptian artist or of the priest who directed him when he gave to the Sibyl that face looking in eternal calm over the desert to the Nile; but that would not be the outcome of the brooding of a Western mind. It seems to us, dreaming over Septimius—imagine such a name for the American Ahasuerus—that there are infinite possibilities of thought in such a creation, though to work them out so fully as to attract even the attention Croly has secured— his book, we note, though always half invisible, never quite passes into oblivion—might require a man with the combined minds of Berkeley and Edgar Poe.
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