The Philosophy of Mystery · 1 of 35

The Challenge

“There are more things in heav’n and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”— Hamlet.

There was a shallop floating on the Wye, among the gray rocks and leafy woods of Chepstow. Within it were two fair girls reclining: the one blending the romantic wildness of a maid of Italy with the exquisite purity of English nature; the other illuming, with the devotion of a vestal, the classic beauty of a Greek.

There was a young and learned bachelor sitting at the helm. Study had stamped an air of thoughtfulness on his brow; yet a smile was ever playing on his lips, as his heart felt the truth and influence of the beautiful life around him.

Listen, gentle reader, we pray thy courtesy and thy patience, as a rude unskilful pen traces the breathed thoughts of these wanderers of the Wye.

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.”

Such is Astrophel.

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.

Cast. A ghost!

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.

Yet I know some few self-created wizards, who have solved to their hearts’ content those two grand mysteries, the real existence and the purpose of ghostly visitations; who, like Owain Glyndwr, “can call spirits from the vasty deep,” and even expect that they will “come when they do call for them.” Others have laboured under self-glamourie, and believed themselves magicians, until put to the proof. I remember the painter, Richard Cosway, was under this illusion; and, when the old cynic Northcote desired him to raise Sir Joshua Reynolds, the pseudo-magus confessed himself foiled, by advancing this simple excuse, “I would, were it not sinful!”

It were well if these monomaniacs were laid in the famous bed of St. Hilary at Poitiers; for there, with the muttering of a prayer or two, as the legend tells us, madmen may be cured.

But, in truth, the light of divine reason has so far dispelled these fancies for the supernatural, that very few of us, I presume, are confident in the hope of raising a ghost when we want one; or of laying it in the Red Sea for a hundred years, by two clergymen, with “bell, book, and candle,” and scraps of mystic Latin, when it becomes rude or troublesome.

Ida. Will you not concede that many visionaries have believed, and written from pure and even holy motives?

Ev. There is no doubt of this, lady; yet while it has fanned the flame of superstition in minds of lower intellect, with many, the endeavour to prove too much has marred these motives, and weakened faith, even in the credulous; so that we may hope the wild romances of Beaumont, and Burthogge, and Baxter, and Aubrey, and Glanville, and that arch-mystagogue Moreton (whose book is half full of prolix dialogues between ghosts and ghost-seers), will soon be mere objects of interest and curiosity to the black-letter bibliomaniac and the more erudite legend-hunter.

Cast. We will not submit to your anathema, Evelyn. This learned clerk has challenged our faith. What a treasury of secrets might he unfold to us from the mystic tomes of antiquity, the wonders of profane psychology; from the tales of Arabia to Vatheck and the Epicurean—from the classic mythology of Homer to the wild romances of his humble prototype Ossian.

Let it be a match: we will listen, Astrophel, while you “unsphere the spirit of Plato;” and here we sit in judgment, on the velvet throne of this our court of Tintern.