第98章

"It is true," said Mejnour, coldly."My life is the life that contemplates,--Zanoni's is the life that enjoys: when I gather the herb, I think but of its uses; Zanoni will pause to admire its beauties.""And you deem your own the superior and the loftier existence?""No.His is the existence of youth,--mine of age.We have cultivated different faculties.Each has powers the other cannot aspire to.Those with whom he associates live better,--those who associate with me know more.""I have heard, in truth," said Glyndon, "that his companions at Naples were observed to lead purer and nobler lives after intercourse with Zanoni; yet were they not strange companions, at the best, for a sage? This terrible power, too, that he exercises at will, as in the death of the Prince di --, and that of the Count Ughelli, scarcely becomes the tranquil seeker after good.""True," said Mejnour, with an icy smile; "such must ever be the error of those philosophers who would meddle with the active life of mankind.You cannot serve some without injuring others; you cannot protect the good without warring on the bad; and if you desire to reform the faulty, why, you must lower yourself to live with the faulty to know their faults.Even so saith Paracelsus, a great man, though often wrong.("It is as necessary to know evil things as good; for who can know what is good without the knowing what is evil?" etc.--Paracelsus, "De Nat.Rer.," lib.3.)Not mine this folly; I live but in knowledge,--I have no life in mankind!"Another time Glyndon questioned the mystic as to the nature of that union or fraternity to which Zanoni had once referred.

"I am right, I suppose," said he, "in conjecturing that you and himself profess to be the brothers 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 be made its perpetual renovater,--these I say, would not suffice for safety.