The concept o f an elixir of immortality appealed to the Romantic artist and Rosicrucian sage alike. Even though the idea o f perpetual youth and beauty was bound up with the aesthetics of Romanticism, the notion of an immortality dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge had been propagat ed by Enlightenment figures such as Condorcet, who declares in Zanoni: ‘Life, I grant, cannot be made eternal; but it may be prolonged almost in definitely.’108 Condorcet believed that the brevity o f the human life-span, as well as the absence of a common language, hampered the pursuit and
BULWER-LYTTON AND THE ROSE AND CROSS
accumulation o f knowledge.109 He expands on these theories in the novel during a meeting o f intellectuals attended by Zanoni and the prophet Ca- zotte, who was involved with the Cabalistic order o f Saint Martines de Pasqualis.
Significantly, the Rosicrucians as represented by Zanoni have over come the obstacles to knowledge outlined by Condorcet. Glyndon notices that, in addition to an ability to prolong his life, Zanoni has a per fect, if not uncanny, command over foreign languages. He recalls the writings o f a Rosicrucian apologist, John Bringeret, who had asserted that all the languages of the world were known to the genuine Brother hood o f the Rosy Cross.110 The manifestos look back beyond Babel to the idea of a common language which is communicated in the Book o f N a
ture. The Cabalistic idea that language was an integral part of nature and
that the cosmos had been created through the spoken word was the fore runner of this aspect of Rosicrucian pansophy. From his observations of Zanoni’s proficiency in languages, Glyndon wonders: ‘Did Zanoni belong to this mystical Fraternity, who, in an earlier age, boasted o f secrets of which the Philosopher’s Stone was but the least?’111
In Zanoni, the dual properties of the philosopher’s stone are exam ined. The first argument concerns the role o f the philosopher’s stone in the process of transmuting base metal into gold. The contribution made by alchemists towards some of the greatest discoveries in science is also recognised: ‘the Philosopher’s Stone itself has seemed no visionary chi mera to some of the soundest chemists that even the present century has produced.’112 Glyndon has been drawn towards the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross in the hope of learning more about the secret of transmuta tion and life-extension. His attraction may be hereditary, since his ances tor is reputed to have been an alchemist and hermetic philosopher who exceeded the ‘allotted boundaries o f mortal existence’113 and halted the ageing process.
Mejnour assures Glyndon that his ancestor attained the secret, though he chose not to prolong his life indefinitely because he did not want to outlive his great-grandchild (‘he died rather than survive the on ly thing he loved’).114 But he is emphatic that the secrets he seeks only involve a shrewd understanding of nature:
All that we [the adepti, Mejnour and Zanoni] 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 preventatives to the effects of Time. This is not Magic; it is the Art of Medi cine rightly understood. In our order we hold most no
ble - first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body.1,5
It may be a significant factor in Glyndon’s failure as a neophyte that he values the secret of immortality over and above its accompanying wis dom and knowledge. By concentrating on the attainment o f the su perficial, Glyndon underestimates the more profound benefits o f the elixir, for ‘To quaff the inner life, is to see the outer life; to live in defiance of time, is to live in the whole. He who discovers the elixir, discovers what lies in space.’116 Glyndon is so eager to benefit from the elixir that he at tempts to short-cut the period o f apprenticeship which Mejnour has pre pared for him. After teaching Glyndon the works of the ‘glorious dupes ... Hermes, and Albert, and Paracelsus,’117 all of whom have died, Mejn our then leads him towards unrecorded esoteric knowledge including Py thagorean numerology and the chemistry of heat, the agent for renewal. Mejnour delays the final stages of his pupil’s training in order to increase Glyndon’s self-discipline and control. Full preparation for drinking the elixir was considered vital, since alchemists believed that otherwise it could act as a poison to the unprepared. Then, we are told, ‘the philoso pher will carry about with him, not the elixir, but the poison.’118 Ironically, in these circumstances, the elixir of life could even accelerate the ageing process. But the greatest hazard o f all lies in the half-prepared neo phyte’s inability to control the fear generated by his ordeal. For Glyndon, the terror materialises in the form o f the Guardians o f the Threshold, who are demons intent on preventing the unprepared from attaining the abso lute. Glyndon illegally breaks into M ejnour’s room and prematurely con sumes the elixir, but finds that he is unable to subdue the power o f the malevolent forces which he has attracted to himself. Because Glyndon wants the secret of immortality to increase his own sensual enjoyment, he becomes the victim o f his own selfish desires, which are symbolised by the fiends. An onlooker has already condemned him for breaking his vow of chastity with a peasant girl, Fillide:
Oh, pupil of Mejnour! oh, would-be-Rosicrucian-Pla- tonist-Magian - I know not what! I am ashamed o f thee! W hat, in the names of Averroes, and Burri, and Agrippa, and Hermes, have become of thy austere con templations?119
Mejnour criticises Glyndon in much stronger terms in an important pas sage where he makes a distinction between the false adept and the true:
BULWER-LYTTON AND THE ROSE AND CROSS
Dost thou not comprehend, at last, that it needs a soul tempered, and purified, and raised, not by external spells, but by its own sublimity and valour, to pass the threshold, and disdain the foe? Wretch! all my science avails nothing for the rash, for the sensual - for him who desires our secrets but to pollute them to gross enjoyments and selfish vice? How have the impostors and sorcerers of the earlier times perished by their very attempt to penetrate the mysteries that should purify, and not deprave! They have boasted o f the philoso pher’s stone, and died in rags; of the immortal elixir, and sank to their grave, gray before their time. Leg ends tell you, that the fiend rent them into fragments. Yes; the fiend of their own unholy desires and criminal designs! What they coveted thou covetest; and if thou hadst the wings o f a seraph, thou couldst soar not from the slough o f thy mortality. Thy desire for knowledge, but petulant presumption; thy thirst for happiness but the diseased longing for the unclean and muddied wa ters o f corporeal pleasure; thy very love, which usually elevates even the mean, a passion that calculates trea son, amidst the first glow of lust; - thou, one of us! Thou, a brother of the August Order!120
False seekers such as Melmoth in M aturin’s novel and M argrave in
A Strange Story are destroyed eventually by their own corrupt desires.
Although Glyndon does not completely destroy him self he does in fact at tract the wrath o f a fiend which symbolises the negative force o f his frus trated desire. Nevertheless he would have experienced a sense of frus tration even if his wish for immortality had been gratified, because the re alisation o f perpetual life cannot cure him o f relentless desire. In
G lyndon’s case, the philosopher’s stone is symbolic of yearning being tantamount to desire for its own sake. Thus the possession o f the elixir
vitce will never satisfy the kind of individual who will always be con
sumed by longings. Zanoni draws attention to this state of perpetual dis satisfaction in his reply to Glyndon’s enquiry about his failure as a neo phyte:
why to thee have been only the penance and the terror - the Threshold and the Phantom? Vain man! look to the commonest elements of the common learning. Can
ter? - can the student, when he has bought his Euclid, become a Newton? ... yea, can yon pale tyrant, with all the parchment-laws of a hundred system-shapers, and the pikes of his dauntless multitude, carve, at his will, a constitution not more vicious than the one which the madness o f a mob could overthrow?121
As the final image suggests, this is the failed idealism which can set into motion the forces of collective tyranny, which Bulwer illustrated through the degeneration of the French Revolutionary ideal. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who looked at the pattern of revolution from a different standpoint in Dialectic o f Enlightenment, concluded that ‘The spirit o f en lightenment replaced the fire and rack by the stigma it attached to all irra tionality, because it led to corruption.’122 Similarly, Bulwer highlights the tragic consequences which spring from the artificial separation o f reason and faith by drawing parallels between the fictional incidents in Zanoni and the train o f historical events leading up to the Reign of Terror.