Chapter II

Shortly after the disastrous termination of Scythrop's passion for

Miss Emily Girouette, Mr Glowry found himself, much against his will,

involved in a lawsuit, which compelled him to dance attendance on the

High Court of Chancery. Scythrop was left alone at Nightmare Abbey. He

was a burnt child, and dreaded the fire of female eyes. He wandered

about the ample pile, or along the garden-terrace, with 'his

cogitative faculties immersed in cogibundity of cogitation.' The

terrace terminated at the south-western tower, which, as we have said,

was ruinous and full of owls. Here would Scythrop take his evening

seat, on a fallen fragment of mossy stone, with his back resting

against the ruined wall,--a thick canopy of ivy, with an owl in it,

over his head,--and the Sorrows of Werter in his hand. He had some

taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we

must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of

reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if

disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring

on a relapse. He began to devour romances and German tragedies, and,

by the recommendation of Mr Flosky, to pore over ponderous tomes of

transcendental philosophy, which reconciled him to the labour of

studying them by their mystical jargon and necromantic imagery. In

the congenial solitude of Nightmare Abbey, the distempered ideas of

metaphysical romance and romantic metaphysics had ample time and space

to germinate into a fertile crop of chimeras, which rapidly shot up

into vigorous and abundant vegetation.

He now became troubled with the passion for reforming the world.[2]

He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret

tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary

instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species. As he

intended to institute a perfect republic, he invested himself with

absolute sovereignty over these mystical dispensers of liberty. He

slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable

eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in

subterranean caves. He passed whole mornings in his study, immersed

in gloomy reverie, stalking about the room in his nightcap, which

he pulled over his eyes like a cowl, and folding his striped calico

dressing-gown about him like the mantle of a conspirator.

'Action,' thus he soliloquised, 'is the result of opinion, and to

new-model opinion would be to new-model society. Knowledge is power;

it is in the hands of a few, who employ it to mislead the many, for

their own selfish purposes of aggrandisement and appropriation. What

if it were in the hands of a few who should employ it to lead the

many? What if it were universal, and the multitude were enlightened?

No. The many must be always in leading-strings; but let them have wise

and honest conductors. A few to think, and many to act; that is the

only basis of perfect society. So thought the ancient philosophers:

they had their esoterical and exoterical doctrines. So thinks the

sublime Kant, who delivers his oracles in language which none but

the initiated can comprehend. Such were the views of those secret

associations of illuminati, which were the terror of superstition and

tyranny, and which, carefully selecting wisdom and genius from the

great wilderness of society, as the bee selects honey from the flowers

of the thorn and the nettle, bound all human excellence in a chain,

which, if it had not been prematurely broken, would have commanded

opinion, and regenerated the world.'

Scythrop proceeded to meditate on the practicability of reviving a

confederation of regenerators. To get a clear view of his own ideas,

and to feel the pulse of the wisdom and genius of the age, he wrote

and published a treatise, in which his meanings were carefully wrapt

up in the monk's hood of transcendental technology, but filled with

hints of matter deep and dangerous, which he thought would set

the whole nation in a ferment; and he awaited the result in awful

expectation, as a miner who has fired a train awaits the explosion of

a rock. However, he listened and heard nothing; for the explosion, if

any ensued, was not sufficiently loud to shake a single leaf of the

ivy on the towers of Nightmare Abbey; and some months afterwards he

received a letter from his bookseller, informing him that only seven

copies had been sold, and concluding with a polite request for the

balance.

Scythrop did not despair. 'Seven copies,' he thought, 'have been sold.

Seven is a mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the

seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they shall be the seven

golden candle-sticks with which I will illuminate the world.'

Scythrop had a certain portion of mechanical genius, which his

romantic projects tended to develope. He constructed models of cells

and recesses, sliding panels and secret passages, that would have

baffled the skill of the Parisian police. He took the opportunity of

his father's absence to smuggle a dumb carpenter into the Abbey, and

between them they gave reality to one of these models in Scythrop's

tower. Scythrop foresaw that a great leader of human regeneration

would be involved in fearful dilemmas, and determined, for the benefit

of mankind in general, to adopt all possible precautions for the

preservation of himself.

The servants, even the women, had been tutored into silence. Profound

stillness reigned throughout and around the Abbey, except when the

occasional shutting of a door would peal in long reverberations

through the galleries, or the heavy tread of the pensive butler would

wake the hollow echoes of the hall. Scythrop stalked about like the

grand inquisitor, and the servants flitted past him like familiars. In

his evening meditations on the terrace, under the ivy of the ruined

tower, the only sounds that came to his ear were the rustling of the

wind in the ivy, the plaintive voices of the feathered choristers, the

owls, the occasional striking of the Abbey clock, and the monotonous

dash of the sea on its low and level shore. In the mean time, he drank

Madeira, and laid deep schemes for a thorough repair of the crazy

fabric of human nature.

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