Alchemy and adeptship are two key aspects of G odw in’s portrayal of St Leon as a Rosicrucian adept. His treatment o f the Rosicrucian theme contributed to the nineteenth-century perception o f the tradition o f the Rose and Cross which was influenced by Renaissance occultism.48 Two such works listed in G odwin’s library catalogue,49 Francis Bacon’s Histo-
ria Vitce et M ortis (1620) and Paracelsus’s De Vita Longa (1566) would
have provided him with source material for the story of St Leon’s imm or tal existence. In D e Vita Longa, Paracelsus argues persuasively for the prolongation of life by pointing out that since no specific time has been de termined for a person’s death then it could be postponed indefinitely. To counter theological objections, particularly charges of blasphemy, Paracel sus reasons that prolongevity is not contrary to nature, since the creator has provided the necessary ingredients for the manufacture o f the elixir. It is significant that these arguments are rehearsed in St Leon in defence of the hero’s decision to take the life-prolonging potion.
Another work by Paracelsus listed in G odw in’s library catalogue is
De Transfiguratione M etallorum Libellus (1593). Even though this trea
tise furnished Godwin with details of alchemical transmutation, he does not divulge the mechanics o f alchemy in St Leon. The reason for this may be because Godwin believed that such an account might actually perpetu ate the very superstition he was trying to dispel. In Lives o f the N ecro
mancers, Godwin roundly dismissed alchemy as a product of the ‘lawless
WILLIAM GODW IN'S DARKNESS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
doings,’51 and this is surely how he would have regarded Paracelsus’s
De Transfiguratione Metallorum Libellus.
Transmutation is approached by way of the moral problems faced by the alchemist. In the novel, Zampieri and St Leon practise this unhal lowed art. Godwin employs hermetic imagery to symbolise not only ma terial prosperity but also greed. Like Zampieri, St Leon discovers that al chemy ‘had planted the sordid love o f gold in my heart, there, by its bane ful vegetation, to poison every nobler and more salubrious feeling.’52 For the true adept, material alchemy was merely symbolic o f the spiritual transmutation which purified the individual on the road to mystical en lightenment. With St Leon, the converse of this occurs, so that his al chemical pursuits accelerate his spiritual deterioration. Even when St Leon loses interest in gold-making and goes on to describe gold as ‘mere dross and dirt,’53 he remains obsessed by alchemy itself, and con fesses:
The secrets of the stranger had given me a particular relish for this kind of pursuit. There are habits of the mind and modes of occupying the attention, in which, when once we have engaged, there seems a sort o f physical impossibility o f ever withdrawing ourselves.54
The enslavement to alchemy is illustrated by an episode in the novel when St Leon is imprisoned by Bethlem Gabor, who tries to exploit his ability to manufacture gold. Yet the alchemical skills which attract Gabor repel Marguerite, for as St Leon is forced to admit, ‘she believed me an alchymist [s/c], a character which she viewed as base, degrading, and in sensible.’55 In an embittered outburst, Marguerite accuses him o f betray ing her saying: ‘For a soldier you present me with a projector and a chem ist, a cold-blooded mortal, raking in the ashes o f a crucible for a selfish and solitary advantage.’56
St Leon’s isolation, brought about by his possession of the elixir of life, enables him to embark upon the solipsistic existence o f the wander ing immortal. Initially he is seduced by the prospect of perpetual youth and freedom from sickness and death:
I am invulnerable to disease. Every sun that rises, finds the circulations o f my frame in the most perfect or der. Decrepitude can never approach me. A thousand winters want the power to furrow my countenance with wrinkles, or turn my hairs to silver.57
Because he is spiritually unprepared for his mortal immortality, St Leon has short-cut the evolutionary path to life-extension which had been forecast by some Enlightenment thinkers. In addition to this, he has defiled the progress towards unity with the creator advocated by the Rosicrucian manifestos. Like Caleb Williams, St Leon has been selected by fate for an exceptional purpose. In both novels, the hero’s downfall is brought about by his longing for prohibited knowledge. For example, Falkland tantalises Williams to unearth a dangerous secret, while Zam p ieri awakens in St Leon undreamed-of ambition:
The alchemist had amused me with descriptions o f vari ous processes for the transmutation o f metals, had ex hibited his crucibles and retorts, and employed a sort of dramatic coup d ’oeil for the purpose o f awakening my curiosity and stimulating my passions.58
The fall o f St Leon is a fable concerning m ankind’s perennial desire to obtain sacred or prohibited knowledge. Often this hidden wisdom is re lated to the secrets of life and death, as in G odw in’s tragedy, Faulkener (1807), where the hero feels himself to be:
Drawn as by some m agician’s powerful spell, To seek the sacred spring that gave me life?59
St Leon tries to justify meddling with occult mysteries by asking ‘Shall I shut myself the gate of knowledge and inform ation?’ For the Enlighten ment thinker such wilful ignorance would have been akin to epistemologi- cal sacrilege. Yet St Leon’s intention to procure prohibited knowledge is, according to Godwin, the denial of wisdom:
The midnight oil was held to be the signal of infernal machinations. The paleness o f study and the furrows o f thought were adjusted to be the tokens o f diabolical alliance. He [the adept] saw, in the transactions of that night, a pledge of the eternal triumph o f ignorance over wisdom.60
St Leon’s possession of the elixir vitae has enabled him to escape the mortality which had resulted from Original Sin. His realisation that he has contrived a second Fall is evident from the imagery which he uses to convey his impressions of his companions: ‘The first sensation I de rived from their prosperity, as I have already said, was pleasure: my sec ond was that which the devil might have felt, when he entered paradise for the seduction o f our first parents.’61 Power o f omniscience has given
W ILLIAM GODW IN’S DARKNESS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
him a Luciferian state of being. He even declares ‘I was like a god,’62 but goes on to admit, ‘The reader may, if he pleases, despise me for the con fession; but I felt I was not formed for the happiness o f a god.’63 St Leon may have felt that god-like happiness could only be obtained from the act of creation, but this is denied him and so he resolves to find satisfaction in improving the material world by ‘spreading improvements, dispensing blessings, and causing all distress and calamity to vanish from before m e.’64 Benevolence is the prerequisite to St Leon’s happiness as an im mortal, but this he cannot sustain. Instead, arrogance and pride triumph, for, having forfeited his mortality, he longs to take his place among the gods, saying ‘M ethought the race of mankind looked too insignificant in my eyes .... I could have been well content to be partaker with a race of immortals, but I was not satisfied to be single in this respect.’65
Even though St Leon complains about his solitude, he is not prepared to share his secret o f immortality with anyone else. Instead he locks away the secret inside himself saying:
I may whisper it to the woods and the waters, but not in the face of man. Not only am I bound to suppress the knowledge of the important secret I possess, but even the feelings, the ruminations, the visions, that are for ever floating in my soul.66
Initially, St Leon’s possessive individualism means that he has coveted the formula for the elixir vitae out o f a sense of self-interest. Later, how ever, he preserves this secrecy for altruistic reasons once he has realised that the diffusion o f this knowledge would be detrimental to society.
The conflict between self-interest and altruism is contained within the wider ethical construct o f the Enlightenment, which encompassed both elitism and egalitarianism. Ironically, St Leon has achieved the mor al and social stasis which had bewitched those eighteenth-century thinkers who wanted to preserve their civilisation from change and de cay. As St Leon complains, ‘for me the laws o f nature are suspended; the eternal wheels o f the universe roll backward.’67 By achieving the ab solute, St Leon has lost the dynamic quest for knowledge which drives on the seeker. Even his metaphysical speculations have degenerated into a solipsistic contemplation of self upon which he reflects, ‘W hat adept or probationer o f the present day would be content to resign the study of God and the profounder secrets o f nature, and to bound his ardour to the investigation of his own miserable existence?’68
St Leon is following out the same tragic destiny as Zampieri, whose life-story is a litany of despair. Zam pieri’s eye-witness description of
historical events identifies him as a Rosicrucian sage. He tells St Leon o f his travels:
I have wandered through every region o f the earth, and have found only disappointment. I have entered the courts of princes; I have accompanied the march of ar mies; I have pined in the putridity of dungeons. I have tasted every vicissitude of splendour and meanness; five times have I been led to the scaffold, and with difficulty escaped a public execution. Hated by man kind, hunted from the face o f the earth, pursued by every atrocious calumny, without a country, without a roof, without a friend.69
M arguerite begins to realise that her husband can no longer sustain any meaningful human relations since he has become a ‘solitary, cold, self centred individual’70 alienated from his fellow-species. The real price he has paid for the possession of the philosopher’s stone is alienation. Un prepared for this contingency, St Leon has turned him self into a lonely immortal, wandering the earth in search o f the unattainable goals of last ing friendship and unbroken peace, regarding himself as one who must endure perpetual isolation in the belief that an ‘immortal can form no true and real attachment to the insect of an hour.’71 To such a being the cycles of mankind appear to be that of a mayfly, for as St Leon points out, ‘months, years, cycles, centuries! To me all these are but as indivisible m om ents.’72 When he realises that solitude must accompany this time less existence, the prospect seems to be almost unendurable. Cast out from nature, he laments, ‘Man was not bom to live alone. He is linked to his brethren by a thousand ties; and, when those ties are broken, he ceases from all genuine existence.’73 St Leon’s mastery o f death has turned him into the slave of eternity, for he now begins to view his imm or tality as a form of non-existence, saying; ‘it was all a lie; I was no youth; I was no man; I was no member o f the great community o f my species.’74 Now a living negation o f h im self and consumed by nihilism, he declares ‘I am nothing to any human being: I am alone in the boundless universe.’75 His life has become a living death, since he believes that he who dedi cates his days to an endless sorrow is the worst and most degraded of suicides.
St Leon atones for his guilt by resolving to undergo the sufferings inflicted upon him by persecutors such as Bethlem Gabor, who derives
sadistic satisfaction from witnessing the ‘sublime desolation o f a mighty
WILLIAM G O DW IN ’S DARKNESS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
points out, ‘I could not resolve to die: death had too many charms to suit the self-condemnation that pursued me. I found a horrible satisfaction in determining to live, and to avenge upon m yself the guilt I had incurred.’77 He urges, ‘Let no man, after me, pant for the acquisition o f the philoso pher’s stone.’78 The lesson to be learnt from the pursuit and acquisition of the elixir of life is that freedom from mortality enslaves the individual in an endless syndrome of life-in-death and death-in-life from which there is no escape. The chronic discontent engendered by such a predicament was also capable of breaking out into social disruption.