These
relate mainly to the temptation of the artist to effect a severance of
ordinary, active human relations. (Sad to think what bitter cause the
author had to brood upon this, the fault attributed to himself!) The
poet, the creator in whatever art, must maintain his own circle of
serene air, shutting out from it the flat reverberations of common life;
but if he fail to live generously toward his fellows,--if he cannot make
the light of every day supply the nimbus in which he hopes to appear
shining to posterity,--then he will fall into the treacherous pit of
selfishness where Septimius's soul lies smothered. But this set of
meanings runs imperceptibly into others, for the book is much like the
cabalistic manuscript described in its pages: now it is blurred over
with deceptive sameness, and again it brims with multifarious beauties
like those that swim within the golden depth of Tieck's enchanted
goblet. The ultimate and most insistent moral is perhaps that which
brings it into comparison with Goethe's "Faust"; this, namely, that, in
order to defraud Nature of her dues, we must enter into compact with the
Devil. Both Faust and Septimius study magic in their separate ways, with
the hope of securing results denied to their kind by a common destiny;
but Faust proves infinitely the meaner of the two, since he desires only
to restore his youth, that he may engage in the mere mad joy of a lusty
existence for a few years, while Septimius seeks some mode, however
austere and cheerless, of prolonging his life through centuries of
world-wide beneficence.
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