By C. A. Ward.

PART III.

(Continued from Vol. V. p. 293.)

NOSTRADAMUS was of a stature somewhat less than middle-size, rather thick-set, active and vigorous. He had a broad, open forehead, a straight, regular nose, grey eyes, of gentle appearance, but in anger flashing fire; the general expression was severe, but pleasant, so that through all the seriousness one could discern a benevolent disposition; his cheeks were rosy even in extreme age; he had a long thick beard, and his health was excellent, all his senses being alert and well-preserved. His spirits were good, and he comprehended readily whatever he gave his attention to. His judgment was penetrating, and his memory remarkably retentive. He was taciturn by nature, thought much and spoke little, was rather prompt, sudden, and irascible in temper, but very patient when hard work had to be encountered. He slept four or five hours only out of the twenty-four. He practised freedom of speech himself and commended it in others. He was cheerful and facetious in conversation, though in jesting a little given to bitterness. He was attached, so says De Chavigny, to the Roman Church, and held fixedly the Catholic faith; out of its pale there was for him no salvation. Though pursuing a line of thought entirely his own, he had no sympathy with the Lutheran heretics of so-called Freethought. He was given to prayer, fasting, and charity. As far as outward observance was concerned, he might be classed with the highly respectable and decent. Le Pelletier says, “sa fin fut ChrÉtienne;” but he adds a little further on that his style is very much more like that of the Pagan oracles of Greece and Rome than of the canonical prophets of Hebrew Inspiration. He remarks that the first Century opens with a regular incantation fortified by the most celebrated rites of Paganism, so that some suspicion of his orthodoxy may well be entertained. Certain it is, for he avows as much in the dedicatory epistle to Henry II.—which, by the way, the King never saw—that it was his custom prudently to veil in obscurity of expression whatever was likely to displease his protectors and so to damage his private interest. This is not the way with the heroes of Hebrew prophecy, Isaiah, Elijah, Samuel, but though it is somewhat cowardly, it becomes, when well reckoned up, a sort of sub-assertion of sincerity; for why should a man record the unpleasant things at all if he did not believe in them, and desired only to make himself agreeable? If he believed his own utterances he was consciously a prophet: that he threw a veil over them, shows only that he declined to suffer martyrdom for his convictions. It is quite possible to be a seer, and yet not heroical, but it is the poorest of criticism not to distinguish between such frailty as this and imposture. Want of grandeur does not imply any intention to deceive. Modern Freethought effectually breaks down upon a point like this, it almost invariably classifies the weak spiritualist as an impostor. It reasons somewhat thus: “Astrologers are impostors—Nostradamus was an astrologer. Prophets and divines, owing to the spread of sound knowledge in modern times, are no longer to be reckoned as inspired, but as impostors; Nostradamus was a prophet and therefore an impostor. He arrived in the world a thousand years behind his time, and must lie down now under Scientific and EncyclopÆdic ridicule. At the close of the nineteenth century is it likely we can allow such claims to be made upon our credulity as the more rational part of the community refused to admit three hundred years ago?” To all this and to all such processes of reasoning, I need merely say that there is a credulity of superstition that has been always esteemed as degrading to human nature; but there is also a superstition of incredulity that is quite as debasing to human nature and even more so, for it springs from the folly of pride and conceit, and not, as the other does, from a misplacement of faith.

By his second wife he left three sons and three daughters. The eldest was CÆsar, to whom he dedicated his first volume of the “Centuries.” Of these he wrote twelve in quatrains, and three of them are left imperfect, the seventh, the eleventh, and twelfth. But he also left some Forecasts written in prose, which Chavigny collected and arranged in twelve books. They are said to comprehend the history of France for about a century after his death—its wars, troubles, and whispered intrigues. The book is not mentioned by Brunet, 1839-45, and I do not find it in the British Museum; but the National Library is rather imperfectly supplied with the literature relating to this remarkable man; no doubt the authorities there look down upon him from the Olympus of Bloomsbury with a scientific disregard, as being a sort of gipsy fortune-teller of the sixteenth century, not worth completing. Do we expect a Messiah from that quarter? Can there any good thing come out of Aix in Provence? “Loco exiguo, obscuro, ignobili, barbaro, impio atque prophano?”

This prose history of a hundred years would be interesting, if only to compare with the rhymed “Centuries,” which have a much vaster range, and are supposed by many to cover all the time from Louis XIV. to the establishment of Antichrist.

Jean de Nostradamus, the brother of Michael, was Procureur to the Parliament of Aix, and wrote a work entitled “Les vies des plus cÉlÈbres et anciens poËtes provensaux, qui ont floury du tems des contes de Provence,” Lyon, 1575, a book still sought for, and rather rare. It has been seen above that CÆsar also wrote on the same subject. His work was entitled “Chronique de l’Histoire de Provence:” in this he introduced the lives of the poets, and the book was published in 1614 by his nephew, CÆsar de Nostradamus.

These are almost all the facts of any importance that are recorded in the life of Nostradamus. It now remains to us to give some account of the most remarkable of his forecasts. They may be pronounced obscure, partial, useless, or what not, according to the special views and disposition of mind in each reader. That they are very curious must be admitted by all, and that some of the things foreseen with astounding particularity are inexplicable upon any hypothesis of reasoning, other than that which admits either a direct revelation in every case, or a general anticipatory faculty, forming part of the great scheme of the mental endowment of mankind. Call it divination, second sight, clairvoyance, magnetic affinity, or what you will. Everyone may in this decide, or, if you had rather, guess for himself. I prefer the second supposition, and think that there are certain organisations, somewhat rare and peculiarly wrought, that are endowed by nature with a subtle tact and anticipatory insight denied to the majorities. I further think that such exceptional instances occur more frequently in people of ancient and unmixed race, such as the Celt, the Basque, the Chaldean, Gipsy, and most frequently of all amongst those branches of them that inhabit mountain-ranges. These I imagine to retain the instincts of the birth of man more clearly than the mixed tribes that have busied and even degraded themselves in the social pursuits of money, power, and art, and have burnt down their souls to a kind of materialistic slag in the furnace of what is called civilisation.

If man is a creature born to immortality—and certainly no thought is so congenial to largeness and nobleness of heart as this is—I can see no reason why he should not have some vision given him of the minor things to happen on this theatre of the earth, which might serve as a sort of foretaste of that major light which is to clothe him as with a glorious garment when he steps forth from this his present condition of earthworm into that exalted bodily temple that he shall inhabit to all eternity. Science so-called is free to teach what it chooses: it may level man to the rank of a turnip by its insidious analysis and gradational processes. Its business is with the present, and with all its pretence of intellect it remains of the material earth, earthy. The future is out of its ken and reach. But the soul, which is the broad, many-sided reason of man in concrete, and the, so to speak, spiritually substantialised symbol of it, cannot be shut up to this. Chop logic by Aristotle’s chaff-cutter, whether handled by a Duncan, a Watts, an Aldrich, or a Whately, as you please, yet the soul, defies you with its absoluteness, pushes aside induction and the contingent with it, and laughing at your littlenesses and your petty syllogisms, leaps at one bound into the incommensurable freedom of the future of eternity.

It now remains for me to show, not that Nostradamus is a grand type of the order of prophets, not that all the Quatrains in all of the twelve books of the “Centuries” are intelligible and of definite purpose, nor that everything he uttered and recorded is to be regarded as a prophecy either fulfilling or fulfilled. (This is not at all what I propose to do.) I intend simply to select, without over much attention to chronology or the sequence of events, such of the quatrains as by philological apparatus existing are capable of being translated into simple and intelligible language out of the occult prophetic, barbaric, and almost always pedantic phraseology (or old Franco-ProvenÇal patois, if you like to call it so) in which it pleased or suited our prophet in his fureur poËtique[14] to record for us his “nocturnes et prophÉtiques supputations” (des astres). In doing this, if one case of unmistakable prevision can be established, the missing spiritual link is set up that connects the present with the future.

Christians generally grow almost rancorous against those who reject their Scripture miracles, as Hume did, on the ground that the laws of nature being inviolable miracles become impossible; but a miracle that contravenes a law of nature is far more incredible per se than such a spiritual link as the above. The miracle of bringing a man to life goes, so to speak, dead against nature and its laws customary. But a forecast, as such, is little more miraculous than a telescope that focuses and brings into range what lies out of the range of the ordinary human eye. It is really as feasible a thing to the seer, as for you and me to see that a kitten will become a cat nine months later on. He sees by imagination what you see by reasoning on association in the past. It is discovery by a different faculty, I admit. But if Christian belief accepts a future state and the immortality of the life (commonly called the soul) of man, then I say, that the Christian who denies the gift of prophecy to be inherent in mankind[15] is really as dead to spiritual life as if he were a materialistic member of a scientific society of the nineteenth century, or a Parisian enclycopÆdist of the eighteenth.

Again, if Christianity be a heaven-descended revelation, its foundations must be rooted deep in the spiritual world and should be full of correspondences. The material universe is full of them. There the meanest particle of dust is link by link connected at last with the grandest astral phenomena, and can we suppose that men are all possessed with an immortal spirit, and yet at the same time announce that not one of them has any prescience, any foreknowledge of things coming on the earth, no sign rendered from the great unnameable Director, who, vast and invisible, also dwells in spiritual obscurity, and never gives an inkling to anyone born of woman that He cares more for an empire with its myriads of embryo angels (according to the doctrine of the Churches) than for an oak tree or a medlar? Yet we are willing to make it a point of virtue to believe that His only Son died for us, and that a whole line of prophets from Jacob to Caiaphas harped perpetually and in succession upon the Paganini string of the one great utterance of His advent. At the birth of Christ it is untruly said that the oracles stopped. So, according to the present Christian dogmatising, did the prophets. Would it not be a thousand times more fraught with hope, if we had not basely smothered such beliefs by materialistic science (or Atheism, for it is closer of kin to the blasphemy of unbelief), could we have said there is a spiritual living link of prophecy existing, and now and again found amongst us; a correspondency in man with the future; a power in him to forecast it a little, though darkly—as with a dark lanthorn moving through a dark season—and touching so, through film, the future of time as to interlink the whole series into one, and make to-day, perishing—with its bells, its bustle, and its breathing—into a continuous whole, one with the glories of eternity?

It will perhaps be well before proceeding to the Quatrains to meet an objection against Nostradamus put forward by the famous Gassendi,[16] who received it from Jean-Baptiste Suffren. Gassendi, it seems, was at Salon in 1638, when Jean-Baptiste Suffren, a judge in that town, communicated to him the horoscope drawn by Nostradamus for his father Antoine Suffren, and written in our prophet’s own hand, giving ten points, such as he should have a long curly beard, so bent in age, that in his 37th year he should be wounded by his half-brothers, and he had none, and much more of the same sort, but invariably wrong, till the horoscope fixes Suffren’s death in 1618, whereas he died in 1597. Now, in the first place, Gassendi was of a sceptical turn of mind, so that he would be glad to find Nostradamus wrong. Then Nostradamus died in 1566, and only in 1638, seventy-two years after, do they produce this document and assert that it is in Nostradamus’s handwriting. We may assume that the MS. was eighty years old at least. Gassendi does not profess to know his handwriting, but took it to be so on Jean-Baptiste Suffren’s simple assertion. It is perfectly possible that Suffren had some desire to ridicule an astrologer, and might have invented the whole thing. At any rate, it is not likely that every one of ten or eleven guesses would be precisely the contrary of the fact.[17] One of the clauses ran that at twenty-five he should cultivate rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, theology, natural science, and the occult philosophy. Jean-Baptiste has the effrontery to say that he studied not one of these, but only the science of jurisprudence. It is not likely, I say, that Nostradamus would guess wrongly in all the sciences, and leave out the only one that the man pursued. This looks as if it had been manufactured for the express purpose of bringing the name of Nostradamus into ridicule and disrepute. It is quite certain that the late John Varley, the painter, could draw some most wonderful horoscopes; a cousin of my father’s, in whose family he taught, had seen his forecasts marvellously verified. So correct had he frequently been that at the time she knew him it was with the greatest difficulty he could be induced to draw one. It is not likely that Nostradamus would fall so absurdly short of John Varley. Guessing at haphazard would correspond with the facts better than this upon the mere doctrine of probabilities. Jean-Baptiste in his haste has proved too much, and Gassendi, like a multitude of incredulous people, was quite ready to receive too much of the things for which his mouth was open and eager.

(To be continued.)