What is guilt? A stain upon the soul. And it is a point of vast
interest whether the soul may contract such stains in all their depth
and flagrancy from deeds which may have been plotted and resolved upon,
but which physically have never had existence. Must the fleshly hand
and visible frame of man set its seal to the evil designs of the soul,
in order to give them their entire validity against the sinner? Or,
while none but crimes perpetrated are cognizable before an earthly
tribunal, will guilty thoughts—of which guilty deeds are no more than
shadows,—will these draw down the full weight of a condemning sentence
in the supreme court of eternity? In the solitude of a midnight chamber
or in a desert afar from men or in a church while the body is kneeling
the soul may pollute itself even with those crimes which we are
accustomed to deem altogether carnal. If this be true, it is a fearful
truth.
Let us illustrate the subject by an imaginary example. A venerable
gentleman—one Mr. Smith—who had long been regarded as a pattern of
moral excellence was warming his aged blood with a glass or two of
generous wine. His children being gone forth about their worldly
business and his grandchildren at school, he sat alone in a deep
luxurious arm-chair with his feet beneath a richly-carved mahogany
table. Some old people have a dread of solitude, and when better
company may not be had rejoice even to hear the quiet breathing of a
babe asleep upon the carpet. But Mr. Smith, whose silver hair was the
bright symbol of a life unstained except by such spots as are
inseparable from human nature—he had no need of a babe to protect him
by its purity, nor of a grown person to stand between him and his own
soul. Nevertheless, either manhood must converse with age, or womanhood
must soothe him with gentle cares, or infancy must sport around his
chair, or his thoughts will stray into the misty region of the past and
the old man be chill and sad. Wine will not always cheer him.
Such might have been the case with Mr. Smith, when, through the
brilliant medium of his glass of old Madeira, he beheld three figures
entering the room. These were Fancy, who had assumed the garb and
aspect of an itinerant showman, with a box of pictures on her back; and
Memory, in the likeness of a clerk, with a pen behind her ear, an
inkhorn at her buttonhole and a huge manuscript volume beneath her arm;
and lastly, behind the other two, a person shrouded in a dusky mantle
which concealed both face and form. But Mr. Smith had a shrewd idea
that it was Conscience. How kind of Fancy, Memory and Conscience to
visit the old gentleman just as he was beginning to imagine that the
wine had neither so bright a sparkle nor so excellent a flavor as when
himself and the liquor were less aged! Through the dim length of the
apartment, where crimson curtains muffled the glare of sunshine and
created a rich obscurity, the three guests drew near the silver-haired
old man. Memory, with a finger between the leaves of her huge volume,
placed herself at his right hand; Conscience, with her face still
hidden in the dusky mantle, took her station on the left, so as to be
next his heart; while Fancy set down her picture-box upon the table
with the magnifying-glass convenient to his eye.
We can sketch merely the outlines of two or three out of the many
pictures which at the pulling of a string successively peopled the box
with the semblances of living scenes. One was a moonlight picture, in
the background a lowly dwelling, and in front, partly shadowed by a
tree, yet besprinkled with flakes of radiance, two youthful figures,
male and female. The young man stood with folded arms, a haughty smile
upon his lip and a gleam of triumph in his eye as he glanced downward
at the kneeling girl. She was almost prostrate at his feet, evidently
sinking under a weight of shame and anguish which hardly allowed her to
lift her clasped hands in supplication. Her eyes she could not lift.
But neither her agony, nor the lovely features on which it was
depicted, nor the slender grace of the form which it convulsed,
appeared to soften the obduracy of the young man. He was the
personification of triumphant scorn.
Now, strange to say, as old Mr. Smith peeped through the
magnifying-glass, which made the objects start out from the canvas with
magical deception, he began to recognize the farmhouse, the tree and
both the figures of the picture. The young man in times long past had
often met his gaze within the looking-glass; the girl was the very
image of his first love—his cottage-love, his Martha Burroughs. Mr.
Smith was scandalized. “Oh, vile and slanderous picture!” he exclaims.
“When have I triumphed over ruined innocence? Was not Martha wedded in
her teens to David Tomkins, who won her girlish love and long enjoyed
her affection as a wife? And ever since his death she has lived a
reputable widow!”
Meantime, Memory was turning over the leaves of her volume, rustling
them to and fro with uncertain fingers, until among the earlier pages
she found one which had reference to this picture. She reads it close
to the old gentleman’s ear: it is a record merely of sinful thought
which never was embodied in an act, but, while Memory is reading,
Conscience unveils her face and strikes a dagger to the heart of Mr.
Smith. Though not a death-blow, the torture was extreme.
The exhibition proceeded. One after another Fancy displayed her
pictures, all of which appeared to have been painted by some malicious
artist on purpose to vex Mr. Smith. Not a shadow of proof could have
been adduced in any earthly court that he was guilty of the slightest
of those sins which were thus made to stare him in the face. In one
scene there was a table set out, with several bottles and glasses half
filled with wine, which threw back the dull ray of an expiring lamp.
There had been mirth and revelry until the hand of the clock stood just
at midnight, when Murder stepped between the boon-companions. A young
man had fallen on the floor, and lay stone dead with a ghastly wound
crushed into his temple, while over him, with a delirium of mingled
rage and horror in his countenance, stood the youthful likeness of Mr.
Smith. The murdered youth wore the features of Edward Spencer. “What
does this rascal of a painter mean?” cries Mr. Smith, provoked beyond
all patience. “Edward Spencer was my earliest and dearest friend, true
to me as I to him through more than half a century. Neither I nor any
other ever murdered him. Was he not alive within five years, and did he
not, in token of our long friendship, bequeath me his gold-headed cane
and a mourning-ring?”
Again had Memory been turning over her volume, and fixed at length upon
so confused a page that she surely must have scribbled it when she was
tipsy. The purport was, however, that while Mr. Smith and Edward
Spencer were heating their young blood with wine a quarrel had flashed
up between them, and Mr. Smith, in deadly wrath, had flung a bottle at
Spencer’s head. True, it missed its aim and merely smashed a
looking-glass; and the next morning, when the incident was imperfectly
remembered, they had shaken hands with a hearty laugh. Yet, again,
while Memory was reading, Conscience unveiled her face, struck a dagger
to the heart of Mr. Smith and quelled his remonstrance with her iron
frown. The pain was quite excruciating.
Some of the pictures had been painted with so doubtful a touch, and in
colors so faint and pale, that the subjects could barely be
conjectured. A dull, semi-transparent mist had been thrown over the
surface of the canvas, into which the figures seemed to vanish while
the eye sought most earnestly to fix them. But in every scene, however
dubiously portrayed, Mr. Smith was invariably haunted by his own
lineaments at various ages as in a dusty mirror. After poring several
minutes over one of these blurred and almost indistinguishable
pictures, he began to see that the painter had intended to represent
him, now in the decline of life, as stripping the clothes from the
backs of three half-starved children. “Really, this puzzles me!” quoth
Mr. Smith, with the irony of conscious rectitude. “Asking pardon of the
painter, I pronounce him a fool as well as a scandalous knave. A man of
my standing in the world to be robbing little children of their
clothes! Ridiculous!”
But while he spoke Memory had searched her fatal volume and found a
page which with her sad calm voice she poured into his ear. It was not
altogether inapplicable to the misty scene. It told how Mr. Smith had
been grievously tempted by many devilish sophistries, on the ground of
a legal quibble, to commence a lawsuit against three orphan-children,
joint-heirs to a considerable estate. Fortunately, before he was quite
decided, his claims had turned out nearly as devoid of law as justice.
As Memory ceased to read Conscience again thrust aside her mantle, and
would have struck her victim with the envenomed dagger only that he
struggled and clasped his hands before his heart. Even then, however,
he sustained an ugly gash.
Why should we follow Fancy through the whole series of those awful
pictures? Painted by an artist of wondrous power and terrible
acquaintance with the secret soul, they embodied the ghosts of all the
never-perpetrated sins that had glided through the lifetime of Mr.
Smith. And could such beings of cloudy fantasy, so near akin to
nothingness, give valid evidence against him at the day of judgment? Be
that the case or not, there is reason to believe that one truly
penitential tear would have washed away each hateful picture and left
the canvas white as snow. But Mr. Smith, at a prick of Conscience too
keen to be endured, bellowed aloud with impatient agony, and suddenly
discovered that his three guests were gone. There he sat alone, a
silver-haired and highly-venerated old man, in the rich gloom of the
crimsoned-curtained room, with no box of pictures on the table, but
only a decanter of most excellent Madeira. Yet his heart still seemed
to fester with the venom of the dagger.
Nevertheless, the unfortunate old gentleman might have argued the
matter with Conscience and alleged many reasons wherefore she should
not smite him so pitilessly. Were we to take up his cause, it should be
somewhat in the following fashion. A scheme of guilt, till it be put in
execution, greatly resembles a train of incidents in a projected tale.
The latter, in order to produce a sense of reality in the reader’s
mind, must be conceived with such proportionate strength by the author
as to seem in the glow of fancy more like truth, past, present or to
come, than purely fiction. The prospective sinner, on the other hand,
weaves his plot of crime, but seldom or never feels a perfect certainty
that it will be executed. There is a dreaminess diffused about his
thoughts; in a dream, as it were, he strikes the death-blow into his
victim’s heart and starts to find an indelible blood-stain on his hand.
Thus a novel-writer or a dramatist, in creating a villain of romance
and fitting him with evil deeds, and the villain of actual life in
projecting crimes that will be perpetrated, may almost meet each other
halfway between reality and fancy. It is not until the crime is
accomplished that Guilt clenches its gripe upon the guilty heart and
claims it for his own. Then, and not before, sin is actually felt and
acknowledged, and, if unaccompanied by repentance, grows a thousandfold
more virulent by its self-consciousness. Be it considered, also, that
men often overestimate their capacity for evil. At a distance, while
its attendant circumstances do not press upon their notice and its
results are dimly seen, they can bear to contemplate it. They may take
the steps which lead to crime, impelled by the same sort of mental
action as in working out a mathematical problem, yet be powerless with
compunction at the final moment. They knew not what deed it was that
they deemed themselves resolved to do. In truth, there is no such thing
in man’s nature as a settled and full resolve, either for good or evil,
except at the very moment of execution. Let us hope, therefore, that
all the dreadful consequences of sin will not be incurred unless the
act have set its seal upon the thought.
Yet, with the slight fancy-work which we have framed, some sad and
awful truths are interwoven. Man must not disclaim his brotherhood even
with the guiltiest, since, though his hand be clean, his heart has
surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity. He must feel
that when he shall knock at the gate of heaven no semblance of an
unspotted life can entitle him to entrance there. Penitence must kneel
and Mercy come from the footstool of the throne, or that golden gate
will never open.