A LONG INTERVAL OF YEARS.--A CHANGE OF MIND AND ITS CAUSES.
THE last accounts received of the Czar reported him to be at Dantzic.
He had, however, quitted that place when I arrived there. I lost no
time in following him, and presented myself to his Majesty one day after
his dinner, when he was sitting with one leg in the Czarina's lap and a
bottle of the best /eau de vie/ before him. I had chosen my time well;
he received me most graciously, read my letter from the Regent--about
which, remembering the fate of Bellerophon, I had had certain
apprehensions, but which proved to be in the highest degree
complimentary--and then declared himself extremely happy to see me
again. However parsimonious Peter generally was towards foreigners, I
never had ground for personal complaint on that score. The very next
day I was appointed to a post of honour and profit about the royal
person; from this I was transferred to a military station, in which I
rose with great rapidity; and I was only occasionally called from my
warlike duties to be intrusted with diplomatic missions of the highest
confidence and importance.
It is this portion of my life--a portion of nine years to the time of
the Czar's death--that I shall, in this history, the most concentrate
and condense. In truth, were I to dwell upon it at length, I should
make little more than a mere record of political events; differing, in
some respects, it is true, from the received histories of the time, but
containing nothing to compensate in utility for the want of interest.
That this was the exact age for adventurers, Alberoni and Dubois are
sufficient proofs. Never was there a more stirring, active, restless
period; never one in which the genius of intrigue was so pervadingly at
work. I was not less fortunate than my brethren. Although scarcely
four and twenty when I entered the Czar's service, my habits of intimacy
with men much older; my customary gravity, reserve, and thought; my
freedom, since Isora's death, from youthful levity or excess; my early
entrance into the world; and a countenance prematurely marked with the
lines of reflection and sobered by its hue,--made me appear considerably
older than I was. I kept my own counsel, and affected to be so: youth
is a great enemy to one's success; and more esteem is often bestowed
upon a wrinkled brow than a plodding brain.
All the private intelligence which during this space of time I had
received from England was far from voluminous. My mother still enjoyed
the quiet of her religious retreat. A fire, arising from the negligence
of a servant, had consumed nearly the whole of Devereux Court (the fine
old house! till /that/ went, I thought even England held one friend).
Upon this accident, Gerald had gone to London; and, though there was now
no doubt of his having been concerned in the Rebellion of 1715, he had
been favourably received at court, and was already renowned throughout
London for his pleasures, his excesses, and his munificent profusion.
Montreuil, whose lot seemed to be always to lose by intrigue what he
gained by the real solidity of his genius, had embarked very largely in
the rash but gigantic schemes of Gortz and Alberoni; schemes which, had
they succeeded, would not only have placed a new king upon the English
throne, but wrought an utter change over the whole face of Europe. With
Alberoni and with Gortz fell Montreuil. He was banished France and
Spain; the penalty of death awaited him in Britain; and he was supposed
to have thrown himself into some convent in Italy, where his name and
his character were unknown. In this brief intelligence was condensed
all my information of the actors in my first scenes of life. I return
to that scene on which I had now entered.
At the age of thirty-three I had acquired a reputation sufficient to
content my ambition; my fortune was larger than my wants; I was a
favourite in courts; I had been successful in camps; I had already
obtained all that would have rewarded the whole lives of many men
superior to myself in merit, more ardent than myself in desires. I was
still young; my appearance, though greatly altered, manhood had rather
improved than impaired. I had not forestalled my constitution by
excesses, nor worn dry the sources of pleasure by too large a demand
upon their capacities; why was it then, at that golden age, in the very
prime and glory of manhood, in the very zenith and summer of success,
that a deep, dark, pervading melancholy fell upon me? a melancholy so
gloomy that it seemed to me as a thick and impenetrable curtain drawn
gradually between myself and the blessed light of human enjoyment. A
torpor crept upon me; an indolent, heavy, clinging languor gathered over
my whole frame, the physical and the mental: I sat for hours without
book, paper, object, thought, gazing on vacancy, stirring not, feeling
not,--yes, feeling, but feeling only one sensation, a sick, sad,
drooping despondency, a sinking in of the heart, a sort of gnawing
within as if something living were twisted round my vitals, and, finding
no other food, preyed, though with a sickly and dull maw, upon /them/.
This disease came upon me slowly: it was not till the beginning of the
second year, from its obvious and palpable commencement, that it grew to
the height that I have described. It began with a distaste to all that
I had been accustomed to enjoy or to pursue. Music, which I had always
passionately loved, though from some defect in the organs of hearing, I
was incapable of attaining the smallest knowledge of the science, music
lost all its diviner spells, all its properties of creating a new
existence, a life of dreaming and vain luxuries, within the mind: it
became only a monotonous sound, less grateful to the languor of my
faculties than an utter and dead stillness. I had never been what is
generally termed a boon companion; but I had had the social vanities, if
not the social tastes; I had insensibly loved the board which echoed
with applause at my sallies, and the comrades who, while they deprecated
my satire, had been complaisant enough to hail it as wit. One of my
weaknesses is a love of show, and I had gratified a feeling not the less
cherished because it arose from a petty source, in obtaining for my
equipages, my mansion, my banquets, the celebrity which is given no less
to magnificence than to fame: now I grew indifferent alike to the signs
of pomp, and to the baubles of taste; praise fell upon a listless ear,
and (rare pitch of satiety!) the pleasures that are the offspring of our
foibles delighted me no more. I had early learned from Bolingbroke a
love for the converse of men, eminent, whether for wisdom or for wit:
the graceful /badinage,/ or the keen critique; the sparkling flight of
the winged words which circled and rebounded from lip to lip, or the
deep speculation upon the mysterious and unravelled wonders of man, of
Nature, and the world; the light maxim upon manners, or the sage inquiry
into the mines of learning, all and each had possessed a link to bind my
temper and my tastes to the graces and fascination of social life. Now
a new spirit entered within me: the smile faded from my lip, and the
jest departed from my tongue; memory seemed no less treacherous than
fancy, and deserted me the instant I attempted to enter into those
contests of knowledge in which I had been not undistinguished before. I
grew confused and embarrassed in speech; my words expressed a sense
utterly different to that which I had intended to convey; and at last,
as my apathy increased, I sat at my own board, silent and lifeless,
freezing into ice the very powers and streams of converse which I had
once been the foremost to circulate and to warm.
At the time I refer to, I was Minister at one of the small Continental
courts, where life is a round of unmeaning etiquette and wearisome
ceremonials, a daily labour of trifles, a ceaseless pageantry of
nothings. I had been sent there upon one important event; the business
resulting from it had soon ceased, and all the duties that remained for
me to discharge were of a negative and passive nature. Nothing that
could arouse, nothing that could occupy faculties that had for years
been so perpetually wound up to a restless excitement, was left for me
in this terrible reservoir of /ennui/. I had come thither at once from
the skirmishing and wild warfare of a Tartar foe; a war in which, though
the glory was obscure, the action was perpetual and exciting. I had
come thither, and the change was as if I had passed from a mountain
stream to a stagnant pool. Society at this court reminded me of a state
funeral: everything was pompous and lugubrious, even to the
drapery--even to the feathers--which, in other scenes, would have been
consecrated to associations of levity or of grace; the hourly pageant
swept on slow, tedious, mournful, and the object of the attendants was
only to entomb the Pleasure which they affected celebrate. What a
change for the wild, the strange, the novel, the intriguing, the varying
life, which, whether in courts or camps, I had hitherto led! The
internal change that came over myself is scarcely to be wondered at; the
winds stood still, and the straw they had blown from quarter to quarter,
whether in anger or in sport, began to moulder upon the spot where they
had left it.
From this cessation of the aims, hopes, and thoughts of life I was
awakened by the spreading, as it were, of another disease: the dead,
dull, aching pain at my heart was succeeded by one acute and intense;
the absence of thought gave way to one thought more terrible, more dark,
more despairing than any which had haunted me since the first year of
Isora's death; and from a numbness and pause, as it were, of existence,
existence became too keen and intolerable a sense. I will enter into an
explanation.
At the court of ------, there was an Italian, not uncelebrated for his
wisdom, nor unbeloved for an innocence and integrity of life rarely
indeed to be met with among his countrymen. The acquaintance of this
man, who was about fifty years of age, and who was devoted almost
exclusively to the pursuit of philosophical science, I had sedulously
cultivated. His conversation pleased me; his wisdom improved; and his
benevolence, which reminded me of the traits of La Fontaine, it was so
infantine, made me incline to love him. Upon the growth of the fearful
malady of mind which seized me, I had discontinued my visits and my
invitations to the Italian; and Bezoni (so was he called) felt a little
offended by my neglect. As soon, however, as he discovered my state of
mind, the good man's resentment left him. He forced himself upon my
solitude, and would sit by me whole evenings,--sometimes without
exchanging a word, sometimes with vain attempts to interest, to arouse,
or to amuse me.
At last, one evening--it was the era of a fearful suffering to me--our
conversation turned upon those subjects which are at once the most
important and the most rarely discussed. We spoke of /religion/. We
first talked upon the theology of revealed religion. As Bezoni warmed
into candour, I perceived that his doctrines differed from my own, and
that he inly disbelieved that divine creed which Christians profess to
adore. From a dispute on the ground of faith, we came to one upon the
more debatable ground of reason. We turned from the subject of revealed
to that of natural religion; and we entered long and earnestly into that
grandest of all earthly speculations,--the metaphysical proofs of the
immortality of the soul. Again the sentiments of Bezoni were opposed to
mine. He was a believer in the dark doctrine which teaches that man is
dust and that all things are forgotten in the grave. He expressed his
opinions with a clearness and precision the more impressive because
totally devoid of cavil and of rhetoric. I listened in silence, but
with a deep and most chilling dismay. Even now I think I see the man as
he sat before me, the light of the lamp falling on his high forehead and
dark features; even now I think I hear his calm, low voice--the silver
voice of his country--stealing to my heart, and withering the only pure
and unsullied hope which I yet cherished there.
Bezoni left me, unconscious of the anguish he bequeathed me, to think
over all he had said. I did not sleep nor even retire to bed. I laid
my head upon my hands, and surrendered myself to turbulent yet intense
reflection. Every man who has lived much in the world, and conversed
with its various tribes, has, I fear, met with many who, on this
momentous subject, profess the same tenets as Bezoni. But he was the
first person I had met of that sect who had evidently thought long and
deeply upon the creed he had embraced. He was not a voluptuary nor a
boaster nor a wit. He had not been misled by the delusions either of
vanity or of the senses. He was a man pure, innocent, modest, full of
all tender charities and meek dispositions towards mankind: it was
evidently his interest to believe in a future state; he could have had
nothing to fear from it. Not a single passion did he cherish which the
laws of another world would have condemned. Add to this, what I have
observed before, that he was not a man fond of the display of intellect,
nor one that brought to the discussions of wisdom the artillery of wit.
He was grave, humble, and self-diffident, beyond all beings. I would
have given a kingdom to have found something in the advocate by which I
could have condemned the cause: I could not, and I was wretched.
I spent the whole of the next week among my books. I ransacked whatever
in my scanty library the theologians had written or the philosophers had
bequeathed upon that mighty secret. I arranged their arguments in my
mind. I armed myself with their weapons. I felt my heart spring
joyously within me as I felt the strength I had acquired, and I sent to
the philosopher to visit me, that I might conquer and confute him. He
came; but he spoke with pain and reluctance. He saw that I had taken
the matter far more deeply to heart than he could have supposed it
possible in a courtier and a man of fortune and the world. Little did
he know of me or my secret soul. I broke down his reserve at last. I
unrolled my arguments. I answered his, and we spent the whole night in
controversy. He left me, and I was more bewildered than ever.
To speak truth, he had devoted years to the subject: I had devoted only
a week. He had come to his conclusions step by step; he had reached the
great ultimatum with slowness, with care, and, he confessed, with
anguish and with reluctance. What a match was I, who brought a hasty
temper, and a limited reflection on that subject to a reasoner like
this? His candour staggered and chilled me even more than his logic.
Arguments that occurred not to me, upon my side of the question, /he/
stated at length and with force; I heard, and, till he replied to them,
I deemed they were unanswerable: the reply came, and I had no
counter-word. A meeting of this nature was often repeated; and when he
left me, tears crept into my wild eyes, my heart melted within me, and I
wept!
I must now enter more precisely than I have yet done into my state of
mind upon religious matters at the time this dispute with the Italian
occurred. To speak candidly, I had been far less shocked with his
opposition to me upon matters of doctrinal faith than with that upon
matters of abstract reasoning. Bred a Roman Catholic, though pride,
consistency, custom, made me externally adhere to the Papal Church, I
inly perceived its errors and smiled at its superstitions. And in the
busy world, where so little but present objects or /human/ anticipations
of the future engross the attention, I had never given the subject that
consideration which would have enabled me (as it has since) to separate
the dogmas of the priest from the precepts of the Saviour, and thus
confirmed my belief as the Christian by the very means which would have
loosened it as the Sectarian. So that at the time Bezoni knew me a
certain indifference to--perhaps arising from an ignorance of--doctrinal
points, rendered me little hurt by arguments against opinions which I
embraced indeed, but with a lukewarm and imperfect affection. But it
was far otherwise upon abstract points of reasoning, far otherwise, when
the hope of surviving this frail and most unhallowed being was to be
destroyed: I might have been indifferent to cavil upon /what/ was the
word of God, but never to question of the justice of God Himself. In
the whole world there was not a more ardent believer in our imperishable
nature, nor one more deeply interested in the belief. Do not let it be
supposed that because I have not often recurred to Isora's death (or
because I have continued my history in a jesting and light tone) that
that event ever passed from the memory which it had turned to bitterness
and gall. Never in the masses of intrigue, in the festivals of
pleasure, in the tumults of ambition, in the blaze of a licentious
court, or by the rude tents of a barbarous host,--never, my buried love,
had I forgotten thee! That remembrance, had no other cause existed,
would have led me to God. Every night, in whatever toils or whatever
objects, whatever failures or triumphs, the day had been consumed; every
night before I laid my head upon my widowed and lonely pillow,--I had
knelt down and lifted my heart to Heaven, blending the hopes of that
Heaven with the memory and the vision of Isora. Prayer had seemed to me
a commune not only with the living God, but with the dead by whom His
dwelling is surrounded. Pleasant and soft was it to turn to one
thought, to which all the holiest portions of my nature clung between
the wearying acts of this hard and harsh drama of existence. Even the
bitterness of Isora's early and unavenged death passed away when I
thought of the heaven to which she was gone, and in which, though I
journeyed now through sin and travail and recked little if the paths of
others differed from my own, I yet trusted with a solemn trust that I
should meet her at last. There was I to merit her with a love as
undying, and at length as pure, as her own. It was this that at the
stated hour in which, after my prayer for our reunion, I surrendered my
spirit to the bright and wild visions of her far, but /not impassable/
home,--it was this which for that single hour made all around me a
paradise of delighted thoughts! It was not the little earth, nor the
cold sky, nor the changing wave, nor the perishable turf,--no, nor the
dead wall and the narrow chamber,--which were around me then! No
dreamer ever was so far from the localities of flesh and life as I was
in that enchanted hour: a light seemed to settle upon all things around
me; her voice murmured on my ear, her kisses melted on my brow; I shut
my eyes, and I fancied that I beheld her.
Wherefore was this comfort? Whence came the spell which admitted me to
this fairy land? What was the source of the hope and the rapture and
the delusion? Was it not the deep certainty that /Isora yet existed/;
that her spirit, her nature, her love were preserved, were inviolate,
were the same? That they watched over me yet, that she knew that in
that hour I was with her, that she felt my prayer, that even then she
anticipated the moment when my soul should burst the human prison-house
and be once more blended with her own?
What! and was this to be no more? Were those mystic and sweet
revealings to be mute to me forever? Were my thoughts of Isora to be
henceforth bounded to the charnel-house and the worm? Was she indeed
/no more/? /No more/, oh, intolerable despair! Why, there was not a
thing I had once known, not a dog that I had caressed, not a book that I
had read, which I could know that I should see /no more/, and, knowing,
not feel something of regret. No more! were we, indeed, parted forever
and forever? Had she gone in her young years, with her warm affections,
her new hopes, all green and unwithered at her heart, at once into dust,
stillness, ice? And had I known her only for one year, one little year,
to see her torn from me by a violent and bloody death, and to be left a
mourner in this vast and eternal charnel, without a solitary consolation
or a gleam of hope? Was the earth to be henceforth a mere mass conjured
from the bones and fattened by the clay of our dead sires? Were the
stars and the moon to be mere atoms and specks of a chill light, no
longer worlds, which the ardent spirit might hereafter reach and be
fitted to enjoy? Was the heaven--the tender, blue, loving heaven, in
whose far regions I had dreamed was Isora's home, and had, therefore,
grown better and happier when I gazed upon it--to be nothing but cloud
and air? and had the love which had seemed so immortal, and so
springing from that which had not blent itself with mortality, been but
a gross lamp fed only by the properties of a brute nature, and placed in
a dark cell of clay, to glimmer, to burn, and to expire with the frail
walls which it had illumined? Dust, death, worms,--were these the
heritage of love and hope, of thought, of passion, of all that breathed
and kindled and exalted and /created/ within?
Could I contemplate this idea; could I believe it possible? /I could
not/. But against the abstract, the logical arguments for this idea,
had I a reply? I shudder as I write that at that time I had not! I
endeavoured to fix my whole thoughts to the study of those subtle
reasonings which I had hitherto so imperfectly conned: but my mind was
jarring, irresolute, bewildered, confused; my stake seemed too vast to
allow me coolness for the game.
Whoever has had cause for some refined and deep study in the midst of
the noisy and loud world may perhaps readily comprehend that feeling
which now possessed me; a feeling that it was utterly impossible to
abstract and concentrate one's thoughts, while at the mercy of every
intruder, and fevered and fretful by every disturbance. Men early and
long accustomed to mingle such reflections with the avocations of courts
and cities have grown callous to these interruptions, and it has been in
the very heart of the multitude that the profoundest speculations have
been cherished and produced; but I was not of this mould. The world,
which before had been distasteful, now grew insufferable; I longed for
some seclusion, some utter solitude, some quiet and unpenetrated nook,
that I might give my undivided mind to the knowledge of these things,
and build the tower of divine reasonings by which I might ascend to
heaven. It was at this time, and in the midst of my fiercest internal
conflict, that the great Czar died, and I was suddenly recalled to
Russia.
"Now," I said, when I heard of my release, "now shall my wishes be
fulfilled!"
I sent to Bezoni. He came, but he refused, as indeed he had for some
time done, to speak to me further upon the question which so wildly
engrossed me. "I forgive you," said I, when we parted, "I forgive you
for all that you have cost me: I feel that the moment is now at hand
when my faith shall frame a weapon wherewith to triumph over yours!"
Father in Heaven! thanks be to Thee that my doubts were at last removed,
and the cloud rolled away from my soul.
Bezoni embraced me, and wept over me. "All good men," said he, "have a
mighty interest in your success; for me there is nothing dark, even in
the mute grave, if it covers the ashes of one who has loved and served
his brethren, and done, with a wilful heart, no living creature wrong."
Soon afterwards the Italian lost his life in attending the victims of a
fearful and contagious disease, whom even the regular practitioners of
the healing art hesitated to visit.
At this moment I am, in the strictest acceptation of the words, a
believer and a Christian. I have neither anxiety nor doubt upon the
noblest and the most comforting of all creeds, and I am grateful, among
the other blessings which faith has brought me,--I am grateful that it
has brought me CHARITY! Dark to all human beings was Bezoni's
doctrine,--dark, above all, to those who have mourned on earth; so
withering to all the hopes which cling the most enduringly to the heart
was his unhappy creed that he who knows how inseparably, though
insensibly, our moral legislation is woven with our supposed
self-interest will scarcely marvel at, even while he condemns, the
unwise and unholy persecution which that creed universally sustains!
Many a most wretched hour, many a pang of agony and despair, did those
doctrines inflict upon myself; but I know that the intention of Bezoni
was benevolence and that the practice of his life was virtue: and while
my reason tells me that God will not punish the reluctant and
involuntary error of one to whom all God's creatures were so dear, my
religion bids me hope that I shall meet him in that world where no error
/is/, and where the Great Spirit to whom all human passions are unknown
avenges the momentary doubt of His justice by a proof of the infinity of
His mercy.