HE
For twenty years of my life I have embraced the phantom of the fairest
woman that ever drew breath. I have submitted to her whims, I have
worshipped her feet, I have, I believe, strengthened her principle.
I have done all in my devotion but adopt her religious faith. And I
have, as I trusted some time since, awakened to perceive that those
twenty years were a period of mere sentimental pastime, perfectly
useless, fruitless, unless, as is possible, it has saved me from other
follies. But it was a folly in itself. Can one's nature be too
stedfast? The question whether a spice of frivolousness may not be a
safeguard has often risen before me. The truth, I must learn to think,
is, that my mental power is not the match for my ideal or sentimental
apprehension and native tenacity of attachment. I have fallen into one
of the pits of a well-meaning but idle man. The world discredits the
existence of pure platonism in love. I myself can barely look back on
those twenty years of amatory servility with a full comprehension of the
part I have been playing in them. And yet I would not willingly forfeit
the exalted admiration of Louise for my constancy: as little willingly as
I would have imperilled her purity. I cling to the past as to something
in which I have deserved well, though I am scarcely satisfied with it.
According to our English notions I know my name. English notions,
however, are not to be accepted in all matters, any more than the flat
declaration of a fact will develop it in alt its bearings. When our
English society shall have advanced to a high civilization, it will be
less expansive in denouncing the higher stupidities. Among us, much of
the social judgement of Bodge upon the relations of men to women is the
stereotyped opinion of the land. There is the dictum here for a man who
adores a woman who is possessed by a husband. If he has long adored her,
and known himself to be preferred by her in innocency of heart; if he has
solved the problem of being her bosom's lord, without basely seeking to
degrade her to being his mistress; the epithets to characterise him in
our vernacular will probably be all the less flattering. Politically we
are the most self-conscious people upon earth, and socially the frankest
animals. The terrorism of our social laws is eminently serviceable,
for without it such frank animals as we are might run into bad excesses.
I judge rather by the abstract evidence than by the examples our fair
matrons give to astounded foreigners when abroad.
Louise writes that her husband is paralysed. The Marquis de Mazardouin
is at last tasting of his mortality. I bear in mind the day when he
married her. She says that he has taken to priestly counsel, and, like
a woman, she praises him for that. It is the one thing which I have not
done to please her. She anticipates his decease. Should she be free--
what then? My heart does not beat the faster for the thought. There are
twenty years upon it, and they make a great load. But I have a desire
that she should come over to us. The old folly might rescue me from the
new one. Not that I am any further persecuted by the dread that I am in
imminent danger here. I have established a proper mastery over my young
lady. 'Nous avons change de role'. Alice is subdued; she laughs feebly,
is becoming conscious--a fact to be regretted, if I desired to check the
creature's growth. There is vast capacity in the girl. She has plainly
not centred her affections upon Charles, so that a man's conscience might
be at ease if--if he chose to disregard what is due to decency. But,
why, when I contest it, do I bow to the world's opinion concerning
disparity of years between husband and wife? I know innumerable cases of
an old husband making a young wife happy. My friend, Dr. Galliot,
married his ward, and he had the best wife of any man of my acquaintance.
She has been publishing his learned manuscripts ever since his death.
That is an extreme case, for he was forty-five years her senior, and
stood bald at the altar. Old General Althorpe married Julia Dahoop, and,
but for his preposterous jealousy of her, might be cited in proof that
the ordinary reckonings are not to be a yoke on the neck of one who
earnestly seeks to spouse a fitting mate, though late in life. But,
what are fifty years? They mark the prime of a healthy man's existence.
He has by that time seen the world, can decide, and settle, and is
virtually more eligible--to use the cant phrase of gossips--than a young
man, even for a young girl. And may not some fair and fresh reward be
justly claimed as the crown of a virtuous career?
I say all this, yet my real feeling is as if I were bald as Dr. Galliot
and jealous as General Althorpe. For, with my thorough knowledge of
myself, I, were I like either one of them, should not have offered myself
to the mercy of a young woman, or of the world. Nor, as I am and know
myself to be, would I offer myself to the mercy of Alice Amble. When my
filleule first drove into Dayton she had some singularly audacious ideas
of her own. Those vivid young feminine perceptions and untamed
imaginations are desperate things to encounter. There is nothing beyond
their reach. Our safety from them lies in the fact that they are always
seeing too much, and imagining too wildly; so that, with a little help
from us, they may be taught to distrust themselves; and when they have
once distrusted themselves, we need not afterwards fear them: their
supernatural vitality has vanished. I fancy my pretty Alice to be in
this state now. She leaves us to-morrow. In the autumn we shall have
her with us again, and Louise will scan her compassionately. I desire
that they should meet. It will be hardly fair to the English girl, but,
if I stand in the gap between them, I shall summon up no small quantity
of dormant compatriotic feeling. The contemplation of the contrast, too,
may save me from both: like the logic ass with the two trusses of hay on
either side of him.