"In mea vesanas habui dispendia vires,
Et valui poenas fortis in ipse meas."*--OVID.
* I had the strength of a madman to my own cost, and employed that
strength in my own punishment.
"Then might my breast be read within,
A thousand volumes would be written there."
EARL OF STIRLING.
ERNEST MALTRAVERS was at the height of his reputation; the work which he
had deemed the crisis that was to make or mar him was the most
brilliantly successful of all he had yet committed to the public.
Certainly, chance did as much for it as merit, as is usually the case
with works that become instantaneously popular. We may hammer away at
the casket with strong arm and good purpose, and all in vain; when some
morning a careless stroke hits the right nail on the head, and we secure
the treasure.
It was at this time, when in the prime of youth--rich, courted,
respected, run after--that Ernest Maltravers fell seriously ill. It was
no active or visible disease, but a general irritability of the nerves,
and a languid sinking of the whole frame. His labours began, perhaps,
to tell against him. In earlier life he had been as active as a hunter
of the chamois, and the hardy exercise of his frame counteracted the
effects of a restless and ardent mind. The change from an athletic to a
sedentary habit of life--the wear and tear of the brain--the absorbing
passion for knowledge which day and night kept all his faculties in a
stretch; made strange havoc in a constitution naturally strong. The
poor author! how few persons understand; and forbear with, and pity him!
He sells his health and youth to a rugged taskmaster. And, O blind and
selfish world, you expect him to be as free of manner, and as pleasant
of cheer, and as equal of mood, as if he were passing the most agreeable
and healthful existence that pleasure could afford to smooth the
wrinkles of the mind, or medicine invent to regulate the nerves of the
body. But there was, besides all this, another cause that operated
against the successful man!--His heart was too solitary. He lived
without the sweet household ties--the connections and amities he formed
excited for a moment, but possessed no charm to comfort or to soothe.
Cleveland resided so much in the country, and was of so much calmer a
temperament, and so much more advanced in age, that, with all the
friendship that subsisted between them, there was none of that daily and
familiar interchange of confidence which affectionate natures demand as
the very food of life. Of his brother (as the reader will conjecture
from never having been formally presented to him) Ernest saw but little.
Colonel Maltravers, one of the gayest and handsomest men of his time,
married a fine lady, lived principally at Paris, except when, for a few
weeks in the shooting season, he filled his country house with
companions who had nothing in common with Ernest: the brothers
corresponded regularly every quarter, and saw each other once a
year--this was all their intercourse. Ernest Maltravers stood in the
world alone, with that cold but anxious spectre--Reputation.
It was late at night. Before a table covered with the monuments of
erudition and thought sat a young man with a pale and worn countenance.
The clock in the room told with a fretting distinctness every moment
that lessened the journey to the grave. There was an anxious and
expectant expression on the face of the student, and from time to time
he glanced to the clock, and muttered to himself. Was it a letter from
some adored mistress--the soothing flattery from some mighty arbiter of
arts and letters--that the young man eagerly awaited? No; the aspirer
was forgotten in the valetudinarian. Ernest Maltravers was waiting the
visit of his physician, whom at that late hour a sudden thought had
induced him to summon from his rest. At length the well-known knock was
heard, and in a few moments the physician entered. He was one well
versed in the peculiar pathology of book men, and kindly as well as
skilful.
"My dear Mr. Maltravers, what is this? How are we?--not seriously ill,
I hope--no relapse--pulse low and irregular, I see, but no fever. You
are nervous."
"Doctor," said the student, "I did not send for you at this time of
night from the idle fear or fretful caprice of an invalid. But when I
saw you this morning, you dropped some hints which have haunted me ever
since. Much that it befits the conscience and the soul to attend to
without loss of time depends upon my full knowledge of my real state.
If I understand you rightly, I may have but a short time to live--is it
so?"
"Indeed!" said the doctor, turning away his face; "you have exaggerated
my meaning. I did not say that you were in what we technically call
danger."
"Am I then likely to be a /long/-lived man?"
The doctor coughed--"That is uncertain, my dear young friend," said he,
after a pause.
"Be plain with me. The plans of life must be based upon such
calculations as we can reasonably form of its probable duration. Do not
fancy that I am weak enough or coward enough to shrink from any abyss
which I have approached unconsciously; I desire--I adjure--nay, I
command you to be explicit."
There was an earnest and solemn dignity in his patient's voice and
manner which deeply touched and impressed the good physician.
"I will answer you frankly," said he; "you overwork the nerves and the
brain; if you do not relax, you will subject yourself to confirmed
disease and premature death. For several months--perhaps for years to
come--you should wholly cease from literary labour. Is this a hard
sentence? You are rich and young--enjoy yourself while you can."
Maltravers appeared satisfied--changed the conversation--talked easily
on other matters for a few minutes: nor was it till he had dismissed his
physician that he broke forth with the thoughts that were burning in
him.
"Oh!" cried he aloud, as he rose and paced the room with rapid strides;
"now, when I see before me the broad and luminous path, am I to be
condemned to halt and turn aside? A vast empire rises on my view,
greater than that of Caesars and conquerors--an empire durable and
universal in the souls of men, that time itself cannot overthrow; and
Death marches with me, side by side, and the skeleton hand waves me back
to the nothingness of common men."
He paused at the casement--he threw it open, and leant forth and gasped
for air. Heaven was serene and still, as morning came coldly forth
amongst the waning stars; and the haunts of men, in their thoroughfare
of idleness and of pleasure, were desolate and void. Nothing, save
Nature, was awake.
"And if, O stars!" murmured Maltravers, from the depth of his excited
heart--"if I have been insensible to your solemn beauty--if the Heaven
and the Earth had been to me but as air and clay--if I were one of a
dull and dim-eyed herd--I might live on, and drop into the grave from
the ripeness of unprofitable years. It is because I yearn for the great
objects of an immortal being, that life shrinks and shrivels up like a
scroll. Away! I will not listen to these human and material monitors,
and consider life as a thing greater than the things that I would live
for. My choice is made, glory is more persuasive than the grave."
He turned impatiently from the casement--his eyes flashed--his chest
heaved--he trod the chamber with a monarch's air. All the calculations
of prudence, all the tame and methodical reasonings with which, from
time to time, he had sought to sober down the impetuous man into the
calm machine, faded away before the burst of awful and commanding
passions that swept over his soul. Tell a man, in the full tide of his
triumphs, that he bears death within him; and what crisis of thought can
be more startling and more terrible!
Maltravers had, as we have seen, cared little for fame, till fame had
been brought within his reach: then, with every step he took, new Alps
had arisen. Each new conjecture brought to light a new truth that
demanded enforcement or defence. Rivalry and competition chafed his
blood, and kept his faculties at their full speed. He had the generous
race-horse spirit of emulation. Ever in action, ever in progress,
cheered on by the sarcasms of foes, even more than by the applause of
friends, the desire of glory had become the habit of existence. When we
have commenced a career, what stop is there till the grave?--where is
the definite barrier of that ambition which, like the eastern bird,
seems ever on the wing, and never rests upon the earth? Our names are
not settled till our death: the ghosts of what we have done are made our
haunting monitors--our scourging avengers--if ever we cease to do, or
fall short of the younger past. Repose is oblivion; to pause is to
unravel all the web that we have woven--until the tomb closes over us,
and men, just when it is too late, strike the fair balance between
ourselves and our rivals; and we are measured, not by the least, but by
the greatest triumphs we have achieved. Oh, what a crushing sense of
impotence comes over us, when we feel that our frame cannot support our
mind--when the hand can no longer execute what the soul, actively as
ever, conceives and desires!--the quick life tied to the dead form--the
ideas fresh as immortality, gushing forth rich and golden, and the
broken nerves, and the aching frame, and the weary eyes!--the spirit
athirst for liberty and heaven--and the damning, choking consciousness
that we are walled up and prisoned in a dungeon that must be our
burial-place! Talk not of freedom--there is no such thing as freedom to
a man whose body is the gaol, whose infirmities are the racks, of his
genius!
Maltravers paused at last, and threw himself on his sofa, wearied and
exhausted. Involuntarily, and as a half unconscious means of escaping
from his conflicting and profitless emotions, he turned to several
letters, which had for hours lain unopened on his table. Every one, the
seal of which he broke, seemed to mock his state--every one seemed to
attest the felicity of his fortunes. Some bespoke the admiring sympathy
of the highest and wisest--one offered him a brilliant opening into
public life--another (it was from Cleveland) was fraught with all the
proud and rapturous approbation of a prophet whose auguries are at last
fulfilled. At that letter Maltravers sighed deeply, and paused before
he turned to the others. The last he opened was in an unknown hand, nor
was any name affixed to it. Like all writers of some note, Maltravers
was in the habit of receiving anonymous letters of praise, censure,
warning, and exhortation--especially from young ladies at boarding
schools, and old ladies in the country; but there was that in the first
sentences of the letter, which he now opened with a careless hand, that
riveted his attention. It was a small and beautiful handwriting, yet
the letters were more clear and bold than they usually are in feminine
caligraphy.
"Ernest Maltravers," began this singular effusion, "have you weighed
yourself? Are you aware of your capacities? Do you feel that for you
there may be a more dazzling reputation that that which appears to
content you? You who seem to penetrate into the subtlest windings of
the human heart, and to have examined nature as through a glass--you,
whose thoughts stand forth like armies marshalled in defence of truth,
bold and dauntless, and without a stain upon their glittering
armour;--are you, at your age, and with your advantages, to bury
yourself amidst books and scrolls? Do you forget that action is the
grand career for men who think as you do? Will this word-weighing and
picture-writing--the cold eulogies of pedants--the listless praises of
literary idlers, content all the yearnings of your ambition? You were
not made solely for the closet; 'The Dreams of Pindus, and the Aonian
Maids' cannot endure through the noon of manhood. You are too practical
for the mere poet, and too poetical to sink into the dull tenor of a
learned life. I have never seen you, yet I know you--I read your spirit
in your page; that aspiration for something better and greater than the
great and the good, which colours all your passionate revelations of
yourself and others--cannot be satisfied merely by ideal images. You
cannot be contented, as poets and historians mostly are, by becoming
great only from delineating great men, or imagining great events, or
describing a great era. Is it not worthier of you to be what you fancy
or relate? Awake, Maltravers, awake! Look into your heart, and feel
your proper destinies. And who am I that thus address you?--a woman
whose soul is filled with you--a woman in whom your eloquence has
awakened, amidst frivolous and vain circles, the sense of a new
existence--a woman who would make you, yourself, the embodied ideal of
your own thoughts and dreams, and who would ask from earth no other lot
than that of following you on the road of fame with the eyes of her
heart. Mistake me not; I repeat that I have never seen you, nor do I
wish it; you might be other than I imagine, and I should lose an idol,
and be left without a worship. I am a kind of visionary Rosicrucian: it
is a spirit that I adore, and not a being like myself. You imagine,
perhaps, that I have some purpose to serve in this--I have no object in
administering to your vanity; and if I judge you rightly, this letter is
one that might make you vain without a blush. Oh, the admiration that
does not spring from holy and profound sources of emotion--how it
saddens us or disgusts! I have had my share of vulgar homage, and it
only makes me feel doubly alone. I am richer than you are--I have
youth--I have what they call beauty. And neither riches, youth, nor
beauty ever gave me the silent and deep happiness I experience when I
think of you. This is a worship that might, I repeat, well make even
you vain. Think of these words, I implore you. Be worthy, not of my
thoughts, but of the shape in which they represent you: and every ray of
glory that surrounds you will brighten my own way, and inspire me with a
kindred emulation. Farewell.--I may write to you again, but you will
never discover me; and in life I pray that we may never meet!"