THE LIFTED VEIL
Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers beyond the growing heritage
That makes completer manhood.
CHAPTER I
The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of
_angina pectoris_; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician
tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted
many months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical
constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I
shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly
existence. If it were to be otherwise--if I were to live on to the age
most men desire and provide for--I should for once have known whether
the miseries of delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true
prevision. For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will
happen in my last moments.
Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting
in this chair, in this study, at ten o'clock at night, longing to die,
weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without
hope. Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire,
and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my
chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently,
before the sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell.
I know why. My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My
housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours
before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself.
Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little
scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does
not wake her. The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with
a horrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again.
I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown:
the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary
of it: I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation--and all the while
the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery,
the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morning through my
chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air--will
darkness close over them for ever?
Darkness--darkness--no pain--nothing but darkness: but I am passing
on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but
always with a sense of moving onward . . .
Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and
strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never
fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged
to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a
chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when
we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven--the living
only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the
rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it--it is
your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with
moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while
the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul,
can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility,
or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while
the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice,
with the yearning for brotherly recognition--make haste--oppress it
with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your
careless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by be still--"ubi
saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit"; the eye will cease to
entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have ceased from all
wants as well as from all work. Then your charitable speeches may find
vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the
failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved; then you
may find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them.
That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it? It has little
reference to me, for I shall leave no works behind me for men to
honour. I have no near relatives who will make up, by weeping over my
grave, for the wounds they inflicted on me when I was among them. It is
only the story of my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy
from strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain
from my friends while I was living.
My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by
contrast with all the after-years. For then the curtain of the future
was as impenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight
in the present hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and
I had a tender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse of long years,
a slight trace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress
as she held me on her knee--her arms round my little body, her cheek
pressed on mine. I had a complaint of the eyes that made me blind for a
little while, and she kept me on her knee from morning till night. That
unequalled love soon vanished out of my life, and even to my childish
consciousness it was as if that life had become more chill. I rode my
little white pony with the groom by my side as before, but there were
no loving eyes looking at me as I mounted, no glad arms opened to me
when I came back. Perhaps I missed my mother's love more than most
children of seven or eight would have done, to whom the other pleasures
of life remained as before; for I was certainly a very sensitive child.
I remember still the mingled trepidation and delicious excitement with
which I was affected by the tramping of the horses on the pavement
in the echoing stables, by the loud resonance of the groom's voices,
by the booming bark of the dogs as my father's carriage thundered
under the archway of the courtyard, by the din of the gong as it gave
notice of luncheon and dinner. The measured tramp of soldiery which I
sometimes heard--for my father's house lay near a county town where
there were large barracks--made me sob and tremble; and yet when they
were gone past, I longed for them to come back again.
I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for
me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a
parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was
not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-
and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely
orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft
of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those
people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are
uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high
spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive
in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps,
helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different
plan from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case
of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to
be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford,
for the sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man
to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the
attainment of an aristocratic position. But, intrinsically, he had
slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified
himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's
_AEschylus_, and dipping into Francis's _Horace_. To this negative
view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with
mining speculations; namely, that a scientific education was the really
useful training for a younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy,
sensitive boy like me was not fit to encounter the rough experience
of a public school. Mr. Letherall had said so very decidedly. Mr.
Letherall was a large man in spectacles, who one day took my small
head between his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an
exploratory, auspicious manner--then placed each of his great thumbs on
my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and stared at me with
glittering spectacles. The contemplation appeared to displease him, for
he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his thumbs across my
eyebrows--
"The deficiency is there, sir--there; and here," he added, touching the
upper sides of my head, "here is the excess. That must be brought out,
sir, and this must be laid to sleep."
I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was
the object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first
hatred--hatred of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as
if he wanted to buy and cheapen it.
I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the system
afterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently clear that private
tutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages, were the
appliances by which the defects of my organization were to be remedied.
I was very stupid about machines, so I was to be greatly occupied
with them; I had no memory for classification, so it was particularly
necessary that I should study systematic zoology and botany; I was
hungry for human deeds and humane motions, so I was to be plentifully
crammed with the mechanical powers, the elementary bodies, and the
phenomena of electricity and magnetism. A better-constituted boy
would certainly have profited under my intelligent tutors, with their
scientific apparatus; and would, doubtless, have found the phenomena
of electricity and magnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday,
assured they were. As it was, I could have paired off, for ignorance
of whatever was taught me, with the worst Latin scholar that was ever
turned out of a classical academy. I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare,
and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied myself in that way with
wandering thoughts, while my tutor was assuring me that "an improved
man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was a man who knew the
reason why water ran downhill." I had no desire to be this improved
man; I was glad of the running water; I could watch it and listen to it
gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the bright green water-plants,
by the hour together. I did not want to know _why_ it ran; I had
perfect confidence that there were good reasons for what was so very
beautiful.
There is no need to dwell on this part of my life. I have said enough
to indicate that my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order,
and that it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster
it into happy, healthy development. When I was sixteen I was sent to
Geneva to complete my course of education; and the change was a very
happy one to me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting
sun on them, as we descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance
into heaven; and the three years of my life there were spent in a
perpetual sense of exaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine,
at the presence of Nature in all her awful loveliness. You will think,
perhaps, that I must have been a poet, from this early sensibility to
Nature. But my lot was not so happy as that. A poet pours forth his
song and _believes_ in the listening ear and answering soul, to which
his song will be floated sooner or later. But the poet's sensibility
without his voice--the poet's sensibility that finds no vent but in
silent tears on the sunny bank, when the noonday light sparkles on the
water, or in an inward shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the
sight of a cold human eye--this dumb passion brings with it a fatal
solitude of soul in the society of one's fellow-men. My least solitary
moments were those in which I pushed off in my boat, at evening,
towards the centre of the lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the
glowing mountain-tops, and the wide blue water, surrounded me with a
cherishing love such as no human face had shed on me since my mother's
love had vanished out of my life. I used to do as Jean Jacques did--lie
down in my boat and let it glide where it would, while I looked up at
the departing glow leaving one mountain-top after the other, as if the
prophet's chariot of fire were passing over them on its way to the home
of light. Then, when the white summits were all sad and corpse-like,
I had to push homeward, for I was under careful surveillance, and was
allowed no late wanderings. This disposition of mine was not favourable
to the formation of intimate friendships among the numerous youths of
my own age who are always to be found studying at Geneva. Yet I made
_one_ such friendship; and, singularly enough, it was with a youth
whose intellectual tendencies were the very reverse of my own. I shall
call him Charles Meunier; his real surname--an English one, for he
was of English extraction--having since become celebrated. He was an
orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance while he pursued the medical
studies for which he had a special genius. Strange! that with my vague
mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating inquiry and given up to
contemplation, I should have been drawn towards a youth whose strongest
passion was science. But the bond was not an intellectual one; it came
from a source that can happily blend the stupid with the brilliant, the
dreamy with the practical: it came from community of feeling. Charles
was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese _gamins_, and not acceptable
in drawing-rooms. I saw that he was isolated, as I was, though from a
different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic resentment, I made
timid advances towards him. It is enough to say that there sprang up
as much comradeship between us as our different habits would allow;
and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Saleve together, or
took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to the monologues
in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future experiment and
discovery. I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of
blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and
the distant glitter of the glacier. He knew quite well that my mind
was half absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we
talk of our hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they
love us? I have mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion
with a strange and terrible scene which I shall have to narrate in my
subsequent life.
This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness,
which is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered
suffering, with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time.
Then came the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually
breaking into variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to
take longer and longer drives. On one of these more vividly remembered
days, my father said to me, as he sat beside my sofa--
"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you
home with me. The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall
go through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places. Our
neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and
we shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague" . . .
My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and
he left my mind resting on the word _Prague_, with a strange sense
that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the
broad sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine
of a long-past century arrested in its course--unrefreshed for ages
by dews of night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty,
weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale
repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their
regal gold-inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad
river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I
passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their
ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real
inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men
and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants
infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I
thought, who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned
time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their
court in the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its
monotonous length on the height; who worship wearily in the stifling
air of the churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their
doom to be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit,
as they live on in perpetual midday, without the repose of night or the
new birth of morning.
A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became
conscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire-irons had
fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught. My heart was
palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my draught beside
me; I would take it presently.
As soon as I was alone again, I began to ask myself whether I had been
sleeping. Was this a dream--this wonderfully distinct vision--minute
in its distinctness down to a patch of rainbow light on the pavement,
transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star--of a
strange city, quite unfamiliar to my imagination? I had seen no picture
of Prague: it lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguely-remembered
historical associations--ill-defined memories of imperial grandeur and
religious wars.
Nothing of this sort had ever occurred in my dreaming experience
before, for I had often been humiliated because my dreams were only
saved from being utterly disjointed and commonplace by the frequent
terrors of nightmare. But I could not believe that I had been asleep,
for I remembered distinctly the gradual breaking-in of the vision
upon me, like the new images in a dissolving view, or the growing
distinctness of the landscape as the sun lifts up the veil of the
morning mist. And while I was conscious of this incipient vision, I
was also conscious that Pierre came to tell my father Mr. Filmore was
waiting for him, and that my father hurried out of the room. No, it was
not a dream; was it--the thought was full of tremulous exultation--was
it the poet's nature in me, hitherto only a troubled yearning
sensibility, now manifesting itself suddenly as spontaneous creation?
Surely it was in this way that Homer saw the plain of Troy, that Dante
saw the abodes of the departed, that Milton saw the earthward flight of
the Tempter. Was it that my illness had wrought some happy change in
my organization--given a firmer tension to my nerves--carried off some
dull obstruction? I had often read of such effects--in works of fiction
at least. Nay; in genuine biographies I had read of the subtilizing
or exalting influence of some diseases on the mental powers. Did
not Novalis feel his inspiration intensified under the progress of
consumption?
When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea, it seemed
to me that I might perhaps test it by an exertion of my will. The
vision had begun when my father was speaking of our going to Prague.
I did not for a moment believe it was really a representation of that
city; I believed--I hoped it was a picture that my newly liberated
genius had painted in fiery haste, with the colours snatched from lazy
memory. Suppose I were to fix my mind on some other place--Venice, for
example, which was far more familiar to my imagination than Prague:
perhaps the same sort of result would follow. I concentrated my
thoughts on Venice; I stimulated my imagination with poetic memories,
and strove to feel myself present in Venice, as I had felt myself
present in Prague. But in vain. I was only colouring the Canaletto
engravings that hung in my old bedroom at home; the picture was a
shifting one, my mind wandering uncertainly in search of more vivid
images; I could see no accident of form or shadow without conscious
labour after the necessary conditions. It was all prosaic effort, not
rapt passivity, such as I had experienced half an hour before. I was
discouraged; but I remembered that inspiration was fitful.
For several days I was in a state of excited expectation, watching for
a recurrence of my new gift. I sent my thoughts ranging over my world
of knowledge, in the hope that they would find some object which would
send a reawakening vibration through my slumbering genius. But no; my
world remained as dim as ever, and that flash of strange light refused
to come again, though I watched for it with palpitating eagerness.
My father accompanied me every day in a drive, and a gradually
lengthening walk as my powers of walking increased; and one evening he
had agreed to come and fetch me at twelve the next day, that we might
go together to select a musical box, and other purchases rigorously
demanded of a rich Englishman visiting Geneva. He was one of the most
punctual of men and bankers, and I was always nervously anxious to be
quite ready for him at the appointed time. But, to my surprise, at a
quarter past twelve he had not appeared. I felt all the impatience of a
convalescent who has nothing particular to do, and who has just taken
a tonic in the prospect of immediate exercise that would carry off the
stimulus.
Unable to sit still and reserve my strength, I walked up and down the
room, looking out on the current of the Rhone, just where it leaves the
dark-blue lake; but thinking all the while of the possible causes that
could detain my father.
Suddenly I was conscious that my father was in the room, but not alone:
there were two persons with him. Strange! I had heard no footstep, I
had not seen the door open; but I saw my father, and at his right hand
our neighbour Mrs. Filmore, whom I remembered very well, though I had
not seen her for five years. She was a commonplace middle-aged woman,
in silk and cashmere; but the lady on the left of my father was not
more than twenty, a tall, slim, willowy figure, with luxuriant blond
hair, arranged in cunning braids and folds that looked almost too
massive for the slight figure and the small-featured, thin-lipped face
they crowned. But the face had not a girlish expression: the features
were sharp, the pale grey eyes at once acute, restless, and sarcastic.
They were fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity, and I felt a painful
sensation as if a sharp wind were cutting me. The pale-green dress,
and the green leaves that seemed to form a border about her pale blond
hair, made me think of a Water-Nixie--for my mind was full of German
lyrics, and this pale, fatal-eyed woman, with the green weeds, looked
like a birth from some cold sedgy stream, the daughter of an aged river.
"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .
But while the last word was in my ears, the whole group vanished, and
there was nothing between me and the Chinese printed folding-screen
that stood before the door. I was cold and trembling; I could only
totter forward and throw myself on the sofa. This strange new power had
manifested itself again . . . But _was_ it a power? Might it not rather
be a disease--a sort of intermittent delirium, concentrating my energy
of brain into moments of unhealthy activity, and leaving my saner hours
all the more barren? I felt a dizzy sense of unreality in what my eye
rested on; I grasped the bell convulsively, like one trying to free
himself from nightmare, and rang it twice. Pierre came with a look of
alarm in his face.
"Monsieur ne se trouve pas bien?" he said anxiously.
"I'm tired of waiting, Pierre," I said, as distinctly and emphatically
as I could, like a man determined to be sober in spite of wine; "I'm
afraid something has happened to my father--he's usually so punctual.
Run to the Hotel des Bergues and see if he is there."
Pierre left the room at once, with a soothing "Bien, Monsieur"; and I
felt the better for this scene of simple, waking prose. Seeking to calm
myself still further, I went into my bedroom, adjoining the _salon_,
and opened a case of eau-de-Cologne; took out a bottle; went through
the process of taking out the cork very neatly, and then rubbed the
reviving spirit over my hands and forehead, and under my nostrils,
drawing a new delight from the scent because I had procured it by slow
details of labour, and by no strange sudden madness. Already I had
begun to taste something of the horror that belongs to the lot of a
human being whose nature is not adjusted to simple human conditions.
Still enjoying the scent, I returned to the salon, but it was not
unoccupied, as it had been before I left it. In front of the Chinese
folding-screen there was my father, with Mrs. Filmore on his right
hand, and on his left--the slim, blond-haired girl, with the keen face
and the keen eyes fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity.
"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .
I heard no more, felt no more, till I became conscious that I was lying
with my head low on the sofa, Pierre, and my father by my side. As soon
as I was thoroughly revived, my father left the room, and presently
returned, saying--
"I've been to tell the ladies how you are, Latimer. They were waiting
in the next room. We shall put off our shopping expedition to-day."
Presently he said, "That young lady is Bertha Grant, Mrs. Filmore's
orphan niece. Filmore has adopted her, and she lives with them, so
you will have her for a neighbour when we go home--perhaps for a near
relation; for there is a tenderness between her and Alfred, I suspect,
and I should be gratified by the match, since Filmore means to provide
for her in every way as if she were his daughter. It had not occurred
to me that you knew nothing about her living with the Filmores."
He made no further allusion to the fact of my having fainted at the
moment of seeing her, and I would not for the world have told him the
reason: I shrank from the idea of disclosing to any one what might be
regarded as a pitiable peculiarity, most of all from betraying it to my
father, who would have suspected my sanity ever after.
I do not mean to dwell with particularity on the details of my
experience. I have described these two cases at length, because they
had definite, clearly traceable results in my after-lot.
Shortly after this last occurrence--I think the very next day--I began
to be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from
the languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my
illness, I had not been alive before. This was the obtrusion on my
mind of the mental process going forward in first one person, and
then another, with whom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant,
frivolous ideas and emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance--Mrs.
Filmore, for example--would force themselves on my consciousness like
an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity
of an imprisoned insect. But this unpleasant sensibility was fitful,
and left me moments of rest, when the souls of my companions were once
more shut out from me, and I felt a relief such as silence brings to
wearied nerves. I might have believed this importunate insight to be
merely a diseased activity of the imagination, but that my prevision of
incalculable words and actions proved it to have a fixed relation to
the mental process in other minds. But this superadded consciousness,
wearying and annoying enough when it urged on me the trivial experience
of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief when it seemed
to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation to
me--when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned
phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their
characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision,
that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed
egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague
capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human
words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.
At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome,
self-confident man of six-and-twenty--a thorough contrast to my
fragile, nervous, ineffectual self. I believe I was held to have a sort
of half-womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters,
who are thick as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them,
and I had been the model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture. But
I thoroughly disliked my own physique and nothing but the belief that
it was a condition of poetic genius would have reconciled me to it.
That brief hope was quite fled, and I saw in my face now nothing but
the stamp of a morbid organization, framed for passive suffering--too
feeble for the sublime resistance of poetic production. Alfred, from
whom I had been almost constantly separated, and who, in his present
stage of character and appearance, came before me as a perfect
stranger, was bent on being extremely friendly and brother-like to me.
He had the superficial kindness of a good-humoured, self-satisfied
nature, that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.
I am not sure that my disposition was good enough for me to have been
quite free from envy towards him, even if our desires had not clashed,
and if I had been in the healthy human condition which admits of
generous confidence and charitable construction. There must always have
been an antipathy between our natures. As it was, he became in a few
weeks an object of intense hatred to me; and when he entered the room,
still more when he spoke, it was as if a sensation of grating metal had
set my teeth on edge. My diseased consciousness was more intensely and
continually occupied with his thoughts and emotions, than with those of
any other person who came in my way. I was perpetually exasperated with
the petty promptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with
his self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant's passion for him, with his
half-pitying contempt for me--seen not in the ordinary indications of
intonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspicious
mind is on the watch for, but in all their naked skinless complication.
For we were rivals, and our desires clashed, though he was not aware
of it. I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha Grant produced in
me on a nearer acquaintance. That effect was chiefly determined by
the fact that she made the only exception, among all the human beings
about me, to my unhappy gift of insight. About Bertha I was always
in a state of uncertainty: I could watch the expression of her face,
and speculate on its meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the
real interest of ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch
for her smile with hope and fear: she had for me the fascination of
an unravelled destiny. I say it was this fact that chiefly determined
the strong effect she produced on me: for, in the abstract, no womanly
character could seem to have less affinity for that of a shrinking,
romantic, passionate youth than Bertha's. She was keen, sarcastic,
unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining critical and unmoved
in the most impressive scenes, inclined to dissect all my favourite
poems, and especially contemptous towards the German lyrics which
were my pet literature at that time. To this moment I am unable to
define my feeling towards her: it was not ordinary boyish admiration,
for she was the very opposite, even to the colour of her hair, of the
ideal woman who still remained to me the type of loveliness; and she
was without that enthusiasm for the great and good, which, even at
the moment of her strongest dominion over me, I should have declared
to be the highest element of character. But there is no tyranny more
complete than that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over
a morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support.
The most independent people feel the effect of a man's silence in
heightening their value for his opinion--feel an additional triumph in
conquering the reverence of a critic habitually captious and satirical:
no wonder, then, that an enthusiastic self-distrusting youth should
watch and wait before the closed secret of a sarcastic woman's face, as
if it were the shrine of the doubtfully benignant deity who ruled his
destiny. For a young enthusiast is unable to imagine the total negation
in another mind of the emotions which are stirring his own: they may
be feeble, latent, inactive, he thinks, but they are there--they may
be called forth; sometimes, in moments of happy hallucination, he
believes they may be there in all the greater strength because he sees
no outward sign of them. And this effect, as I have intimated, was
heightened to its utmost intensity in me, because Bertha was the only
being who remained for me in the mysterious seclusion of soul that
renders such youthful delusion possible. Doubtless there was another
sort of fascination at work--that subtle physical attraction which
delights in cheating our psychological predictions, and in compelling
the men who paint sylphs, to fall in love with some _bonne et brave
femme_, heavy-heeled and freckled.
Bertha's behaviour towards me was such as to encourage all my
illusions, to heighten my boyish passion, and make me more and more
dependent on her smiles. Looking back with my present wretched
knowledge, I conclude that her vanity and love of power were intensely
gratified by the belief that I had fainted on first seeing her purely
from the strong impression her person had produced on me. The most
prosaic woman likes to believe herself the object of a violent, a
poetic passion; and without a grain of romance in her, Bertha had that
spirit of intrigue which gave piquancy to the idea that the brother of
the man she meant to marry was dying with love and jealousy for her
sake. That she meant to marry my brother, was what at that time I did
not believe; for though he was assiduous in his attentions to her, and
I knew well enough that both he and my father had made up their minds
to this result, there was not yet an understood engagement--there had
been no explicit declaration; and Bertha habitually, while she flirted
with my brother, and accepted his homage in a way that implied to him a
thorough recognition of its intention, made me believe, by the subtlest
looks and phrases--feminine nothings which could never be quoted
against her--that he was really the object of her secret ridicule; that
she thought him, as I did, a coxcomb, whom she would have pleasure
in disappointing. Me she openly petted in my brother's presence, as
if I were too young and sickly ever to be thought of as a lover; and
that was the view he took of me. But I believe she must inwardly have
delighted in the tremors into which she threw me by the coaxing way in
which she patted my curls, while she laughed at my quotations. Such
caresses were always given in the presence of our friends; for when we
were alone together, she affected a much greater distance towards me,
and now and then took the opportunity, by words or slight actions, to
stimulate my foolish timid hope that she really preferred me. And why
should she not follow her inclination? I was not in so advantageous a
position as my brother, but I had fortune, I was not a year younger
than she was, and she was an heiress, who would soon be of age to
decide for herself.
The fluctuations of hope and fear, confined to this one channel, made
each day in her presence a delicious torment. There was one deliberate
act of hers which especially helped to intoxicate me. When we were at
Vienna her twentieth birthday occurred, and as she was very fond of
ornaments, we all took the opportunity of the splendid jewellers' shops
in that Teutonic Paris to purchase her a birthday present of jewellery.
Mine, naturally, was the least expensive; it was an opal ring--the opal
was my favourite stone, because it seems to blush and turn pale as if
it had a soul. I told Bertha so when I gave it her, and said that it
was an emblem of the poetic nature, changing with the changing light
of heaven and of woman's eyes. In the evening she appeared elegantly
dressed, and wearing conspicuously all the birthday presents except
mine. I looked eagerly at her fingers, but saw no opal. I had no
opportunity of noticing this to her during the evening; but the next
day, when I found her seated near the window alone, after breakfast,
I said, "You scorn to wear my poor opal. I should have remembered
that you despised poetic natures, and should have given you coral, or
turquoise, or some other opaque unresponsive stone." "Do I despise it?"
she answered, taking hold of a delicate gold chain which she always
wore round her neck and drawing out the end from her bosom with my ring
hanging to it; "it hurts me a little, I can tell you," she said, with
her usual dubious smile, "to wear it in that secret place; and since
your poetical nature is so stupid as to prefer a more public position,
I shall not endure the pain any longer."
She took off the ring from the chain and put it on her finger, smiling
still, while the blood rushed to my cheeks, and I could not trust
myself to say a word of entreaty that she would keep the ring where it
was before.
I was completely fooled by this, and for two days shut myself up in my
own room whenever Bertha was absent, that I might intoxicate myself
afresh with the thought of this scene and all it implied.
I should mention that during these two months--which seemed a long
life to me from the novelty and intensity of the pleasures and pains
I underwent--my diseased anticipation in other people's consciousness
continued to torment me; now it was my father, and now my brother,
now Mrs. Filmore or her husband, and now our German courier, whose
stream of thought rushed upon me like a ringing in the ears not to be
got rid of, though it allowed my own impulses and ideas to continue
their uninterrupted course. It was like a preternaturally heightened
sense of hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others
find perfect stillness. The weariness and disgust of this involuntary
intrusion into other souls was counteracted only by my ignorance
of Bertha, and my growing passion for her; a passion enormously
stimulated, if not produced, by that ignorance. She was my oasis of
mystery in the dreary desert of knowledge. I had never allowed my
diseased condition to betray itself, or to drive me into any unusual
speech or action, except once, when, in a moment of peculiar bitterness
against my brother, I had forestalled some words which I knew he was
going to utter--a clever observation, which he had prepared beforehand.
He had occasionally a slightly affected hesitation in his speech,
and when he paused an instant after the second word, my impatience
and jealousy impelled me to continue the speech for him, as if it
were something we had both learned by rote. He coloured and looked
astonished, as well as annoyed; and the words had no sooner escaped
my lips than I felt a shock of alarm lest such an anticipation of
words--very far from being words of course, easy to divine--should
have betrayed me as an exceptional being, a sort of quiet energumen,
whom every one, Bertha above all, would shudder at and avoid. But I
magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could
produce on others; for no one gave any sign of having noticed my
interruption as more than a rudeness, to be forgiven me on the score of
my feeble nervous condition.
While this superadded consciousness of the actual was almost constant
with me, I had never had a recurrence of that distinct prevision which
I have described in relation to my first interview with Bertha; and I
was waiting with eager curiosity to know whether or not my vision of
Prague would prove to have been an instance of the same kind. A few
days after the incident of the opal ring, we were paying one of our
frequent visits to the Lichtenberg Palace. I could never look at many
pictures in succession; for pictures, when they are at all powerful,
affect me so strongly that one or two exhaust all my capability of
contemplation. This morning I had been looking at Giorgione's picture
of the cruel-eyed woman, said to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia. I
had stood long alone before it, fascinated by the terrible reality
of that cunning, relentless face, till I felt a strange poisoned
sensation, as if I had long been inhaling a fatal odour, and was just
beginning to be conscious of its effects. Perhaps even then I should
not have moved away, if the rest of the party had not returned to this
room, and announced that they were going to the Belvedere Gallery to
settle a bet which had arisen between my brother and Mr. Filmore about
a portrait. I followed them dreamily, and was hardly alive to what
occurred till they had all gone up to the gallery, leaving me below;
for I refused to come within sight of another picture that day. I made
my way to the Grand Terrace, since it was agreed that we should saunter
in the gardens when the dispute had been decided. I had been sitting
here a short space, vaguely conscious of trim gardens, with a city and
green hills in the distance, when, wishing to avoid the proximity of
the sentinel, I rose and walked down the broad stone steps, intending
to seat myself farther on in the gardens. Just as I reached the
gravel-walk, I felt an arm slipped within mine, and a light hand gently
pressing my wrist. In the same instant a strange intoxicating numbness
passed over me, like the continuance or climax of the sensation I was
still feeling from the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia. The gardens, the summer
sky, the consciousness of Bertha's arm being within mine, all vanished,
and I seemed to be suddenly in darkness, out of which there gradually
broke a dim firelight, and I felt myself sitting in my father's leather
chair in the library at home. I knew the fireplace--the dogs for
the wood-fire--the black marble chimney-piece with the white marble
medallion of the dying Cleopatra in the centre. Intense and hopeless
misery was pressing on my soul; the light became stronger, for Bertha
was entering with a candle in her hand--Bertha, my wife--with cruel
eyes, with green jewels and green leaves on her white ball-dress; every
hateful thought within her present to me . . . "Madman, idiot! why
don't you kill yourself, then?" It was a moment of hell. I saw into
her pitiless soul--saw its barren worldliness, its scorching hate--and
felt it clothe me round like an air I was obliged to breathe. She came
with her candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt;
I saw the great emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded serpent with
diamond eyes. I shuddered--I despised this woman with the barren soul
and mean thoughts; but I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched
my bleeding heart, and would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood
ebbed away. She was my wife, and we hated each other. Gradually the
hearth, the dim library, the candle-light disappeared--seemed to melt
away into a background of light, the green serpent with the diamond
eyes remaining a dark image on the retina. Then I had a sense of my
eyelids quivering, and the living daylight broke in upon me; I saw
gardens, and heard voices; I was seated on the steps of the Belvedere
Terrace, and my friends were round me.
The tumult of mind into which I was thrown by this hideous vision made
me ill for several days, and prolonged our stay at Vienna. I shuddered
with horror as the scene recurred to me; and it recurred constantly,
with all its minutiae, as if they had been burnt into my memory; and
yet, such is the madness of the human heart under the influence of
its immediate desires, I felt a wild hell-braving joy that Bertha was
to be mine; for the fulfilment of my former prevision concerning her
first appearance before me, left me little hope that this last hideous
glimpse of the future was the mere diseased play of my own mind, and
had no relation to external realities. One thing alone I looked towards
as a possible means of casting doubt on my terrible conviction--the
discovery that my vision of Prague had been false--and Prague was the
next city on our route.
Meanwhile, I was no sooner in Bertha's society again than I was as
completely under her sway as before. What if I saw into the heart of
Bertha, the matured woman--Bertha, my wife? Bertha, the _girl_, was
a fascinating secret to me still: I trembled under her touch; I felt
the witchery of her presence; I yearned to be assured of her love.
The fear of poison is feeble against the sense of thirst. Nay, I was
just as jealous of my brother as before--just as much irritated by his
small patronizing ways; for my pride, my diseased sensibility, were
there as they had always been, and winced as inevitably under every
offence as my eye winced from an intruding mote. The future, even when
brought within the compass of feeling by a vision that made me shudder,
had still no more than the force of an idea, compared with the force
of present emotion--of my love for Bertha, of my dislike and jealousy
towards my brother.
It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a
bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant
day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an
impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them
for evermore. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom:
after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through
the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with
bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old
time.
My mind speculated eagerly on the means by which I should become my
brother's successful rival, for I was still too timid, in my ignorance
of Bertha's actual feeling, to venture on any step that would urge
from her an avowal of it. I thought I should gain confidence even for
this, if my vision of Prague proved to have been veracious; and yet,
the horror of that certitude! Behind the slim girl Bertha, whose words
and looks I watched for, whose touch was bliss, there stood continually
that Bertha with the fuller form, the harder eyes, the more rigid
mouth--with the barren, selfish soul laid bare; no longer a fascinating
secret, but a measured fact, urging itself perpetually on my unwilling
sight. Are you unable to give me your sympathy--you who read this? Are
you unable to imagine this double consciousness at work within me,
flowing on like two parallel streams which never mingle their waters
and blend into a common hue? Yet you must have known something of the
presentiments that spring from an insight at war with passion; and my
visions were only like presentiments intensified to horror. You have
known the powerlessness of ideas before the might of impulse; and my
visions, when once they had passed into memory, were mere ideas--pale
shadows that beckoned in vain, while my hand was grasped by the living
and the loved.
In after-days I thought with bitter regret that if I had foreseen
something more or something different--if instead of that hideous
vision which poisoned the passion it could not destroy, or if even
along with it I could have had a foreshadowing of that moment when I
looked on my brother's face for the last time, some softening influence
would have been shed over my feeling towards him: pride and hatred
would surely have been subdued into pity, and the record of those
hidden sins would have been shortened. But this is one of the vain
thoughts with which we men flatter ourselves. We try to believe that
the egoism within us would have easily been melted, and that it was
only the narrowness of our knowledge which hemmed in our generosity,
our awe, our human piety, and hindered them from submerging our hard
indifference to the sensations and emotions of our fellows. Our
tenderness and self-renunciation seem strong when our egoism has had
its day--when, after our mean striving for a triumph that is to be
another's loss, the triumph comes suddenly, and we shudder at it,
because it is held out by the chill hand of death.