THE POWER OF LOVE OVER THE RESOLUTION OF THE STUDENT.--ARAM
BECOMES A FREQUENT GUEST AT THE MANOR-HOUSE.--A WALK.--
CONVERSATION WITH DAME DARKMANS.--HER HISTORY.--POVERTY AND
ITS EFFECTS.
MAD. “Then, as Time won thee frequent to our hearth,
Didst thou not breathe, like dreams, into my soul
Nature’s more gentle secrets, the sweet lore
Of the green herb and the bee-worshipp’d flower?
And when deep Night did o’er the nether Earth
Diffuse meek quiet, and the Heart of Heaven
With love grew breathless--didst thou not unrol
The volume of the weird chaldean stars,
And of the winds, the clouds, the invisible air,
Make eloquent discourse, until, methought,
No human lip, but some diviner spirit
Alone, could preach such truths of things divine?
And so--and so--”
ARAM. “From Heaven we turned to Earth,
And Wisdom fathered Passion.”
..................
ARAM. “Wise men have praised the Peasant’s thoughtless lot,
And learned Pride hath envied humble Toil;
If they were right, why let us burn our books,
And sit us down, and play the fool with Time,
Mocking the prophet Wisdom’s high decrees,
And walling this trite Present with dark clouds,
‘Till Night becomes our Nature; and the ray
Ev’n of the stars, but meteors that withdraw
The wandering spirit from the sluggish rest
Which makes its proper bliss. I will accost
This denizen of toil.”
--From Eugene Aram, a MS. Tragedy.
“A wicked hag, and envy’s self excelling
In mischiefe, for herself she only vext,
But this same, both herself and others eke perplext.”
...............
“Who then can strive with strong necessity,
That holds the world in his still changing state,
.................
Then do no further go, no further stray,
But here lie down, and to thy rest betake.”
--Spenser.
Few men perhaps could boast of so masculine and firm a mind, as, despite
his eccentricities, Aram assuredly possessed. His habits of solitude
had strengthened its natural hardihood; for, accustomed to make all the
sources of happiness flow solely from himself, his thoughts the only
companion--his genius the only vivifier--of his retreat; the tone and
faculty of his spirit could not but assume that austere and vigorous
energy which the habit of self-dependence almost invariably produces;
and yet, the reader, if he be young, will scarcely feel surprise that
the resolution of the Student, to battle against incipient love, from
whatever reasons it might be formed, gradually and reluctantly melted
away. It may be noted, that the enthusiasts of learning and reverie
have, at one time or another in their lives, been, of all the tribes
of men, the most keenly susceptible to love; their solitude feeds their
passion; and deprived, as they usually are, of the more hurried and
vehement occupations of life, when love is once admitted to their
hearts, there is no counter-check to its emotions, and no escape from
its excitation. Aram, too, had just arrived at that age when a man
usually feels a sort of revulsion in the current of his desires. At
that age, those who have hitherto pursued love, begin to grow alive to
ambition; those who have been slaves to the pleasures of life, awaken
from the dream, and direct their desire to its interests. And in the
same proportion, they who till then have wasted the prodigal fervours
of youth upon a sterile soil; who have served Ambition, or, like Aram,
devoted their hearts to Wisdom; relax from their ardour, look back on
the departed years with regret, and commence, in their manhood, the
fiery pleasures and delirious follies which are only pardonable in
youth. In short, as in every human pursuit there is a certain
vanity, and as every acquisition contains within itself the seed of
disappointment, so there is a period of life when we pause from the
pursuit, and are discontented with the acquisition. We then look around
us for something new--again follow--and are again deceived. Few men
throughout life are the servants to one desire. When we gain the middle
of the bridge of our mortality, different objects from those which
attracted us upward almost invariably lure us to the descent. Happy
they who exhaust in the former part of the journey all the foibles of
existence! But how different is the crude and evanescent love of that
age when thought has not given intensity and power to the passions,
from the love which is felt, for the first time, in maturer but still
youthful years! As the flame burns the brighter in proportion to the
resistance which it conquers, this later love is the more glowing in
proportion to the length of time in which it has overcome temptation:
all the solid and, concentred faculties ripened to their full height,
are no longer capable of the infinite distractions, the numberless
caprices of youth; the rays of the heart, not rendered weak by
diversion, collect into one burning focus;
[Love is of the nature of a burning glass, which kept
still in one place, fireth; changed often it doth nothing!”
--Letters by Sir John Suckling.]
the same earnestness and unity of purpose which render what we undertake
in manhood so far more successful than what we would effect in youth,
are equally visible and equally triumphant, whether directed to interest
or to love. But then, as in Aram, the feelings must be fresh as well as
matured; they must not have been frittered away by previous indulgence;
the love must be the first produce of the soil, not the languid
after-growth.
The reader will remark, that the first time in which our narrative has
brought Madeline and Aram together, was not the first time they had met;
Aram had long noted with admiration a beauty which he had never seen
paralleled, and certain vague and unsettled feelings had preluded the
deeper emotion that her image now excited within him. But the main cause
of his present and growing attachment, had been in the evident sentiment
of kindness which he could not but feel Madeline bore towards him. So
retiring a nature as his, might never have harboured love, if the love
bore the character of presumption; but that one so beautiful beyond
his dreams as Madeline Lester, should deign to exercise towards him a
tenderness, that might suffer him to hope, was a thought, that when he
caught her eye unconsciously fixed upon him, and noted that her voice
grew softer and more tremulous when she addressed him, forced itself
upon his heart, and woke there a strange and irresistible emotion,
which solitude and the brooding reflection that solitude produces--a
reflection so much more intense in proportion to the paucity of living
images it dwells upon--soon ripened into love. Perhaps even, he would
not have resisted the impulse as he now did, had not at this time
certain thoughts connected with past events, been more forcibly than
of late years obtruded upon him, and thus in some measure divided his
heart. By degrees, however, those thoughts receded from their vividness,
into the habitual deep, but not oblivious, shade beneath which his
commanding mind had formerly driven them to repose; and as they thus
receded, Madeline’s image grew more undisturbedly present, and his
resolution to avoid its power more fluctuating and feeble. Fate seemed
bent upon bringing together these two persons, already so attracted
towards each other. After the conversation recorded in our last chapter,
between Walter and the Student, the former, touched and softened as we
have seen, in spite of himself, had cheerfully forborne (what before
he had done reluctantly) the expressions of dislike which he had once
lavished so profusely upon Aram; and Lester, who, forward as he had
seemed, had nevertheless been hitherto a little checked in his advances
to his neighbour by the hostility of his son, now felt no scruple
to deter him from urging them with a pertinacity that almost forbade
refusal. It was Aram’s constant habit, in all seasons, to wander abroad
at certain times of the day, especially towards the evening; and if
Lester failed to win entrance to his house, he was thus enabled to meet
the Student in his frequent rambles, and with a seeming freedom from
design. Actuated by his great benevolence of character, Lester earnestly
desired to win his solitary and unfriended neighbour from a mood and
habit which he naturally imagined must engender a growing melancholy
of mind; and since Walter had detailed to him the particulars of his
meeting with Aram, this desire had been considerably increased. There is
not perhaps a stronger feeling in the world than pity, when united
with admiration. When one man is resolved to know another, it is almost
impossible to prevent him: we see daily the most remarkable instances of
perseverance on one side conquering distaste on the other. By degrees,
then, Aram relaxed from his insociability; he seemed to surrender
himself to a kindness, the sincerity of which he was compelled to
acknowledge; if he for a long time refused to accept the hospitality
of his neighbour, he did not reject his society when they met, and
this intercourse by little and little progressed, until ultimately
the recluse yielded to solicitation, and became the guest as well
as companion. This, at first accident, grew, though not without many
interruptions, into habit; and at length few evenings were passed by the
inmates of the Manor-house without the society of the Student. As his
reserve wore off, his conversation mingled with its attractions a tender
and affectionate tone. He seemed grateful for the pains which had been
taken to allure him to a scene in which, at last, he acknowledged he
found a happiness that he never experienced before: and those who had
hitherto admired him for his genius, admired him now yet more for his
susceptibility to the affections.
There was not in Aram any thing that savoured of the harshness of
pedantry, or the petty vanities of dogmatism: his voice was soft and
low, and his manner always remarkable for its singular gentleness, and a
certain dignified humility. His language did indeed, at times, assume
a tone of calm and patriarchal command; but it was only the command
arising from an intimate persuasion of the truth of what he uttered.
Moralizing upon our nature, or mourning over the delusions of the world,
a grave and solemn strain breathed throughout his lofty words and
the profound melancholy of his wisdom; but it touched, not
offended--elevated, not humbled--the lesser intellect of his listeners;
and even this air of unconscious superiority vanished when he was
invited to teach or explain. That task which so few do gracefully, that
an accurate and shrewd thinker has said: “It is always safe to learn,
even from our enemies; seldom safe to instruct even our friends,” [Note:
Lacon.] Aram performed with a meekness and simplicity that charmed the
vanity, even while it corrected the ignorance, of the applicant; and so
various and minute was the information of this accomplished man, that
there scarcely existed any branch even of that knowledge usually called
practical, to which he could not impart from his stores something
valuable and new. The agriculturist was astonished at the success of his
suggestions; and the mechanic was indebted to him for the device which
abridged his labour in improving its result.
It happened that the study of botany was not, at that day, so favourite
and common a diversion with young ladies as it is now, and Ellinor,
captivated by the notion of a science that gave a life and a history
to the loveliest of earth’s offspring, besought Aram to teach her its
principles.
As Madeline, though she did not second the request, could scarcely
absent herself from sharing the lesson, this pursuit brought the
pair--already lovers--closer and closer together. It associated them not
only at home, but in their rambles throughout that enchanting country;
and there is a mysterious influence in Nature, which renders us, in her
loveliest scenes, the most susceptible to love! Then, too, how often in
their occupation their hands and eyes met:--how often, by the shady wood
or the soft water-side, they found themselves alone. In all times, how
dangerous the connexion, when of different sexes, between the scholar
and the teacher! Under how many pretences, in that connexion, the heart
finds the opportunity to speak out.
Yet it was not with ease and complacency that Aram delivered himself
to the intoxication of his deepening attachment. Sometimes he was
studiously cold, or evidently wrestling with the powerful passion that
mastered his reason. It was not without many throes, and desperate
resistance, that love at length overwhelmed and subdued him; and these
alternations of his mood, if they sometimes offended Madeline and
sometimes wounded, still rather increased than lessened the spell which
bound her to him. The doubt and the fear--the caprice and the change,
which agitate the surface, swell also the tides, of passion. Woman,
too, whose love is so much the creature of her imagination, always asks
something of mystery and conjecture in the object of her affection. It
is a luxury to her to perplex herself with a thousand apprehensions;
and the more restlessly her lover occupies her mind, the more deeply he
enthrals it.
Mingling with her pure and tender attachment to Aram, a high and
unswerving veneration, she saw in his fitfulness, and occasional
abstraction and contradiction of manner, a confirmation of the modest
sentiment that most weighed upon her fears; and imagined that at those
times he thought her, as she deemed herself, unworthy of his love.
And this was the only struggle which she conceived to pass between
the affection he evidently bore her, and the feelings which had as yet
restrained him from its open avowal.
One evening, Lester and the two sisters were walking with the Student
along the valley that led to the house of the latter, when they saw an
old woman engaged in collecting firewood among the bushes, and a little
girl holding out her apron to receive the sticks with which the crone’s
skinny arms unsparingly filled it. The child trembled, and seemed
half-crying; while the old woman, in a harsh, grating croak, was
muttering forth mingled objurgation and complaint.
There was something in the appearance of the latter at once impressive
and displeasing; a dark, withered, furrowed skin was drawn like
parchment over harsh and aquiline features; the eyes, through the rheum
of age, glittered forth black and malignant; and even her stooping
posture did not conceal a height greatly above the common stature,
though gaunt and shrivelled with years and poverty. It was a form and
face that might have recalled at once the celebrated description of
Otway, on a part of which we have already unconsciously encroached, and
the remaining part of which we shall wholly borrow.
“--On her crooked shoulders had she wrapped The tattered remnants of an
old stript hanging, That served to keep her carcase from the cold, So
there was nothing of a piece about her. Her lower weeds were all o’er
coarsely patched With different coloured rags, black, red, white,
yellow, And seemed to speak variety of wretchedness.”
“See,” said Lester, “one of the eyesores of our village, (I might say)
the only discontented person.”
“What! Dame Darkmans!” said Ellinor, quickly. “Ah! let us turn back. I
hate to encounter that old woman; there is something so evil and savage
in her manner of talk--and look, how she rates that poor girl, whom she
has dragged or decoyed to assist her!”
Aram looked curiously on the old hag. “Poverty,” said he, “makes some
humble, but more malignant; is it not want that grafts the devil on this
poor woman’s nature? Come, let us accost her--I like conferring with
distress.”
“It is hard labour this?” said the Student gently.
The old woman looked up askant--the music of the voice that addressed
her sounded harsh on her ear.
“Ay, ay!” she answered. “You fine gentlefolks can know what the poor
suffer; ye talk and ye talk, but ye never assist.”
“Say not so, Dame,” said Lester; “did I not send you but yesterday bread
and money? and when do you ever look up at the Hall without obtaining
relief?”
“But the bread was as dry as a stick,” growled the hag: “and the money,
what was it? will it last a week? Oh, yes! Ye think as much of your
doits and mites, as if ye stripped yourselves of a comfort to give it
to us. Did ye have a dish less--a ‘tato less, the day ye sent me--your
charity I ‘spose ye calls it? Och! fie! But the Bible’s the poor
cretur’s comfort.”
“I am glad to hear you say that, Dame,” said the good-natured Lester;
“and I forgive every thing else you have said, on account of that one
sentence.”
The old woman dropped the sticks she had just gathered, and glowered
at the speaker’s benevolent countenance with a malicious meaning in her
dark eyes.
“An’ ye do? Well, I’m glad I please ye there. Och! yes! the Bible’s a
mighty comfort; for it says as much that the rich man shall not inter
the kingdom of Heaven! There’s a truth for you, that makes the poor
folk’s heart chirp like a cricket--ho! ho! I sits by the imbers of a
night, and I thinks and thinks as how I shall see you all burning;
and ye’ll ask me for a drop o’ water, and I shall laugh thin from my
pleasant seat with the angels. Och--it’s a book for the poor that!”
The sisters shuddered. “And you think then that with envy, malice,
and all uncharitableness at your heart, you are certain of Heaven? For
shame! Pluck the mote from your own eye!”
“What sinnifies praching? Did not the Blessed Saviour come for the poor?
Them as has rags and dry bread here will be ixalted in the nixt world;
an’ if we poor folk have malice as ye calls it, whose fault’s that? What
do ye tache us? Eh?--answer me that. Ye keeps all the larning an’ all
the other fine things to yoursel’, and then ye scould, and thritten, and
hang us, ‘cause we are not as wise as you. Och! there is no jistice in
the Lamb, if Heaven is not made for us; and the iverlasting Hell, with
its brimstone and fire, and its gnawing an’ gnashing of teeth, an’ its
theirst, an’ its torture, and its worm that niver dies, for the like o’
you.”
“Come! come away,” said Ellinor, pulling her father’s arm.
“And if,” said Aram, pausing, “if I were to say to you,--name your want
and it shall be fulfilled, would you have no charity for me also?”
“Umph,” returned the hag, “ye are the great scolard; and they say
ye knows what no one else do. Till me now,” and she approached, and
familiarly, laid her bony finger on the student’s arm; “till me,--have
ye iver, among other fine things, known poverty?”
“I have, woman!” said Aram, sternly.
“Och ye have thin! And did ye not sit and gloat, and eat up your oun
heart, an’ curse the sun that looked so gay, an’ the winged things that
played so blithe-like, an’ scowl at the rich folk that niver wasted a
thought on ye? till me now, your honour, till me!”
And the crone curtesied with a mock air of beseeching humility.
“I never forgot, even in want, the love due to my fellow-sufferers; for,
woman, we all suffer,--the rich and the poor: there are worse pangs than
those of want!”
“Ye think there be, do ye? that’s a comfort, umph! Well, I’ll till ye
now, I feel a rispict for you, that I don’t for the rest on ‘em; for
your face does not insult me with being cheary like their’s yonder;
an’ I have noted ye walk in the dusk with your eyes down and your arms
crossed; an’ I have said,--that man I do not hate, somehow, for he has
something dark at his heart like me!”
“The lot of earth is woe,” answered Aram calmly, yet shrinking back
from the crone’s touch; “judge we charitably, and act we kindly to each
other. There--this money is not much, but it will light your hearth and
heap your table without toil, for some days at least!”
“Thank your honour: an’ what think you I’ll do with the money?”
“What?”
“Drink, drink, drink!” cried the hag fiercely; “there’s nothing like
drink for the poor, for thin we fancy oursels what we wish, and,”
sinking her voice into a whisper, “I thinks thin that I have my foot
on the billies of the rich folks, and my hands twisted about their
intrails, and I hear them shriek, and--thin I’m happy!”
“Go home!” said Aram, turning away, “and open the Book of life with
other thoughts.”
The little party proceeded, and, looking back, Lester saw the old woman
gaze after them, till a turn in the winding valley hid her from his
sight.
“That is a strange person, Aram; scarcely a favourable specimen of the
happy English peasant;” said Lester, smiling.
“Yet they say,” added Madeline, “that she was not always the same
perverse and hateful creature she is now.”
“Ay,” said Aram, “and what then is her history?”
“Why,” replied Madeline, slightly blushing to find herself made the
narrator of a story, “some forty years ago this woman, so gaunt and
hideous now, was the beauty of the village. She married an Irish soldier
whose regiment passed through Grassdale, and was heard of no more
till about ten years back, when she returned to her native place, the
discontented, envious, altered being you now see her.”
“She is not reserved in regard to her past life,” said Lester. “She is
too happy to seize the attention of any one to whom she can pour forth
her dark and angry confidence. She saw her husband, who was afterwards
dismissed the service, a strong, powerful man, a giant of his tribe,
pine and waste, inch by inch, from mere physical want, and at last
literally die from hunger. It happened that they had settled in the
country in which her husband was born, and in that county, those
frequent famines which are the scourge of Ireland were for two years
especially severe. You may note, that the old woman has a strong vein of
coarse eloquence at her command, perhaps acquired in (for it partakes of
the natural character of) the country in which she lived so long; and it
would literally thrill you with horror to hear her descriptions of the
misery and destitution that she witnessed, and amidst which her husband
breathed his last. Out of four children, not one survives. One, an
infant, died within a week of the father; two sons were executed, one
at the age of sixteen, one a year older, for robbery committed under
aggravated circumstances; and the fourth, a daughter, died in the
hospitals of London. The old woman became a wanderer and a vagrant, and
was at length passed to her native parish, where she has since dwelt.
These are the misfortunes which have turned her blood to gall; and these
are the causes which fill her with so bitter a hatred against those whom
wealth has preserved from sharing or witnessing a fate similar to hers.”
“Oh!” said Aram, in a low, but deep tone, “when--when will these hideous
disparities be banished from the world? How many noble natures--how many
glorious hopes--how much of the seraph’s intellect, have been crushed
into the mire, or blasted into guilt, by the mere force of physical
want? What are the temptations of the rich to those of the poor? Yet see
how lenient we are to the crimes of the one,--how relentless to those of
the other! It is a bad world; it makes a man’s heart sick to look around
him. The consciousness of how little individual genius can do to relieve
the mass, grinds out, as with a stone, all that is generous in ambition;
and to aspire from the level of life is but to be more graspingly
selfish.”
“Can legislators, or the moralists that instruct legislators, do so
little, then, towards universal good?” said Lester, doubtingly.
“Why? what can they do but forward civilization? And what is
civilization, but an increase of human disparities? The more the luxury
of the few, the more startling the wants, and the more galling the
sense, of poverty. Even the dreams of the philanthropist only tend
towards equality; and where is equality to be found, but in the state
of the savage? No; I thought otherwise once; but I now regard the
vast lazar-house around us without hope of relief:--Death is the sole
Physician!”
“Ah, no!” said the high-souled Madeline, eagerly; “do not take away from
us the best feeling and the highest desire we can cherish. How poor,
even in this beautiful world, with the warm sun and fresh air about us,
that alone are sufficient to make us glad, would be life, if we could
not make the happiness of others!”
Aram looked at the beautiful speaker with a soft and half-mournful
smile. There is one very peculiar pleasure that we feel as we grow
older,--it is to see embodied in another and a more lovely shape the
thoughts and sentiments we once nursed ourselves; it is as if we viewed
before us the incarnation of our own youth; and it is no wonder that we
are warmed towards the object, that thus seems the living apparition
of all that was brightest in ourselves! It was with this sentiment
that Aram now gazed on Madeline. She felt the gaze, and her heart beat
delightedly, but she sunk at once into a silence, which she did not
break during the rest of their walk.
“I do not say,” said Aram, after a pause, “that we are not able to make
the happiness of those immediately around us. I speak only of what
we can effect for the mass. And it is a deadening thought to mental
ambition, that the circle of happiness we can create is formed more by
our moral than our mental qualities. A warm heart, though accompanied
but by a mediocre understanding, is even more likely to promote the
happiness of those around, than are the absorbed and abstract, though
kindly powers of a more elevated genius; but (observing Lester about
to interrupt him), let us turn from this topic,--let us turn from man’s
weakness to the glories of the mother-nature, from which he sprung.”
And kindling, as he ever did, the moment he approached a subject so
dear to his studies, Aram now spoke of the stars, which began to sparkle
forth,--of the vast, illimitable career which recent science had opened
to the imagination,--and of the old, bewildering, yet eloquent theories,
which from age to age had at once misled and elevated the conjecture of
past sages. All this was a theme which his listeners loved to listen
to, and Madeline not the least. Youth, beauty, pomp, what are these,
in point of attraction, to a woman’s heart, when compared to
eloquence?--the magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells!