Your name has been always on my lips and in my heart, and you alone
of all the world have never questioned me. I come to you again, E * *
*, as I have so often—as I did when we were children, when you folded
me trustfully in your arms—and say to you: I am as I was then; and I
hear you say: Tell me nothing, for I believe you always, and there
must be no questioning between us.
What I shall write to you will not be to cast a doubt upon our
perfect and entire sympathy by any explanation, but to fulfil what I
feel to be a duty towards you—to put you in possession of all that
may weigh in the least degree with those at all understanding my
nature, before whom you care to justify your steadfast attachment to
me, though the performance of this duty, dear E * * *, may impose
upon me the revelation of my inmost life. If, in your judgment,
there will be here presented aught of such justification, show it
to them, wholly or partially, just as you think well, remembering
that this is for your sake, not my own. My justification it would be
needful to make before a much wider tribunal, for I have perpetrated
an act which the whole conventional world have leagued together,
in ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy, to denominate a crime, and
I could expect little or no sympathy from that wide bar of public
judgment that knows nothing of me nor of my surroundings, and which
never could be made to comprehend my nature; or, comprehending it,
would not even then, at this day, be prepared to accept any argument
or explanation in extenuation of my course.
E * * *, you remember me at fourteen; you remember the time we
returned from the visit to Wymondham; you remember how, repulsing the
cold influences overcoming me in spite of myself, I dashed down in
the carriage the plain bonnet they had asked me to wear that day, and
stamped on it, and let all my hair fall down upon my shoulders, and
said: I am free. You remember it well. And then, at last, when the
carriage reached the house, how we threw ourselves into each other’s
arms, and I had no more courage, and feared to avow the act, telling
them you sat down on it—and you were still; and then how I cried all
night, that I denied the truth of my nature—that I was not free.
E * * *, that day repeated itself through my life—in every act, in
the worship of God, in my marriage, in the very conception of my
children; and I looked forward to its last repetition only in my
death.
It is past now—my living death is over. I have chosen between the
universal condemnation of the world and my own sense of right; not in
any sublime way, but in the simple, truthful way my nature craved.
I lie down in the evening and rise in the morning, for the first
time since a child, blessing God for my existence. Nothing can rob
me of this now but death alone. I have that treasure to a woman’s
heart that a woman can alone understand—the open avowal of the love
that controls her being. With it, part of it, all of it, is the man,
free from prejudice, filled with every noble aspiration, who is its
object. Should I, I ask you, have preferred the reputation which the
world accords to her who, yielding to its forms, becomes daily the
living lie it approves?
They who go on disposing of human instincts, human affections and
human brains in their own way, according to their own sense of right
and wrong, should go further; they should change their meeting-houses
and churches into monasteries and convents, and watch the religious
aspirations they would control by daily and nightly supervision.
Into their homes they should introduce harem espionage, that the
bodily instincts, which they hold in enforced compliance, may never
have an opportunity to assert the truth about themselves.
Heresy and adultery, the two excommunicative words, which social life
suspends over the doomed head of a woman who thinks and acts contrary
to its rules of action, have not that full power and effect they are
supposed to have. Nothing but actual physical imprisonment of the
body, and, if it were possible, of the mind, can prevent a woman from
becoming the secret avower of her belief and of her instincts. The
excommunicative words do not restrain from either offence; they only
develop that unquestionable vice of woman’s weakness, hypocrisy.
The brain, when infidel, is infidel by its own proper organization,
and they who assail its infidelity strike vainly at the God who made
it, and implanted it in every newborn soul; the body, when infidel
to the connection in which it is placed, is so by its own proper
instincts, and they, who attempt to control it, strike, likewise, at
a law of its creation.
When will narrow-minded, bigoted men learn that the one absolute,
controlling law of a woman’s nature is love—that it is the only
good and desirable thing about a woman—the only reliable thing
about her? They can trust her, with her love, to live in a house
of prostitution; they cannot control her, without it, by the most
absolute, social ostracism.
And this love, what is it? It is a power present always in the world,
which, recognized by two like natures, thenceforth binds them to
each other, beyond the control, and in violation, if need be, of any
other law—as my mother’s love bound her to my father, and my father’s
love bound him to her, and gave me my being—a being cradled in the
tenderest, truest passion that ever existed between two human beings.
How long have I been in ascertaining and yielding myself up to this
divine law! What wasted years! What subjections derogatory to the
vilest nature! What hypocrisy, dishonoring to God! What suffering
have I caused this man, assigned to me alone, since that day on which
I first in him recognized myself!
It seems so long ago; it seems far longer to me than the time makes
it; it seems as if an eternity had rolled backward to that day.
Oh, I had questionings of right and wrong in that fathomless interval
of despair, far other, far deeper, than all I had been taught or
could be taught by their lips—questionings that brought me to the
very brink of death.
Why should I have loved him? Why do I love him? What is it I love in
him? All this I have asked myself a thousand times, and there has
never been, can never be, an answer to all this questioning.
Yet I say now to you: Why should I not love him? What is there not to
love in him? My heart only answers: What is there in me that I should
be loved, that I should know that joy which in its tiniest moment
makes all years of other time a mockery?
And these questions do we ask each other daily and nightly forever.
And yet there is one reason, they say, why I should not have loved
him—one word there is which the world places as an impassable
barrier between us—a word that has never crossed my lips till now—a
meaningless word, and yet involving in their eyes a crime as great
as that adultery which I commit—just as great, for both are equally
meaningless as touching our relation.
And that word expresses the social position he bore me. Rather than
have been his lawful wife even, I might have been a king’s mistress,
or any nobleman’s paramour, with less offence.
And I, who was the reputable bawd of marriage rites, was I above
him? I, a daily offence against decency in obedience to the same
social law that would have forced him to life-long humility? Was I
above him? How? In what way? I, sunk, in the abasement of my own
weak unnatural compliance, below the veriest nameless outcast? Could
I be above anything? Was he not at least my peer? He, who, if we
leave too such vapid questions of distinction, is Hyperion to a Satyr
compared in person with me—short, fat, little body that I am!
I have silently asked myself in his arms, when I dared not soil our
lips with their utterance, about these words—groom and adulterer.
Yet well I knew that they had no relation to our love—that they
were but words—that a true soul no social contamination defiles or
degrades—that nobility unrecognized and virtue an outcast, wherever
placed, are eternally the same.
I had learned these lessons from a parent’s lips. The example of my
own true-hearted mother had taught me this. My own life had been
given me in violation of society’s teachings.
Noble-hearted woman! who could say (I their child, and the only one
that blessed at last their union, nearly a year old then:) Richard
Gurney, I have withholden from you nothing; I have sacrificed all
at the altar of love—even my little Marian—yet I ask no formal bond
of union in return; I care not for it. What I had when our little
one’s life began—what I have now—what I know nothing can deprive me
of now—your love—contents me. And he as nobly answered: Not for the
sake of it, Mary, for it will have but little acknowledgment from my
kindred or the world; but for the pride of the open avowal, and for
the sake of our little girl, I marry you.
And this love, so true, so self-immolating, met, as he anticipated,
with no approbation from his family. You remember how my husband, as
an especial favor, asked Miss ——, and would solicit the members of
his family, to accompany me to see my mother—a woman as far above
them all in every instinct of her soul as was my father—the true
representative of the Lords of Gournai and Le Braii.
Yet such was the affectation of superiority they always persevered in!
I know the world says we who are of English lineage never look so low
to find high things.
This is not, and was never, true of me nor of my blood. I would,
were it needful to find my ideal, as my father before me, search
through any situation, just as men dig down for jewels; and I would
have delved to the uttermost profound for that which I now possess.
But he whom I loved was not so far; he was near me by the permission
of that social law we have offended. The home of his family became
established near my own. He was oft actually beside me, and separated
only by that word from me; nay, he had right to touch me by
permission of this social law—was charged temporarily with the safety
of my life even—could speak to me, but respectfully—respectfully! He
who was in reality of kindred blood, and made for me—for me—whom they
paid court to, not because of the instinct of that blood, but because
of the narrow thrift of my kinsmen.
But enough of this. I might have spared myself the contempt that
tingles through my veins.
I loved him, E * * *; that was all. He became all I did, all I said,
my very life. If I say more I may err, for I truly know no more, and
shall never know more than this.
The whole scope and measure of a woman’s heart and brain, and the
whole purpose of her being, is love; and her whole knowledge forces
itself into one inquiry: Am I worthy of the love of him I love? And
does he love me? But I have thought over all this social matter, and
have asked myself if I could have loved him better if he had not been
what he was—if he had been a member of Parliament? Well, they had
been plenty in our family—there were, among the rest, uncle Hudson,
and cousin Charles, and cousin Edward Buxton, and cousin Priscilla’s
husband; so, too, father had consented to be; and finally, Jackey
himself was there, and filling Walpole’s chair, or at least the
edge of it. And what was it but too palpable a sham? We all knew
this—men and women—and we lived on it meanly, enjoying the empty
honor and the empty praises of those in truth below us, because they
so stupidly praised us. Oh, it was so foolish, all this member of
Parliament pride! I loved William rather because he was not a member
of Parliament—at least because it was not his aspiration. And then,
if he had been an elder of the meeting? He!—what think you of that,
E * * *? Or my Lord Bishop of Norwich—the Lord of diluted _pater
nosters_—was he above him? Are these the things to marry a breathing
woman to? Does any one think a _liaison_ with the Bishop would have
ennobled me?—or the embraces of the elder?
It is scarcely needful to say to you, my dear, that in the above
there is not the slightest personal disrespect intended to Mr. Pelham
or any other individual being.
True men are not such. A woman’s instincts repel such forms of men.
You may dress the real as meanly as an American slave, or you may
elaborate the attire of the counterfeit to the antipodes of this—to
pontifical robes—and the living soul of a woman will never fail to
distinguish the false from the true.
Why you yourself, E * * *, would have wept your eyes out, I am sure,
if I could have deliberately linked myself to the lifeless purpose
in which the vitality of such beings ends.
He is not one of these. He is a man, E * * *, whom I love. Do you
wonder I love him? It is because he is a man—a man, and not a hollow
make-believe.
It is so with every true woman. In her love she recognizes no
distinction of position. The gods of her idolatry, like the statues
of the Greeks—whether standing in a rough warehouse or in the
Louvre—remain unchanged in the calmness of their beauty and power. We
ask nothing more of them but themselves, to gaze upon them, to become
intoxicated, and to die with the love of them. Such seems to me the
man to whom, by the profoundest law of my nature, I yield my being.
But will the world understand this? Perhaps it is the accident of my
place and estate, that, surrounding me with what passes by the name
of power, made me see its emptiness—that, uniting me to the highest
representative of a religion in the person of a son who put it
lightly off, made its meaningless character apparent—that, teaching
me to strengthen a family distinction by the unconscious sacrifice of
myself to him in whose control I had been somehow left, taught me to
question if it were right, and at last to rise above and throw off
the chains of an unnatural compliance.
My intercourse and secret correspondence with you from my early
girlhood taught you how wayward, how passionate I was; and those
letters are so much a part of me that I cannot write anything again
as they were written.
You have preserved them; read them again, even to the days that
followed my unnatural blood-kin union and its results.
Blood-kin union it was. Intermarriage always.
There was the marriage of my husband’s uncle John with my aunt
Elizabeth, first cousins.
Blood-kin union of my husband’s father and mother, third cousins.
Intermarriage of my husband’s uncle, Henry Birkbeck, with Jane
Gurney, third cousins.
Intermarriage of my husband’s father with Mary Fowler, cousin of his
first wife.
Is it strange that such unions should prove unfortunate? Elizabeth
Gurney and Jane Birkbeck only survived their marriages a year. Jane
Gurney, my husband’s mother, lived but four or five years of marriage
life.
There, too, in the case of grandfather and aunt Agatha, was the
anomaly of father and daughter marrying sister and brother.
There was the marriage of my husband’s cousin Henry with Jane
Birkbeck, his second cousin.
Then came the marriage of Catharine Gurney with her first cousin,
Edward Buxton.
Then Rachel with Thomas Buxton, another pair of first cousins.
About a year thence, after the interesting grief on his part at
the death of his aunt Fry, our uncle Buxton, and his old Balls,
John Henry brought about his marriage with me, both of us the great
grandchildren of the same pair—I, a thoughtless girl then staying
at Earlham, and he nearly twice my age. But I don’t blame them.
Heaven knows their ignorance of my nature, and the utter want of
congeniality in everything between his and me.
You know the ideal my heart and passions craved, and you know this
reality circumstances and family considerations brought me; and
you know from the day of that marriage I was silent. For when body
and soul were in this, at last, both gone, I resolved to bear all
patiently and submissively—to act and be the lie to the last. Indeed,
as years wore on, it became almost my nature. I lost my inner light,
as they say. I became a woman to look down from my social position
and dwell in the proprieties forever.
There was then but one hope for me, and that hope was based upon the
fact that I could not write to you. The pure, simple instincts of my
girlhood, the ungratified passions, the real intelligence, lingered
in me still. I dared not write to you—to you, who knew me so well,
I dared not confess what my life had become. Yet more—I still had
faith in my nature, because I felt I was silently degrading the
crowning act of my mother’s life by my weak and unnatural submission.
I had faith over all when I first shrunk from the compliance with my
vow, and when I prayed its living fruit might be in her image and not
in mine. I felt then the force of nature * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Thus year after year passed away, and thus should I have lived and
died; but I saw him, I heard his voice, I learned daily his thoughts,
I revelled in his nature! Then I wrote to you again; my faith had
become a living power; I began a new life.
Then came the fall, as ever before. The influence of social restraint
was too terrible, and I sunk back as I did that day when we were
children. This last assertion and denial of my nature brought me to
the verge of death, but it brought me to reason also; and then, an
altered being, weak and broken down, I rose, and with one fearful,
silent struggle, that our sex’s nature alone can know, I was forever
free! Oh, the revelation of that hour! Life seemed in a moment no
longer hard and difficult. Its relations were simple, its passions
legitimate, its love supreme.
But let me narrate to you how I awakened to the reality of my
position, my after experience, and how at last I had the strength to
accomplish my emancipation.
The first few months of my married life I was truly not happy; but
I cannot speak of that period as one of unhappiness. Indeed, during
the whole spring I did not fully realize what that covenant means
that disposes finally of the life of a woman, and that, too, at a
time before the meaning of her nature consciously asserts itself. The
novelty of the change, the new interests arising, the necessity to be
a wife—all these feelings and emotions shut out myself from myself.
And so it went on, month after month, in which I cannot recall
anything that awakened me fully to the reality of my position.
But, E * * *, it was ordered in my life that it should come, and it
came. A simple incident defined to me the meaning of my vow.
Among our visits to Earlham was one we made on the first day of the
following autumn. I remember the date and the appearance of the
country well. I shall never forget either. The fields were undulating
with their golden grain. Costessy Park was in its fullest verdure.
Everything seemed rejoicing in the coming harvest—the happy maternity
of earth. And so we reached Earlham.
The first object I saw was Anna’s child. It impressed me profoundly.
I took him in my arms, and as I looked at him everything grew
dark about me. I had been before the toy of a ceremony; I was now
a conscious wife. Beautiful lawn and woodland, summer breezes,
kindness, marriage rites even, what can they avail against the first
awakening consciousness of a crime against nature?
I was wholly without sympathy; there were none around me to
understand me. If I had spoken my thought the very air would have
been filled with condemnation. I, a wife, had I a right to entertain
for an instant such an idea? Could I dare to experience an instinct
of aversion? Had I a right to say I had been violated—that I was what
all women loathe?
I could not understand it; yet there it remained, a fact of my
nature, asserting itself against the condition in which I was placed,
and from which apparently no earthly power existed to release me.
I returned to Easton an altered being; but this feeling wore off
somewhat in the routine, and in the necessities of married life—for
his father’s death, occurring shortly after, you remember, involved
many changes and responsibilities, which turned, in a measure, for a
time, the current of my thoughts.
Afterwards succeeded, at constantly recurring intervals of a year or
two, many other deaths in our families which tended to check my free
indulgence of thought, till at last my feelings settled simply into
a sense of a vague but awful responsibility of a violation of the
social law.
You must recall the constant distress and trouble into which we were
all plunged by the successive deaths of his sister Anna, his aunt
Catharine, my father and the children. The family at I—— Hall, too,
was a weight which never ceased to press upon my heart, and, indeed,
upon my whole existence.
And so I lived, but not among the living. I had my inner life and
my outward life—what, I doubt not, other women have had as well as
this poor one at Catton. I drummed, in the old school-girl way, into
my husband’s ears the set tunes for the piano, utterly unobservant
of the music. I dressed in the same mechanical way to receive his
relations, and thanked God when they were gone—and so underwent,
beneath a conjugal yoke of continued kindness, a slow death. I
entered into the life around me as an actress, real herself only
when away from the stage of her action. I became the same that other
women become, who turn from human faces to brute things for comfort.
My early passion for horses and dogs proved then my consolation. I
had to the full that mental nervousness which craves allayment in
action. It would be impossible to admire a horse more than I had
always done. It was an instinct of my nature, just as of Landseer’s,
or of old Mary Breeze’s, of glorious memory; but I loved them now,
for they were so much to me!
But when alone, immured, away from every one, I lived my fullest
life. My imagination went away boldly, admiringly, lovingly, to other
men. They were not objects of jealousy, dear E * * *, for they were
dead.
I lived with the memories of the founders of our family—men who
never sat upon the clerk’s stool, and could never have claimed the
benefit of clergy—men with strong arms and stalwart frames, making
their deeds of knightly prowess known in a hundred battles—with the
memories of Hugh, and Walter, and Anselm, and Girard, and Reginald,
and Matthew and John, who in the Holy Land fought at Prince Edward’s
side, and rendered their red cross a terror to the Paynim. And my
memory, only too tenacious, as you know, kept each noble form before
me, with all the vividness of a present reality.
I lived with them, too, in their pastimes, in which—side by side with
the Black Prince, in the eyes of their sovereign, and their gracious
mistress, his Queen Phillippa, at the tournaments, held on the very
spots where I daily rode—they mimicked their glorious achievements
upon the veritable fields of blood which they had won.
I admired their splendid force, their brains not emasculate with such
education as I saw around me, nor hampered with narrow trade tricks.
I wondered what work they would be about if they were living to-day.
I tried to imagine how any of the family could have got down, step
by step, generation after generation, to studying Greek verbs, or
calculating per cents.
Hugo alive, I knew well, would not be a praying banker, but abroad in
the free air, adventuring crusades, simply and naturally, in whatever
way the time demanded, just as the man I love, simply and naturally,
and yet so irresistibly, rescued the sepulchre of my buried hopes
and desires, against the law and the power, the ignorance and the
infidelity to human nature, of all around me. All things great are
simple. In the crusades my ancestors adventured, they went a long way
across the world. It was as far as the distance between groom and
lady, but not further. They conquered what was their own by right of
their nature and their belief, and with such a struggle as every one
must undergo who undertakes the assertion of his right against social
law.
They conquered theirs as he did also his own; and does not his seem
an act like, or nobler, than theirs? Is the rescue of a dead body a
worthier act than the rescue of a living soul?
It was not so hard a conquest. My requirements were simple and
natural. I was surrounded by everything unreal and artificial. I
demanded the society of a living man, free from the education and
influences of a family holding all these foolish theories that
deprive us of the real enjoyments of life—one who could look upon
water as water, and drink it without a homily—look upon food, not
as a subject of prayer, but of mastication—enjoy the sunshine and
air as sunshine and air, and talk with men and women as such without
shrinking from them as heterodox, or loving them as orthodox too
well—one who could listen to music and find it pleasant to the ear,
and not be exercised whether God intended it should be agreeable—who
could contemplate a picture not as an engine of the devil, but a work
of art—one who could enjoy all delights as requirements of nature,
and not as subjects of a deep concern. In Mr. Taylor I found such a
man. He looked upon all these things as, indeed, I also saw them; but
with him it was not a matter which cost him questioning. He knew it
all without thought, and without education, as they call it. He lived
in the intuitive knowledge of it.
In the interchange of kindred thoughts about these things we lived
day by day, until, unconsciously, I found myself craving every word
he spoke. I found his presence, which took me back to the men of my
ancestral pride, a necessity of my life, and, at last, I felt myself
for the first time beneath an influence of love.
The night that followed this discovery, when I knelt down by my
bedside, his image stood between me and the far-off height on which
my subjected brain had placed God.
And when I saw him there, I struggled, as I had been led to believe
was duty, to dash down the image that stood at once in the way of my
human vows and in the very presence of the stern methodical God of
their education.
Yet there it stood, and there it must stand forever. Yes, dear E *
* *, I loved him almost before I knew it; and he I felt, moreover,
loved me, though not a word was spoken between us. It was not his to
speak, and I would have concealed from my very inmost self the fact
of this love.
But it could not be so forever. To maintain the form of a
superiority, where none existed, became at last an impossibility.
We loved, and the expression of it I foresaw could no longer be
controlled by either, and so it came first from my lips. He was
riding beside me, and did not reply to me. He said, out into the air,
into the heavens: God has given me too great a joy. Then he turned to
me and said: I have loved you from the first day I saw you. I loved
you because I felt it was my destiny; other than this I know not why;
I only know I loved you.
Dear E * * *, he was so beautiful, so noble then, in the expression
of that love so long concealed. The earth whirled around me, and his
arm caught me falling unconsciously. When I came to myself I was
resting on his bosom, confident of its strength as of a breastplate
of iron, though I saw his eyes dim with tears.
We rode homewards in silence. There was a beauty in the very stones
beneath our feet. The wayside flowers had an odor too exquisite
to the sense. The air and sky were filled with an influence too
beautiful for earth. I was very, very happy. Could this feeling have
rested in me, I had been content—faithful to my duty, as I had been
taught—to have lived ever so. But my heart was now craving constantly
the repetition of that moment. It could not be satisfied but in his
presence. Hitherto patient only under a sense of wrong, I now began
to be agitated by a passion in which every feeling of my life had
centred.
It is not necessary to recount all the conflicts which it brought to
me, nor to trace the way in which my nobler nature sunk gradually
before the threatened penalty of social destruction; it is enough to
say that I was borne by it to the decision which involved my destiny,
and I yielded to the social law for the last time, because I had not
yet come to that point at which a woman, driven to the very presence
of death by the pressure of a false relation, thinks at last for
herself, and hesitates no longer how to shape her course, should even
the remaining wreck of her life be dashed to destruction.
Last autumn I began to feel myself breaking down. I could live thus
no longer. When the time came we usually went to London, a while
before the opening of Parliament, I felt that the crisis had come.
If I went down with my husband in any hope of escaping the feelings
that were mastering me, I knew well that on my return this life of
passion would only recommence at sight of its object. If I remained
alone, I believed I had strength to put it from me—I believed I could
part with him, if for the days or weeks that would follow, after
I had left him, I might meet no other gaze than God’s—if I might
exhaust the despair that I well knew would follow in silence.