CHAPTER II.
"Then 'gan the Palmer thus--'Most wretched man
That to affections dost the bridle lend:
In their beginnings they are weak and wan,
But soon, through suffrance, growe to fearfull end;
While they are weak, betimes with them contend.'"
SPENSER.
MALTRAVERS went frequently to the house of Madame de Ventadour--it was
open twice a week to the world, and thrice a week to friends.
Maltravers was soon of the latter class. Madame de Ventadour had been
in England in her childhood, for her parents had been /emigres/. She
spoke English well and fluently, and this pleased Maltravers; for though
the French language was sufficiently familiar to him, he was like most
who are more vain of the mind than the person, and proudly averse to
hazarding his best thoughts in the domino of a foreign language. We
don't care how faulty the accent, or how incorrect the idiom, in which
we talk nothings; but if we utter any of the poetry within us, we
shudder at the risk of the most trifling solecism.
This was especially the case with Maltravers; for, besides being now
somewhat ripened from his careless boyhood into a proud and fastidious
man, he had a natural love for the Becoming. This love was
unconsciously visible in trifles: it is the natural parent of Good
Taste. And it was indeed an inborn good taste which redeemed Ernest's
natural carelessness in those personal matters in which young men
usually take a pride. An habitual and soldier-like neatness, and a love
of order and symmetry, stood with him in the stead of elaborate
attention to equipage and dress.
Maltravers had not thought twice in his life whether he was handsome or
not; and, like most men who have a knowledge of the gentler sex, he knew
that beauty had little to do with engaging the love of women. The air,
the manner, the tone, the conversation, the something that interests,
and the something to be proud of--these are the attributes of the man
made to be loved. And the Beauty-man is, nine times out of ten, little
more than the oracle of his aunts, and the "/Sich/ a love!" of the
housemaids!
To return from this digression, Maltravers was glad that he could talk
in his own language to Madame de Ventadour; and the conversation between
them generally began in French, and glided away into English. Madame de
Ventadour was eloquent, and so was Maltravers; yet a more complete
contrast in their mental views and conversational peculiarities can
scarcely be conceived. Madame de Ventadour viewed everything as a woman
of the world: she was brilliant, thoughtful, and not without delicacy
and tenderness of sentiment; still all was cast in a worldly mould. She
had been formed by the influences of society, and her mind betrayed its
education. At once witty and melancholy (no uncommon union), she was a
disciple of the sad but caustic philosophy produced by /satiety/. In
the life she led, neither her heart nor her head was engaged; the
faculties of both were irritated, not satisfied or employed. She felt
somewhat too sensitively the hollowness of the great world, and had a
low opinion of human nature. In fact, she was a woman of the French
memoirs--one of those charming and /spirituelles/ Aspasias of the
boudoir, who interest us by their subtlety, tact, and grace, their
exquisite tone of refinement, and are redeemed from the superficial and
frivolous, partly by a consummate knowledge of the social system in
which they move, and partly by a half-concealed and touching discontent
of the trifles on which their talents and affections are wasted. These
are the women who, after a youth of false pleasure, often end by an old
age of false devotion. They are a class peculiar to those ranks and
countries in which shines and saddens that gay and unhappy thing--/a
woman without a home/!
Now this was a specimen of life--this Valerie de Ventadour--that
Maltravers had never yet contemplated, and Maltravers was perhaps
equally new to the Frenchwoman. They were delighted with each other's
society, although it so happened that they never agreed.
Madame de Ventadour rode on horseback, and Maltravers was one of her
usual companions. And oh, the beautiful landscapes through which their
daily excursions lay!
Maltravers was an admirable scholar. The stores of the immortal dead
were as familiar to him as his own language. The poetry, the
philosophy, the manner of thought and habits of life--of the graceful
Greek and the luxurious Roman--were a part of knowledge that constituted
a common and household portion of his own associations and peculiarities
of thought. He had saturated his intellect with the Pactolus of
old--and the grains of gold came down from the classic Tmolus with every
tide. This knowledge of the dead, often so useless, has an
inexpressible charm when it is applied to the places where the dead
lived. We care nothing about the ancients on Highgate Hill--but at
Baiae, Pompeii, by the Virgilian Hades, the ancients are society with
which we thirst to be familiar. To the animated and curious Frenchwoman
what a cicerone was Ernest Maltravers! How eagerly she listened to
accounts of a life more elegant than that of Paris!--of a civilisation
which the world never can know again! So much the better;--for it was
rotten at the core, though most brilliant in the complexion. Those cold
names and unsubstantial shadows which Madame de Ventadour had been
accustomed to yawn over in skeleton histories, took from the eloquence
of Maltravers the breath of life--they glowed and moved--they feasted
and made love--were wise and foolish, merry and sad, like living things.
On the other hand, Maltravers learned a thousand new secrets of the
existing and actual world from the lips of the accomplished and
observant Valerie. What a new step in the philosophy of life does a
young man of genius make, when he first compares his theories and
experience with the intellect of a clever woman of the world! Perhaps
it does not elevate him, but how it enlightens and refines!--what
numberless minute yet important mysteries in human character and
practical wisdom does he drink unconsciously from the sparkling
/persiflage/ of such a companion! Our education is hardly ever complete
without it.
"And so you think these stately Romans were not, after all, so
dissimilar to ourselves?" said Valerie, one day, as they looked over the
same earth and ocean along which had roved the eyes of the voluptuous
but august Lucullus.
"In the last days of their Republic, a /coup-d'oeil of their social date
might convey to us a general notion of our own. Their system, like
ours--a vast aristocracy heaved and agitated, but kept ambitious and
intellectual, by the great democratic ocean which roared below and
around it. An immense distinction between rich and poor--a nobility
sumptuous, wealthy, cultivated, yet scarcely elegant or refined; a
people with mighty aspirations for more perfect liberty, but always
liable, in a crisis, to be influenced and subdued by a deep-rooted
veneration for the very aristocracy against which they struggled;--a
ready opening through all the walls of custom and privilege, for every
description of talent and ambition; but so strong and universal a
respect for wealth, that the finest spirit grew avaricious, griping, and
corrupt, almost unconsciously; and the man who rose from the people did
not scruple to enrich himself out of the abuses he affected to lament;
and the man who would have died for his country could not help thrusting
his hands into her pockets. Cassius, the stubborn and thoughtful
patriot, with his heart of iron, had, you remember, an itching palm.
Yet, what a blow to all the hopes and dreams of a world was the
overthrow of the free party after the death of Caesar! What generations
of freemen fell at Philippi! In England, perhaps, we may have
ultimately the same struggle; in France, too (perhaps a larger stage,
with far more inflammable actors), we already perceive the same war of
elements which shook Rome to her centre, which finally replaced the
generous Julius with the hypocritical Augustus, which destroyed the
colossal patricians to make way for the glittering dwarfs of a court,
and cheated the people out of the substance with the shadow of liberty.
How it may end in the modern world, who shall say? But while a nation
has already a fair degree of constitutional freedom, I believe no
struggle so perilous and awful as that between the aristocratic and the
democratic principle. A people against a despot--/that/ contest
requires no prophet; but the change from an aristocratic to a democratic
commonwealth is indeed the wide, unbounded prospect upon which rest
shadows, clouds, and darkness. If it fail--for centuries is the
dial-hand of Time put back; if it succeed--"
Maltravers paused.
"And if it succeed?" said Valerie.
"Why, then, man will have colonised Utopia!" replied Maltravers.
"But at least, in modern Europe," he continued, "there will be fair room
for the experiment. For we have not that curse of slavery which, more
than all else, vitiated every system of the ancients, and kept the rich
and the poor alternately at war; and we have a press, which is not only
the safety-valve of the passions of every party, but the great note-book
of the experiments of every hour--the homely, the invaluable ledger of
losses and of gains. No; the people who keep that tablet well, never
can be bankrupt. And the society of those old Romans; their daily
passions--occupations--humours!--why, the satire of Horace is the glass
of our own follies! We may fancy his easy pages written in the Chaussee
d'Antin, or Mayfair; but there was one thing that will ever keep the
ancient world dissimilar from the modern."
"And what is that?"
"The ancients knew not that delicacy in the affections which
characterises the descendants of the Goths," said Maltravers, and his
voice slightly trembled; "they gave up to the monopoly of the senses
what ought to have had an equal share in the reason and the imagination.
Their love was a beautiful and wanton butterfly; but not the butterfly
which is the emblem of the soul."
Valerie sighed. She looked timidly into the face of the young
philosopher, but his eyes were averted.
"Perhaps," she said, after a short pause, "we pass our lives more
happily without love than with it. And in our modern social system"
(she continued, thoughtfully, and with profound truth, though it is
scarcely the conclusion to which a woman often arrives) "I think we have
pampered Love to too great a preponderance over the other excitements of
life. As children, we are taught to dream of it; in youth, our books,
our conversation, our plays, are filled with it. We are trained to
consider it the essential of life; and yet, the moment we come to actual
experience, the moment we indulge this inculcated and stimulated
craving, nine times out of ten we find ourselves wretched and undone.
Ah, believe me, Mr. Maltravers, this is not a world in which we should
preach up too far the philosophy of Love!"
"And does Madame de Ventadour speak from experience?" asked Maltravers,
gazing earnestly upon the changing countenance of his companion.
"No; and I trust that I never may!" said Valerie, with great energy.
Ernest's lip curled slightly, for his pride was touched.
"I could give up many dreams of the future," said he, "to hear Madame de
Ventadour revoke that sentiment."
"We have outridden our companions, Mr. Maltravers," said Valerie,
coldly, and she reined in her horse. "Ah, Mr. Ferrers," she continued,
as Lumley and the handsome German baron now joined her, "you are too
gallant; I see you imply a delicate compliment to my horsemanship, when
you wish me to believe you cannot keep up with me: Mr. Maltravers is not
so polite."
"Nay," returned Ferrers, who rarely threw away a compliment without a
satisfactory return, "Nay, you and Maltravers appeared lost among the
old Romans; and our friend the baron took that opportunity to tell me of
all the ladies who adored him."
"Ah, Monsieur Ferrare, /que vous etes malin/!" said Schomberg, looking
very much confused.
"/Malin/! no; I spoke from no envy: /I/ never was adored, thank Heaven!
What a bore it must be!"
"I congratulate you on the sympathy between yourself and Ferrers,"
whispered Maltravers to Valerie.
Valerie laughed; but during the rest of the excursion she remained
thoughtful and absent, and for some days their rides were discontinued.
Madame de Ventadour was not well.
