CHAPTER IV.
MAIS en connaissant votre condition naturelle, usez des moyens
qui lui sont propres, et ne pretendez pas regner par une autre
voie que par celle qui vous fait roi.*--PASCAL.
* "But in understanding your natural condition, use the means
which are proper to it; and pretend not to govern by any other
way than by that which constitutes you governor."
IN the heart as in the ocean, the great tides ebb and flow. The waves
which had once urged on the spirit of Ernest Maltravers to the rocks and
shoals of active life had long since receded back upon the calm depths,
and left the strand bare. With a melancholy and disappointed mind, he
had quitted the land of his birth; and new scenes, strange and wild, had
risen before his wandering gaze. Wearied with civilization, and sated
with many of the triumphs for which civilized men drudge and toil, and
disquiet themselves in vain, he had plunged amongst hordes, scarce
redeemed from primeval barbarism. The adventures through which he had
passed, and in which life itself could only be preserved by wary
vigilance and ready energies, had forced him, for a while, from the
indulgence of morbid contemplations. His heart, indeed, had been left
inactive; but his intellect and his physical powers had been kept in
hourly exercise. He returned to the world of his equals with a mind
laden with the treasures of a various and vast experience, and with much
of the same gloomy moral as that which, on emerging from the Catacombs,
assured the restless speculations of Rasselas of the vanity of human life
and the folly of moral aspirations.
Ernest Maltravers, never a faultless or completed character, falling
short in practice of his own capacities, moral and intellectual, from his
very desire to overpass the limits of the Great and Good, was seemingly
as far as heretofore from the grand secret of life. It was not so in
reality; his mind had acquired what before it wanted,--_hardness_; and we
are nearer to true virtue and true happiness when we demand too little
from men than when we exact too much.
Nevertheless, partly from the strange life that had thrown him amongst
men whom safety itself made it necessary to command despotically, partly
from the habit of power and disdain of the world, his nature was
incrusted with a stern imperiousness of manner, often approaching to the
harsh and morose, though beneath it lurked generosity and benevolence.
Many of his younger feelings, more amiable and complex, had settled into
one predominant quality, which more or less had always characterized
him,--Pride! Self-esteem made inactive, and Ambition made discontented,
usually engender haughtiness. In Maltravers this quality, which,
properly controlled and duly softened, is the essence and life of honour,
was carried to a vice. He was perfectly conscious of its excess, but he
cherished it as a virtue. Pride had served to console him in sorrow, and
therefore it was a friend; it had supported him when disgusted with
fraud, or in resistance to violence, and therefore it was a champion and
a fortress. It was a pride of a peculiar sort: it attached itself to no
one point in especial,--not to talent, knowledge, mental gifts, still
less to the vulgar commonplaces of birth and fortune; it rather resulted
from a supreme and wholesale contempt of all other men, and all their
objects,--of ambition, of glory, of the hard business of life. His
favourite virtue was fortitude; it was on this that he now mainly valued
himself. He was proud of his struggles against others, prouder still of
conquests over his own passions. He looked upon FATE as the arch enemy
against whose attacks we should ever prepare. He fancied that against
fate he had thoroughly schooled himself. In the arrogance of his heart
he said, "I can defy the future." He believed in the boast of the vain
old sage,--"I am a world to myself!" In the wild career through which
his later manhood had passed, it is true that he had not carried his
philosophy into a rejection of the ordinary world. The shock occasioned
by the death of Florence yielded gradually to time and change; and he had
passed from the deserts of Africa and the East to the brilliant cities of
Europe. But neither his heart nor his reason had ever again been
enslaved by his passions. Never again had he known the softness of
affection. Had he done so, the ice had been thawed, and the fountain had
flowed once more into the great deeps. He had returned to England,--he
scarce knew wherefore, or with what intent, certainly not with any idea
of entering again upon the occupations of active life; it was, perhaps,
only the weariness of foreign scenes and unfamiliar tongues, and the
vague, unsettled desire of change, that brought him back to the
fatherland. But he did not allow so unphilosophical a cause to himself:
and, what was strange, he would not allow one much more amiable, and
which was, perhaps, the truer cause,--the increasing age and infirmities
of his old guardian, Cleveland, who prayed him affectionately to return.
Maltravers did not like to believe that his heart was still so kind.
Singular form of pride! No, he rather sought to persuade himself that he
intended to sell Burleigh, to arrange his affairs finally, and then quit
forever his native land. To prove to himself that this was the case, he
had intended at Dover to hurry at once to Burleigh, and merely write to
Cleveland that he was returned to England. But his heart would not
suffer him to enjoy this cruel luxury of self-mortification, and his
horses' heads were turned to Richmond when within a stage of London. He
had spent two days with the good old man, and those two days had so
warmed and softened his feelings that he was quite appalled at his own
dereliction from fixed principles! However, he went before Cleveland had
time to discover that he was changed; and the old man had promised to
visit him shortly.
This, then, was the state of Ernest Maltravers at the age of
thirty-six,--an age in which frame and mind are in their fullest
perfection; an age in which men begin most keenly to feel that they are
citizens. With all his energies braced and strengthened; with his mind
stored with profusest gifts; in the vigour of a constitution to which a
hardy life had imparted a second and fresher youth; so trained by stern
experience as to redeem with an easy effort all the deficiencies and
faults which had once resulted from too sensitive an imagination and too
high a standard for human actions; formed to render to his race the most
brilliant and durable service, and to secure to himself the happiness
which results from sobered fancy, a generous heart, and an approving
conscience,--here was Ernest Maltravers, backed, too, by the appliances
and gifts of birth and fortune, perversely shutting up genius, life, and
soul in their own thorny leaves, and refusing to serve the fools and
rascals who were formed from the same clay, and gifted by the same God.
Morbid and morose philosophy, begot by a proud spirit on a lonely heart!
