The Egoist

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If we have to pass through anguish to discover it and cherish the
peace it gives to clasp it, calling it ours, is a full reward.
Deep in his reverie, he said his adieus to Mrs. Mountstuart, and
strolled up the avenue behind the carriage-wheels, unwilling to
meet Laetitia till he had exhausted the fresh savour of the cud
of fancy.

Supposing it done!--

It would be generous on his part. It would redound to his credit.

His home would be a fortress, impregnable to tongues. He would
have divine security in his home.

One who read and knew and worshipped him would be sitting there
star-like: sitting there, awaiting him, his fixed star.

It would be marriage with a mirror, with an echo; marriage with a
shining mirror, a choric echo.

It would be marriage with an intellect, with a fine understanding;
to make his home a fountain of repeatable wit: to make his dear
old Patterne Hall the luminary of the county.

He revolved it as a chant: with anon and anon involuntarily a
discordant animadversion on Lady Busshe. Its attendant imps heard
the angry inward cry.

Forthwith he set about painting Laetitia in delectable human
colours, like a miniature of the past century, reserving her ideal
figure for his private satisfaction. The world was to bow to her
visible beauty, and he gave her enamel and glow, a taller stature,
a swimming air, a transcendency that exorcized the image of the
old witch who had driven him to this.

The result in him was, that Laetitia became humanly and avowedly
beautiful. Her dark eyelashes on the pallor of her cheeks lent
their aid to the transformation, which was a necessity to him, so
it was performed. He received the waxen impression.

His retinue of imps had a revel. We hear wonders of men, and we
see a lifting up of hands in the world. The wonders would be
explained, and never a hand need to interject, if the mystifying
man were but accompanied by that monkey-eyed confraternity. They
spy the heart and its twists.

The heart is the magical gentleman. None of them would follow
where there was no heart. The twists of the heart are the comedy.

"The secret of the heart is its pressing love of self ", says the
Book.

By that secret the mystery of the organ is legible: and a
comparison of the heart to the mountain rillet is taken up to show
us the unbaffled force of the little channel in seeking to swell
its volume, strenuously, sinuously, ever in pursuit of self; the
busiest as it is the most single-aiming of forces on our earth.
And we are directed to the sinuosities for posts of observation
chiefly instructive.

Few maintain a stand there. People see, and they rush away to
interchange liftings of hands at the sight, instead of patiently
studying the phenomenon of energy.

Consequently a man in love with one woman, and in all but absolute
consciousness, behind the thinnest of veils, preparing his mind to
love another, will be barely credible. The particular hunger of
the forceful but adaptable heart is the key of him. Behold the
mountain rillet, become a brook, become a torrent, how it inarms a
handsome boulder: yet if the stone will not go with it, on it
hurries, pursuing self in extension, down to where perchance a dam
has been raised of a sufficient depth to enfold and keep it from
inordinate restlessness. Laetitia represented this peaceful
restraining space in prospect.

But she was a faded young woman. He was aware of it; and
systematically looking at himself with her upturned orbs, he
accepted her benevolently as a God grateful for worship, and used
the divinity she imparted to paint and renovate her. His heart
required her so. The heart works the springs of imagination;
imagination received its commission from the heart, and was a
cunning artist.

Cunning to such a degree of seductive genius that the masterpiece
it offered to his contemplation enabled him simultareously to
gaze on Clara and think of Laetitia. Clara came through the
park-gates with Vernon, a brilliant girl indeed, and a shallow
one: a healthy creature, and an animal; attractive, but
capricious, impatient, treacherous, foul; a woman to drag men
through the mud. She approached.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

In Which We Take a Step to the Centre of Egoism

They met; Vernon soon left them.

"You have not seen Crossjay?" Willoughby inquired.

"No," said Clara. "Once more I beg you to pardon him. He spoke
falsely, owing to his poor boy's idea of chivalry."

"The chivalry to the sex which commences in lies ends by creating
the woman's hero, whom we see about the world and in certain
courts of law."

His ability to silence her was great: she could not reply to
speech like that.

"You have," said he, " made a confidante of Mrs. Mountstuart."

"Yes."

"This is your purse."

"I thank you."

"Professor Crooklyn has managed to make your father acquainted
with your project. That, I suppose, is the railway ticket in the
fold of the purse. He was assured at the station that you had
taken a ticket to London, and would not want the fly."

"It is true. I was foolish."

"You have had a pleasant walk with Vernon--turning me in and
out?"

"We did not speak of you. You allude to what he would never
consent to."

"He's an honest fellow, in his old-fashioned way. He's a secret
old fellow. Does he ever talk about his wife to you?"

Clara dropped her purse, and stooped and picked it up.

"I know nothing of Mr. Whitford's affairs," she said, and she
opened the purse and tore to pieces the railway ticket.

"The story's a proof that romantic spirits do not furnish the
most romantic history. You have the word 'chivalry' frequently on
your lips. He chivalrously married the daughter of the
lodging-house where he resided before I took him. We obtained
information of the auspicious union in a newspaper report of Mrs.
Whitford's drunkenness and rioting at a London railway terminus--
probably the one whither your ticket would have taken you
yesterday, for I heard the lady was on her way to us for supplies,
the connubial larder being empty."

"I am sorry; I am ignorant; I have heard nothing; I know nothing,"
said Clara.

"You are disgusted. But half the students and authors you hear of
marry in that way. And very few have Vernon's luck."

"She had good qualities?" asked Clara.

Her under lip hung.

It looked like disgust; he begged her not indulge the feeling.

"Literary men, it is notorious, even with the entry to society,
have no taste in women. The housewife is their object. Ladies
frighten and would, no doubt, be an annoyance and hindrance to
them at home."

"You said he was fortunate."

"You have a kindness for him."

"I respect him."

"He is a friendly old fellow in his awkward fashion; honourable,
and so forth. But a disreputable alliance of that sort sticks to a
man. The world will talk. Yes, he was fortunate so far; he fell
into the mire and got out of it. Were he to marry again . .

"She ..."

"Died. Do not be startled; it was a natural death. She responded
to the sole wishes left to his family. He buried the woman, and I
received him. I took him on my tour. A second marriage might cover
the first: there would be a buzz about the old business: the
woman's relatives write to him still, try to bleed him, I dare
say. However, now you understand his gloominess. I don't imagine
he regrets his loss. He probably sentimentalizes, like most men
when they are well rid of a burden. You must not think the worse
of him."

"I do not," said Clara.

"I defend him whenever the matter's discussed."

"I hope you do."

"Without approving his folly. I can't wash him clean."

They were at the Hall-doors. She waited for any personal
communications he might be pleased to make, and as there was none,
she ran upstairs to her room.

He had tossed her to Vernon in his mind, not only painlessly, but
with a keen acid of satisfaction. The heart is the wizard.

Next he bent his deliberate steps to Laetitia.

The mind was guilty of some hesitation; the feet went forward.

She was working at an embroidery by an open window. Colonel De
Craye leaned outside, and Willoughby pardoned her air of demure
amusement, on hearing him say: "No, I have had one of the
pleasantest half-hours of my life, and would rather idle here, if
idle you will have it, than employ my faculties on horse-back,"

"Time is not lost in conversing with Miss Dale," said
Willoughby.

The light was tender to her complexion where she sat in partial
shadow.

De Craye asked whether Crossjay had been caught.

Laetitia murmured a kind word for the boy. Willoughby examined her
embroidery.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel appeared.

They invited her to take carriage exercise with them.

Laetitia did not immediately answer, and Willoughby remarked:
"Miss Dale has been reproving Horace for idleness and I recommend
you to enlist him to do duty, while I relieve him here."

The ladies had but to look at the colonel. He was at their
disposal, if they would have him. He was marched to the carriage.

Laetitia plied her threads.

"Colonel De Craye spoke of Crossjay," she said. "May I hope you
have forgiven the poor boy, Sir Willoughby?"

He replied: "Plead for him."

"I wish I had eloquence."

"In my opinion you have it."

"If he offends, it is never from meanness. At school, among
comrades, he would shine. He is in too strong a light; his
feelings and his moral nature are over-excited."

"That was not the case when he was at home with you.

"I am severe; I am stern."

"A Spartan mother!"

"My system of managing a boy would be after that model: except in
this: he should always feet that he could obtain forgiveness."

"Not at the expense of justice?"

"Ah! young creatures are not to be arraigned before the higher
Courts. It seems to me perilous to terrify their imaginations.
If we do so, are we not likely to produce the very evil we are
combating? The alternations for the young should be school and
home: and it should be in their hearts to have confidence that
forgiveness alternates with discipline. They are of too tender an
age for the rigours of the world; we are in danger of hardening
them. I prove to you that I am not possessed of eloquence. You
encouraged me to speak, Sir Willoughby."

"You speak wisely, Laetitia."

"I think it true. Will not you reflect on it? You have only to do
so to forgive him. I am growing bold indeed, and shall have to beg
forgiveness for myself."

"You still write? you continue to work with your pen?" said
Willoughby.

"A little; a very little."

"I do not like you to squander yourself, waste yourself, on the
public. You are too precious to feed the beast. Giving out
incessantly must end by attenuating. Reserve yourself for your
friends. Why should they be robbed of so much of you? Is it not
reasonable to assume that by lying fallow you would be more
enriched for domestic life? Candidly, had I authority I would
confiscate your pen: I would 'away with that bauble'. You will not
often find me quoting Cromwell, but his words apply in this
instance. I would say rather, that lancet. Perhaps it is the more
correct term. It bleeds you, it wastes you. For what? For a breath
of fame!"

"I write for money."

"And there--I would say of another--you subject yourself to the
risk of mental degradation. Who knows?--moral! Trafficking the
brains for money must bring them to the level of the purchasers in
time. I confiscate your pen, Laetitia."

"It will be to confiscate your own gift, Sir Willoughby."

"Then that proves--will you tell me the date?"

"You sent me a gold pen-holder on my sixteenth birthday."

"It proves my utter thoughtlessness then, and later. And later!"

He rested an elbow on his knee, and covered his eyes, murmuring in
that profound hollow which is haunted by the voice of a contrite
past: "And later!"

The deed could be done. He had come to the conclusion that it
could be done, though the effort to harmonize the figure sitting
near him, with the artistic figure of his purest pigments, had
cost him labour and a blinking of the eyelids. That also could be
done. Her pleasant tone, sensible talk, and the light favouring
her complexion, helped him in his effort. She was a sober cup;
sober and wholesome. Deliriousness is for adolescence. The men who
seek intoxicating cups are men who invite their fates.

Curiously, yet as positively as things can be affirmed, the
husband of this woman would be able to boast of her virtues and
treasures abroad, as he could not--impossible to say why not--
boast of a beautiful wife or a blue-stocking wife. One of her
merits as a wife would be this extraordinary neutral merit of a
character that demanded colour from the marital hand, and would
take it.

Laetitia had not to learn that he had much to distress him. Her
wonder at his exposure of his grief counteracted a fluttering of
vague alarm. She was nervous; she sat in expectation of some burst
of regrets or of passion.

"I may hope that you have pardoned Crossjay?" she said.

"My friend," said he, uncovering his face, "I am governed by
principles. Convince me of an error, I shall not obstinately
pursue a premeditated course. But you know me. Men who have not
principles to rule their conduct are--well, they are unworthy of
a half hour of companionship with you. I will speak to you
to-night. I have letters to dispatch. To-night: at twelve: in the
room where we spoke last. Or await me in the drawing-room. I have
to attend to my guests till late."

He bowed; he was in a hurry to go.

The deed could he done. It must be done; it was his destiny.

CHAPTER XXXIX

In the Heart of the Egoist

But already he had begun to regard the deed as his executioner. He
dreaded meeting Clara. The folly of having retained her stood
before him. How now to look on her and keep a sane resolution
unwavering? She tempted to the insane. Had she been away, he could
have walked through the performance composed by the sense of doing
a duty to himself; perhaps faintly hating the poor wretch he made
happy at last, kind to her in a manner, polite. Clara's presence
in the house previous to the deed, and, oh, heaven! after it,
threatened his wits. Pride? He had none; he cast it down for her
to trample it; he caught it back ere it was trodden on. Yes; he
had pride: he had it as a dagger in his breast: his pride was his
misery. But he was too proud to submit to misery. "What I do is
right." He said the words, and rectitude smoothed his path, till
the question clamoured for answer: Would the world countenance and
endorse his pride in Laetitia? At one time, yes. And now? Clara's
beauty ascended, laid a beam on him. We are on board the labouring
vessel of humanity in a storm, when cries and countercries ring
out, disorderliness mixes the crew, and the fury of
self-preservation divides: this one is for the ship, that one for
his life. Clara was the former to him, Laetitia the latter. But
what if there might not be greater safety in holding tenaciously
to Clara than in casting her off for Laetitia? No, she had done
things to set his pride throbbing in the quick. She had gone
bleeding about first to one, then to another; she had betrayed him
to Vernon, and to Mrs. Mountstuart; a look in the eyes of Horace
De Craye said, to him as well: to whom not? He might hold to her
for vengeance; but that appetite was short-lived in him if it
ministered nothing to his purposes. "I discard all idea of
vengeance," he said, and thrilled burningly to a smart in his
admiration of the man who could be so magnanimous under mortal
injury; for the more admirable he, the more pitiable. He drank a
drop or two of self-pity like a poison, repelling the assaults of
public pity. Clara must be given up. It must be seen by the world
that, as he felt, the thing he did was right. Laocoon of his own
serpents, he struggled to a certain magnificence of attitude in
the muscular net of constrictions he flung around himself. Clara
must be given up. Oh, bright Abominable! She must be given up: but
not to one whose touch of her would be darts in the blood of the
yielder, snakes in his bed: she must be given up to an
extinguisher; to be the second wife of an old-fashioned
semi-recluse, disgraced in his first. And were it publicly known
that she had been cast off, and had fallen on old Vernon for a
refuge, and part in spite, part in shame, part in desperation,
part in a fit of good sense under the circumstances, espoused him,
her beauty would not influence the world in its judgement. The
world would know what to think. As the instinct of
self-preservation whispered to Willoughby, the world, were it
requisite, might be taught to think what it assuredly would not
think if she should be seen tripping to the altar with Horace De
Craye. Self-preservation, not vengeance, breathed that whisper. He
glanced at her iniquity for a justification of it, without any
desire to do her a permanent hurt: he was highly civilized: but
with a strong intention to give her all the benefit of a scandal,
supposing a scandal, or ordinary tattle.

"And so he handed her to his cousin and secretary, Vernon
Whitford, who opened his mouth and shut his eyes."

You hear the world? How are we to stop it from chattering? Enough
that he had no desire to harm her. Some gentle anticipations of
her being tarnished were imperative; they came spontaneously to
him; otherwise the radiance of that bright Abominable in loss
would have been insufferable; he could not have borne it; he could
never have surrendered her. Moreover, a happy present effect was
the result. He conjured up the anticipated chatter and shrug of
the world so vividly that her beauty grew hectic with the stain,
bereft of its formidable magnetism. He could meet her calmly; he
had steeled himself. Purity in women was his principal stipulation.
and a woman puffed at, was not the person to cause him tremours.

Consider him indulgently: the Egoist is the Son of Himself. He is
likewise the Father. And the son loves the father, the father the
son; they reciprocate affection through the closest of ties; and
shall they view behaviour unkindly wounding either of them, not
for each other's dear sake abhorring the criminal? They would not
injure you, but they cannot consent to see one another suffer or
crave in vain. The two rub together in sympathy besides
relationship to an intenser one. Are you, without much offending,
sacrificed by them, it is on the altar of their mutual love, to
filial piety or paternal tenderness: the younger has offered a
dainty morsel to the elder, or the elder to the younger. Absorbed
in their great example of devotion do they not think of you. They
are beautiful.

Yet is it most true that the younger has the passions of youth:
whereof will come division between them; and this is a tragic
state. They are then pathetic. This was the state of Sir
Willoughby lending ear to his elder, until he submitted to bite at
the fruit proposed to him--with how wry a mouth the venerable
senior chose not to mark. At least, as we perceive, a half of him
was ripe of wisdom in his own interests. The cruder half had but
to be obedient to the leadership of sagacity for his interests to
be secured, and a filial disposition assisted him; painfully
indeed; but the same rare quality directed the good gentleman to
swallow his pain. That the son should bewail his fate were a
dishonour to the sire. He reverenced, and submitted. Thus, to say,
consider him indulgently, is too much an appeal for charity on
behalf of one requiring but initial anatomy--a slicing in halves
--to exonerate, perchance exalt him. The Egoist is our
fountain-head, primeval man: the primitive is born again, the
elemental reconstituted. Born again, into new conditions, the
primitive may be highly polished of men, and forfeit nothing save
the roughness of his original nature. He is not only his own
father, he is ours; and he is also our son. We have produced him.
he us. Such were we, to such are we returning: not other, sings
the poet, than one who toilfully works his shallop against the
tide, "si brachia forte remisit":--let him haply relax the
labour of his arms, however high up the stream, and back he goes,
"in pejus", to the early principle of our being, with seeds and
plants, that are as carelessly weighed in the hand and as
indiscriminately husbanded as our humanity.

Poets on the other side may be cited for an assurance that the
primitive is not the degenerate: rather is he a sign of the
indestructibility of the race, of the ancient energy in removing
obstacles to individual growth; a sample of what we would be, had
we his concentrated power. He is the original innocent, the pure
simple. It is we who have fallen; we have melted into Society,
diluted our essence, dissolved. He stands in the midst
monumentally, a land-mark of the tough and honest old Ages, with
the symbolic alphabet of striking arms and running legs, our early
language, scrawled over his person, and the glorious first flint
and arrow-head for his crest: at once the spectre of the
Kitchen-midden and our ripest issue.

But Society is about him. The occasional spectacle of the
primitive dangling on a rope has impressed his mind with the
strength of his natural enemy: from which uncongenial sight he has
turned shuddering hardly less to behold the blast that is blown
upon a reputation where one has been disrespectful of the many. By
these means, through meditation on the contrast of circumstances
in life, a pulse of imagination has begun to stir, and he has
entered the upper sphere or circle of spiritual Egoism: he has
become the civilized Egoist; primitive still, as sure as man has
teeth, but developed in his manner of using them.

Degenerate or not (and there is no just reason to suppose it) Sir
Willoughby was a social Egoist, fiercely imaginative in whatsoever
concerned him. He had discovered a greater realm than that of the
sensual appetites, and he rushed across and around it in his
conquering period with an Alexander's pride. On these wind-like
journeys he had carried Constantia, subsequently Clara; and
however it may have been in the case of Miss Durham, in that of
Miss Middleton it is almost certain she caught a glimpse of his
interior from sheer fatigue in hearing him discourse of it. What
he revealed was not the cause of her sickness: women can bear
revelations--they are exciting: but the monotonousness. He slew
imagination. There is no direr disaster in love than the death of
imagination. He dragged her through the labyrinths of his
penetralia, in his hungry coveting to be loved more and still
more, more still, until imagination gave up the ghost, and he
talked to her plain hearing like a monster. It must have been
that; for the spell of the primitive upon women is masterful up to
the time of contact.

"And so he handed her to his cousin and secretary, Vernon
Whitford, who opened his mouth and shut his eyes."

The urgent question was, how it was to be accomplished.
Willoughby worked at the subject with all his power of
concentration: a power that had often led him to feel and say,
that as a barrister, a diplomatist, or a general, he would have
won his grades: and granting him a personal interest in the
business, he might have achieved eminence: he schemed and fenced
remarkably well.

He projected a scene, following expressions of anxiety on account
of old Vernon and his future settlement: and then Clara
maintaining her doggedness, to which he was now so accustomed that
he could not conceive a change in it--says he: "If you determine
on breaking I give you back your word on one condition." Whereupon
she starts: he insists on her promise: she declines: affairs
resume their former footing; she frets: she begs for the
disclosure: he flatters her by telling her his desire to keep her
in the family: she is unilluminated, but strongly moved by
curiosity: he philosophizes on marriage "What are we? poor
creatures! we must get through life as we can, doing as much good
as we can to those we love; and think as you please, I love old
Vernon. Am I not giving you the greatest possible proof of it?"
She will not see. Then flatly out comes the one condition. That
and no other. "Take Vernon and I release you." She refuses. Now
ensues the debate, all the oratory being with him. "Is it because
of his unfortunate first marriage? You assured me you thought no
worse of him," etc. She declares the proposal revolting. He can
distinguish nothing that should offend her in a proposal to make
his cousin happy if she will not him. Irony and sarcasm relieve
his emotions, but he convinces her he is dealing plainly and
intends generosity. She is confused; she speaks in maiden fashion.
He touches again on Vernon's early escapade. She does not enjoy
it. The scene closes with his bidding her reflect on it, and
remember the one condition of her release. Mrs. Mountstuart
Jenkinson, now reduced to believe that he burns to be free, is then
called in for an interview with Clara. His aunts Eleanor and
Isabel besiege her. Laetitia in passionate earnest besieges her.
Her father is wrought on to besiege her. Finally Vernon is
attacked by Willoughby and Mrs. Mountstuart:--and here,
Willoughby chose to think, was the main difficulty. But the girl
has money; she is agreeable; Vernon likes her; she is fond of his
"Alps", they have tastes in common, he likes her father, and in
the end he besieges her. Will she yield? De Craye is absent. There
is no other way of shunning a marriage she is incomprehensibly but
frantically averse to. She is in the toils. Her father will stay
at Patterne Hall as long as his host desires it. She hesitates,
she is overcome; in spite of a certain nausea due to Vernon's
preceding alliance, she yields.