Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion

W >> William Hazlitt >> Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion

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At once he took his Muse and dipt her Right in the middle of the
Scripture.

It would not do--the lady could make neither head nor tail of it. This
is a poor attempt at levity. Alas! I am sad enough. "Would she go and
leave me so? If it was only my own behaviour, I still did not doubt of
success. I knew the sincerity of my love, and she would be convinced of
it in time. If that was all, I did not care: but tell me true, is there
not a new attachment that is the real cause of your estrangement? Tell
me, my sweet friend, and before you tell me, give me your hand (nay,
both hands) that I may have something to support me under the dreadful
conviction." She let me take her hands in mine, saying, "She supposed
there could be no objection to that,"--as if she acted on the
suggestions of others, instead of following her own will--but still
avoided giving me any answer. I conjured her to tell me the worst, and
kill me on the spot. Any thing was better than my present state. I
said, "Is it Mr. C-----?" She smiled, and said with gay indifference,
"Mr. C----- was here a very short time." "Well, then, was it Mr.
-----?" She hesitated, and then replied faintly, "No." This was a mere
trick to mislead; one of the profoundnesses of Satan, in which she is an
adept. "But," she added hastily, "she could make no more confidences."
"Then," said I, "you have something to communicate." "No; but she had
once mentioned a thing of the sort, which I had hinted to her mother,
though it signified little." All this while I was in tortures. Every
word, every half-denial, stabbed me. "Had she any tie?" "No, I have no
tie!" "You are not going to be married soon?" "I don't intend ever to
marry at all!" "Can't you be friends with me as of old?" "She could
give no promises." "Would she make her own terms?" "She would make
none."--"I was sadly afraid the LITTLE IMAGE was dethroned from her
heart, as I had dashed it to the ground the other night."--"She was
neither desperate nor violent." I did not answer--"But deliberate and
deadly,"--though I might; and so she vanished in this running fight of
question and answer, in spite of my vain efforts to detain her. The
cockatrice, I said, mocks me: so she has always done. The thought was a
dagger to me. My head reeled, my heart recoiled within me. I was stung
with scorpions; my flesh crawled; I was choked with rage; her scorn
scorched me like flames; her air (her heavenly air) withdrawn from me,
stifled me, and left me gasping for breath and being. It was a fable.
She started up in her own likeness, a serpent in place of a woman. She
had fascinated, she had stung me, and had returned to her proper shape,
gliding from me after inflicting the mortal wound, and instilling deadly
poison into every pore; but her form lost none of its original
brightness by the change of character, but was all glittering,
beauteous, voluptuous grace. Seed of the serpent or of the woman, she
was divine! I felt that she was a witch, and had bewitched me. Fate
had enclosed me round about. _I_ was transformed too, no longer human
(any more than she, to whom I had knit myself) my feelings were marble;
my blood was of molten lead; my thoughts on fire. I was taken out of
myself, wrapt into another sphere, far from the light of day, of hope,
of love. I had no natural affection left; she had slain me, but no
other thing had power over me. Her arms embraced another; but her
mock-embrace, the phantom of her love, still bound me, and I had not a
wish to escape. So I felt then, and so perhaps shall feel till I grow
old and die, nor have any desire that my years should last longer than
they are linked in the chain of those amorous folds, or than her
enchantments steep my soul in oblivion of all other things! I started
to find myself alone--for ever alone, without a creature to love me. I
looked round the room for help; I saw the tables, the chairs, the places
where she stood or sat, empty, deserted, dead. I could not stay where I
was; I had no one to go to but to the parent-mischief, the preternatural
hag, that had "drugged this posset" of her daughter's charms and
falsehood for me, and I went down and (such was my weakness and
helplessness) sat with her for an hour, and talked with her of her
daughter, and the sweet days we had passed together, and said I thought
her a good girl, and believed that if there was no rival, she still had
a regard for me at the bottom of her heart; and how I liked her all the
better for her coy, maiden airs: and I received the assurance over and
over that there was no one else; and that Sarah (they all knew) never
staid five minutes with any other lodger, while with me she would stay
by the hour together, in spite of all her father could say to her (what
were her motives, was best known to herself!) and while we were talking
of her, she came bounding into the room, smiling with smothered delight
at the consummation of my folly and her own art; and I asked her mother
whether she thought she looked as if she hated me, and I took her
wrinkled, withered, cadaverous, clammy hand at parting, and kissed it.
Faugh!--

I will make an end of this story; there is something in it discordant to
honest ears. I left the house the next day, and returned to Scotland in
a state so near to phrenzy, that I take it the shades sometimes ran into
one another. R---- met me the day after I arrived, and will tell you
the way I was in. I was like a person in a high fever; only mine was in
the mind instead of the body. It had the same irritating, uncomfortable
effect on the bye-standers. I was incapable of any application, and
don't know what I should have done, had it not been for the kindness of
-----. I came to see you, to "bestow some of my tediousness upon you,"
but you were gone from home. Everything went on well as to the law
business; and as it approached to a conclusion, I wrote to my good
friend P---- to go to M----, who had married her sister, and ask him if
it would be worth my while to make her a formal offer, as soon as I was
free, as, with the least encouragement, I was ready to throw myself at
her feet; and to know, in case of refusal, whether I might go back there
and be treated as an old friend. Not a word of answer could be got from
her on either point, notwithstanding every importunity and intreaty; but
it was the opinion of M---- that I might go and try my fortune. I did
so with joy, with something like confidence. I thought her giving no
positive answer implied a chance, at least, of the reversion of her
favour, in case I behaved well. All was false, hollow, insidious. The
first night after I got home, I slept on down. In Scotland, the flint
had been my pillow. But now I slept under the same roof with her. What
softness, what balmy repose in the very thought! I saw her that same
day and shook hands with her, and told her how glad I was to see her;
and she was kind and comfortable, though still cold and distant. Her
manner was altered from what it was the last time. She still absented
herself from the room, but was mild and affable when she did come. She
was pale, dejected, evidently uneasy about something, and had been ill.
I thought it was perhaps her reluctance to yield to my wishes, her pity
for what I suffered; and that in the struggle between both, she did not
know what to do. How I worshipped her at these moments! We had a long
interview the third day, and I thought all was doing well. I found her
sitting at work in the window-seat of the front parlour; and on my
asking if I might come in, she made no objection. I sat down by her;
she let me take her hand; I talked to her of indifferent things, and of
old times. I asked her if she would put some new frills on my
shirts?---"With the greatest pleasure." If she could get THE LITTLE
IMAGE mended? "It was broken in three pieces, and the sword was gone,
but she would try." I then asked her to make up a plaid silk which I
had given her in the winter, and which she said would make a pretty
summer gown. I so longed to see her in it!--"She had little time to
spare, but perhaps might!" Think what I felt, talking peaceably,
kindly, tenderly with my love,--not passionately, not violently. I
tried to take pattern by her patient meekness, as I thought it, and to
subdue my desires to her will. I then sued to her, but respectfully, to
be admitted to her friendship--she must know I was as true a friend as
ever woman had--or if there was a bar to our intimacy from a dearer
attachment, to let me know it frankly, as I shewed her all my heart.
She drew out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes "of tears which sacred
pity had engendered there." Was it so or not? I cannot tell. But so
she stood (while I pleaded my cause to her with all the earnestness, and
fondness in the world) with the tears trickling from her eye-lashes, her
head stooping, her attitude fixed, with the finest expression that ever
was seen of mixed regret, pity, and stubborn resolution; but without
speaking a word, without altering a feature. It was like a petrifaction
of a human face in the softest moment of passion. "Ah!" I said, "how
you look! I have prayed again and again while I was away from you, in
the agony of my spirit, that I might but live to see you look so again,
and then breathe my last!" I intreated her to give me some explanation.
In vain! At length she said she must go, and disappeared like a
spirit. That week she did all the little trifling favours I had asked
of her. The frills were put on, and she sent up to know if I wanted any
more done. She got the Buonaparte mended. This was like healing old
wounds indeed! How? As follows, for thereby hangs the conclusion of my
tale. Listen.

I had sent a message one evening to speak to her about some special
affairs of the house, and received no answer. I waited an hour
expecting her, and then went out in great vexation at my disappointment.
I complained to her mother a day or two after, saying I thought it so
unlike Sarah's usual propriety of behaviour, that she must mean it as a
mark of disrespect. Mrs. L---- said, "La! Sir, you're always fancying
things. Why, she was dressing to go out, and she was only going to get
the little image you're both so fond of mended; and it's to be done this
evening. She has been to two or three places to see about it, before
she could get anyone to undertake it." My heart, my poor fond heart,
almost melted within me at this news. I answered, "Ah! Madam, that's
always the way with the dear creature. I am finding fault with her and
thinking the hardest things of her; and at that very time she's doing
something to shew the most delicate attention, and that she has no
greater satisfaction than in gratifying my wishes!" On this we had some
farther talk, and I took nearly the whole of the lodgings at a hundred
guineas a year, that (as I said) she might have a little leisure to sit
at her needle of an evening, or to read if she chose, or to walk out
when it was fine. She was not in good health, and it would do her good
to be less confined. I would be the drudge and she should no longer be
the slave. I asked nothing in return. To see her happy, to make her
so, was to be so myself.--This was agreed to. I went over to Blackheath
that evening, delighted as I could be after all I had suffered, and lay
the whole of the next morning on the heath under the open sky, dreaming
of my earthly Goddess. This was Sunday. That evening I returned, for I
could hardly bear to be for a moment out of the house where she was, and
the next morning she tapped at the door--it was opened--it was she--she
hesitated and then came forward: she had got the little image in her
hand, I took it, and blest her from my heart. She said "They had been
obliged to put some new pieces to it." I said "I didn't care how it was
done, so that I had it restored to me safe, and by her." I thanked her
and begged to shake hands with her. She did so, and as I held the only
hand in the world that I never wished to let go, I looked up in her
face, and said "Have pity on me, have pity on me, and save me if you
can!" Not a word of answer, but she looked full in my eyes, as much as
to say, "Well, I'll think of it; and if I can, I will save you!" We
talked about the expense of repairing the figure. "Was the man
waiting?"--"No, she had fetched it on Saturday evening." I said I'd
give her the money in the course of the day, and then shook hands with
her again in token of reconciliation; and she went waving out of the
room, but at the door turned round and looked full at me, as she did the
first time she beguiled me of my heart. This was the last.--

All that day I longed to go down stairs to ask her and her mother to set
out with me for Scotland on Wednesday, and on Saturday I would make her
my wife. Something withheld me. In the evening, however, I could not
rest without seeing her, and I said to her younger sister, "Betsey, if
Sarah will come up now, I'll pay her what she laid out for me the other
day."--"My sister's gone out, Sir," was the answer. What again! thought
I, That's somewhat sudden. I told P---- her sitting in the window-seat
of the front parlour boded me no good. It was not in her old character.
She did not use to know there were doors or windows in the house--and
now she goes out three times in a week. It is to meet some one, I'll
lay my life on't. "Where is she gone?"--"To my grandmother's, Sir."
"Where does your grandmother live now?"--"At Somers' Town." I
immediately set out to Somers' Town. I passed one or two streets, and
at last turned up King Street, thinking it most likely she would return
that way home. I passed a house in King Street where I had once lived,
and had not proceeded many paces, ruminating on chance and change and
old times, when I saw her coming towards me. I felt a strange pang at
the sight, but I thought her alone. Some people before me moved on, and
I saw another person with her. THE MURDER WAS OUT. It was a tall,
rather well-looking young man, but I did not at first recollect him. We
passed at the crossing of the street without speaking. Will you believe
it, after all that had past between us for two years, after what had
passed in the last half-year, after what had passed that very morning,
she went by me without even changing countenance, without expressing the
slightest emotion, without betraying either shame or pity or remorse or
any other feeling that any other human being but herself must have shewn
in the same situation. She had no time to prepare for acting a part, to
suppress her feelings--the truth is, she has not one natural feeling in
her bosom to suppress. I turned and looked--they also turned and looked
and as if by mutual consent, we both retrod our steps and passed again,
in the same way. I went home. I was stifled. I could not stay in the
house, walked into the street and met them coming towards home. As soon
as he had left her at the door (I fancy she had prevailed with him to
accompany her, dreading some violence) I returned, went up stairs, and
requested an interview. Tell her, I said, I'm in excellent temper and
good spirits, but I must see her! She came smiling, and I said, "Come
in, my dear girl, and sit down, and tell me all about it, how it is and
who it is."--" What," she said, "do you mean Mr. C----?" "Oh," said I,
"Then it is he! Ah! you rogue, I always suspected there was something
between you, but you know you denied it lustily: why did you not tell me
all about it at the time, instead of letting me suffer as I have done?
But, however, no reproaches. I only wish it may all end happily and
honourably for you, and I am satisfied. But," I said, "you know you
used to tell me, you despised looks."--"She didn't think Mr. C---- was
so particularly handsome." "No, but he's very well to pass, and a
well-grown youth into the bargain." Pshaw! let me put an end to the
fulsome detail. I found he had lived over the way, that he had been
lured thence, no doubt, almost a year before, that they had first spoken
in the street, and that he had never once hinted at marriage, and had
gone away, because (as he said) they were too much together, and that it
was better for her to meet him occasionally out of doors. "There could
be no harm in them walking together." "No, but you may go some where
afterwards."--" One must trust to one's principle for that." Consummate
hypocrite! * * * * * * I told her Mr. M----, who had married her
sister, did not wish to leave the house. I, who would have married her,
did not wish to leave it. I told her I hoped I should not live to see
her come to shame, after all my love of her; but put her on her guard as
well as I could, and said, after the lengths she had permitted herself
with me, I could not help being alarmed at the influence of one over
her, whom she could hardly herself suppose to have a tenth part of my
esteem for her!! She made no answer to this, but thanked me coldly for
my good advice, and rose to go. I begged her to sit a few minutes, that
I might try to recollect if there was anything else I wished to say to
her, perhaps for the last time; and then, not finding anything, I bade
her good night, and asked for a farewell kiss. Do you know she refused;
so little does she understand what is due to friendship, or love, or
honour! We parted friends, however, and I felt deep grief, but no
enmity against her. I thought C---- had pressed his suit after I went,
and had prevailed. There was no harm in that--a little fickleness or
so, a little over-pretension to unalterable attachment--but that was
all. She liked him better than me--it was my hard hap, but I must bear
it. I went out to roam the desert streets, when, turning a corner, whom
should I meet but her very lover? I went up to him and asked for a few
minutes' conversation on a subject that was highly interesting to me and
I believed not indifferent to him: and in the course of four hours'
talk, it came out that for three months previous to my quitting London
for Scotland, she had been playing the same game with him as with
me--that he breakfasted first, and enjoyed an hour of her society, and
then I took my turn, so that we never jostled; and this explained why,
when he came back sometimes and passed my door, as she was sitting in my
lap, she coloured violently, thinking if her lover looked in, what a
denouement there would be. He could not help again and again
expressing his astonishment at finding that our intimacy had continued
unimpaired up to so late a period after he came, and when they were on
the most intimate footing. She used to deny positively to him that
there was anything between us, just as she used to assure me with
impenetrable effrontery that "Mr. C---- was nothing to her, but merely a
lodger." All this while she kept up the farce of her romantic
attachment to her old lover, vowed that she never could alter in that
respect, let me go to Scotland on the solemn and repeated assurance that
there was no new flame, that there was no bar between us but this
shadowy love--I leave her on this understanding, she becomes more fond
or more intimate with her new lover; he quitting the house (whether
tired out or not, I can't say)--in revenge she ceases to write to me,
keeps me in wretched suspense, treats me like something loathsome to her
when I return to enquire the cause, denies it with scorn and impudence,
destroys me and shews no pity, no desire to soothe or shorten the pangs
she has occasioned by her wantonness and hypocrisy, and wishes to linger
the affair on to the last moment, going out to keep an appointment with
another while she pretends to be obliging me in the tenderest point
(which C---- himself said was too much). . . .What do you think of all
this? Shall I tell you my opinion? But I must try to do it in another
letter.

TO THE SAME

(In conclusion)

I did not sleep a wink all that night; nor did I know till the next day
the full meaning of what had happened to me. With the morning's light,
conviction glared in upon me that I had not only lost her for ever--but
every feeling I had ever had towards her--respect, tenderness, pity--all
but my fatal passion, was gone. The whole was a mockery, a frightful
illusion. I had embraced the false Florimel instead of the true; or was
like the man in the Arabian Nights who had married a GOUL. How
different was the idea I once had of her? Was this she,

--"Who had been beguiled--she who was made
Within a gentle bosom to be laid--
To bless and to be blessed--to be heart-bare
To one who found his bettered likeness there--
To think for ever with him, like a bride--
To haunt his eye, like taste personified--
To double his delight, to share his sorrow,
And like a morning beam, wake to him every morrow?

I saw her pale, cold form glide silent by me, dead to shame as to pity.
Still I seemed to clasp this piece of witchcraft to my bosom; this
lifeless image, which was all that was left of my love, was the only
thing to which my sad heart clung. Were she dead, should I not wish to
gaze once more upon her pallid features? She is dead to me; but what
she once was to me, can never die! The agony, the conflict of hope and
fear, of adoration and jealousy is over; or it would, ere long, have
ended with my life. I am no more lifted now to Heaven, and then plunged
in the abyss; but I seem to have been thrown from the top of a
precipice, and to lie groveling, stunned, and stupefied. I am
melancholy, lonesome, and weaker than a child. The worst is, I have no
prospect of any alteration for the better: she has cut off all
possibility of a reconcilement at any future period. Were she even to
return to her former pretended fondness and endearments, I could have no
pleasure, no confidence in them. I can scarce make out the
contradiction to myself. I strive to think she always was what I now
know she is; but I have great difficulty in it, and can hardly believe
but she still IS what she so long SEEMED. Poor thing! I am afraid
she is little better off herself; nor do I see what is to become of her,
unless she throws off the mask at once, and RUNS A-MUCK at infamy.
She is exposed and laid bare to all those whose opinion she set a value
upon. Yet she held her head very high, and must feel (if she feels any
thing) proportionably mortified.--A more complete experiment on
character was never made. If I had not met her lover immediately after
I parted with her, it would have been nothing. I might have supposed
she had changed her mind in my absence, and had given him the preference
as soon as she felt it, and even shewn her delicacy in declining any
farther intimacy with me. But it comes out that she had gone on in the
most forward and familiar way with both at once--(she could not change
her mind in passing from one room to another)--told both the same
barefaced and unblushing falsehoods, like the commonest creature;
received presents from me to the very last, and wished to keep up the
game still longer, either to gratify her humour, her avarice, or her
vanity in playing with my passion, or to have me as a dernier resort,
in case of accidents. Again, it would have been nothing, if she had not
come up with her demure, well-composed, wheedling looks that morning,
and then met me in the evening in a situation, which (she believed)
might kill me on the spot, with no more feeling than a common courtesan
shews, who BILKS a customer, and passes him, leering up at her bully,
the moment after. If there had been the frailty of passion, it would
have been excusable; but it is evident she is a practised, callous jilt,
a regular lodging-house decoy, played off by her mother upon the
lodgers, one after another, applying them to her different purposes,
laughing at them in turns, and herself the probable dupe and victim of
some favourite gallant in the end. I know all this; but what do I gain
by it, unless I could find some one with her shape and air, to supply
the place of the lovely apparition? That a professed wanton should come
and sit on a man's knee, and put her arms round his neck, and caress
him, and seem fond of him, means nothing, proves nothing, no one
concludes anything from it; but that a pretty, reserved, modest,
delicate-looking girl should do this, from the first hour to the last of
your being in the house, without intending anything by it, is new, and,
I think, worth explaining. It was, I confess, out of my calculation,
and may be out of that of others. Her unmoved indifference and
self-possession all the while, shew that it is her constant practice.
Her look even, if closely examined, bears this interpretation. It is
that of studied hypocrisy or startled guilt, rather than of refined
sensibility or conscious innocence. "She defied anyone to read her
thoughts?" she once told me. "Do they then require concealing?" I
imprudently asked her. The command over herself is surprising. She
never once betrays herself by any momentary forgetfulness, by any
appearance of triumph or superiority to the person who is her dupe, by
any levity of manner in the plenitude of her success; it is one
faultless, undeviating, consistent, consummate piece of acting. Were
she a saint on earth, she could not seem more like one. Her
hypocritical high-flown pretensions, indeed, make her the worse: but
still the ascendancy of her will, her determined perseverance in what
she undertakes to do, has something admirable in it, approaching to the
heroic. She is certainly an extraordinary girl! Her retired manner,
and invariable propriety of behaviour made me think it next to
impossible she could grant the same favours indiscriminately to every
one that she did to me. Yet this now appears to be the fact. She must
have done the very same with C----, invited him into the house to carry
on a closer intrigue with her, and then commenced the double game with
both together. She always "despised looks." This was a favourite
phrase with her, and one of the hooks which she baited for me. Nothing
could win her but a man's behaviour and sentiments. Besides, she could
never like another--she was a martyr to disappointed affection--and
friendship was all she could even extend to any other man. All the
time, she was making signals, playing off her pretty person, and having
occasional interviews in the street with this very man, whom she could
only have taken so sudden and violent a liking to him from his looks,
his personal appearance, and what she probably conjectured of his
circumstances. Her sister had married a counsellor--the Miss F----'s,
who kept the house before, had done so too--and so would she. "There
was a precedent for it." Yet if she was so desperately enamoured of
this new acquaintance, if he had displaced THE LITTLE IMAGE from her
breast, if he was become her SECOND "unalterable attachment" (which I
would have given my life to have been) why continue the same
unwarrantable familiarities with me to the last, and promise that they
should be renewed on my return (if I had not unfortunately stumbled upon
the truth to her aunt) and yet keep up the same refined cant about her
old attachment all the time, as if it was that which stood in the way of
my pretensions, and not her faithlessness to it? "If one swerves from
one, one shall swerve from another"--was her excuse for not returning my
regard. Yet that which I thought a prophecy, was I suspect a history.
She had swerved twice from her avowed engagements, first to me, and then
from me to another. If she made a fool of me, what did she make of her
lover? I fancy he has put that question to himself. I said nothing to
him about the amount of the presents; which is another damning
circumstance, that might have opened my eyes long before; but they were
shut by my fond affection, which "turned all to favour and to
prettiness." She cannot be supposed to have kept up an appearance of
old regard to me, from a fear of hurting my feelings by her desertion;
for she not only shewed herself indifferent to, but evidently triumphed
in my sufferings, and heaped every kind of insult and indignity upon
them. I must have incurred her contempt and resentment by my mistaken
delicacy at different times; and her manner, when I have hinted at
becoming a reformed man in this respect, convinces me of it. "She hated
it!" She always hated whatever she liked most. She "hated Mr. C----'s
red slippers," when he first came! One more count finishes the
indictment. She not only discovered the most hardened indifference to
the feelings of others; she has not shewn the least regard to her own
character, or shame when she was detected. When found out, she seemed
to say, "Well, what if I am? I have played the game as long as I could;
and if I could keep it up no longer, it was not for want of good will!"
Her colouring once or twice is the only sign of grace she has exhibited.
Such is the creature on whom I had thrown away my heart and soul-one
who was incapable of feeling the commonest emotions of human nature, as
they regarded herself or any one else. "She had no feelings with
respect to herself," she often said. She in fact knows what she is, and
recoils from the good opinion or sympathy of others, which she feels to
be founded on a deception; so that my overweening opinion of her must
have appeared like irony, or direct insult. My seeing her in the street
has gone a good way to satisfy me. Her manner there explains her manner
in-doors to be conscious and overdone; and besides, she looks but
indifferently. She is diminutive in stature, and her measured step and
timid air do not suit these public airings. I am afraid she will soon
grow common to my imagination, as well as worthless in herself. Her
image seems fast "going into the wastes of time," like a weed that the
wave bears farther and farther from me. Alas! thou poor hapless weed,
when I entirely lose sight of thee, and for ever, no flower will ever
bloom on earth to glad my heart again!

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