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THE LIFTED VEIL
THE LIFTED VEIL
by George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]
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THE LIFTED VEIL
CHAPTER I
The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks
of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician tells
me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many months.
Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I
am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer
groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence. If it were to
be otherwise--if I were to live on to the age most men desire and provide
for--I should for once have known whether the miseries of delusive
expectation can outweigh the miseries of true provision. For I foresee
when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my last moments.
Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in
this chair, in this study, at ten o'clock at night, longing to die, weary of
incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope. Just
as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is
burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I shall only
have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of
suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why. My
two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper will
have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry
will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed at last, and
is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she
never answers the bell; it does not wake her. The sense of suffocation
increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make a great effort,
and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there is no help. I
thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with
the known, and be weary of it: I am content. Agony of pain and
suffocation--and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the
bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the
morning through my chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth after the
frosty air--will darkness close over them for ever?
Darkness--darkness--no pain--nothing but darkness: but I am passing
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on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but
always with a sense of moving onward . . .
Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and
strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully
unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to
trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance
of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are
dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven--the living only from
whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the
hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it--it is your only
opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid
entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that
delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the
tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or
envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb
with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition-make
haste--oppress it with your ill- considered judgements, your trivial
comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by
be still--"ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit"; the eye will
cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have ceased from all
wants as well as from all work. Then your charitable speeches may find
vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the
failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved; then you may
find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them.
That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it? It has little
reference to me, for I shall leave no works behind me for men to honour.
I have no near relatives who will make up, by weeping over my grave, for
the wounds they inflicted on me when I was among them. It is only the
story of my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy from
strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain from my
friends while I was living.
My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by
contrast with all the after-years. For then the curtain of the future was as
impenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight in the
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present hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and I had a
tender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse of long years, a slight
trace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress as she held
me on her knee--her arms round my little body, her cheek pressed on mine.
I had a complaint of the eyes that made me blind for a little while, and she
kept me on her knee from morning till night. That unequalled love soon
vanished out of my life, and even to my childish consciousness it was as if
that life had become more chill I rode my little white pony with the groom
by my side as before, but there were no loving eyes looking at me as I
mounted, no glad arms opened to me when I came back. Perhaps I
missed my mother's love more than most children of seven or eight would
have done, to whom the other pleasures of life remained as before; for I
was certainly a very sensitive child. I remember still the mingled
trepidation and delicious excitement with which I was affected by the
tramping of the horses on the pavement in the echoing stables, by the loud
resonance of the groom's voices, by the booming bark of the dogs as my
father's carriage thundered under the archway of the courtyard, by the din
of the gong as it gave notice of luncheon and dinner. The measured tramp
of soldiery which I sometimes heard--for my father's house lay near a
county town where there were large barracks--made me sob and tremble;
and yet when they were gone past, I longed for them to come back again.
I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for
me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's
duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only
son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty
when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man,
in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active
landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are
always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the
weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in
great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at
other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the
intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one with
which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth
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at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and successor; he must
go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of course:
my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or
Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic position. But,
intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits";
having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading
Potter's AEschylus, and dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative
view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with
mining speculations; namely, that a scientific education was the really
useful training for a younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy,
sensitive boy like me was not fit to encounter the rough experience of a
public school. Mr. Letherall had said so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall
was a large man in spectacles, who one day took my small head between
his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, auspicious
manner--then placed each of his great thumbs on my temples, and pushed
me a little way from him, and stared at me with glittering spectacles. The
contemplation appeared to displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said
to my father, drawing his thumbs across my eyebrows
"The deficiency is there, sir--there; and here," he added, touching the
upper sides of my head, "here is the excess. That must be brought out, sir,
and this must be laid to sleep."
I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the object
of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred-- hatred of this big,
spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy and
cheapen it.
I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the system
afterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently clear that private
tutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages, were the
appliances by which the defects of my organization were to be remedied.
I was very stupid about machines, so I was to be greatly occupied with
them; I had no memory for classification, so it was particularly necessary
that I should study systematic zoology and botany; I was hungry for
human deeds and humane motions, so I was to be plentifully crammed
with the mechanical powers, the elementary bodies, and the phenomena of
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electricity and magnetism. A better-constituted boy would certainly have
profited under my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus; and
would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and magnetism
as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they were. As it was, I
could have paired off, for ignorance of whatever was taught me, with the
worst Latin scholar that was ever turned out of a classical academy.
read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied
myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor was assuring
me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was a
man who knew the reason why water ran downhill." I had no desire to
be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could watch it
and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the bright green
water-plants, by the hour together. I did not want to know WHY it ran; I
had perfect confidence that there were good reasons for what was so very
beautiful.
There is no need to dwell on this part of my life. I have said enough
to indicate that my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order, and that
it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster it into
happy, healthy development. When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva to
complete my course of education; and the change was a very happy one to
me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as we
descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and the
three years of my life there were spent in a perpetual sense of exaltation,
as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of Nature in all her
awful loveliness. You will think, perhaps, that I must have been a poet,
from this early sensibility to Nature. But my lot was not so happy as that.
A poet pours forth his song and BELIEVES in the listening ear and
answering soul, to which his song will be floated sooner or later. But the
poet's sensibility without his voice--the poet's sensibility that finds no vent
but in silent tears on the sunny bank, when the noonday light sparkles on
the water, or in an inward shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the
sight of a cold human eye--this dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude
of soul in the society of one's fellow-men. My least solitary moments
were those in which I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the
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centre of the lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountaintops,
and the wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such
as no human face had shed on me since my mother's love had vanished out
of my life. I used to do as Jean Jacques did--lie down in my boat and let
it glide where it would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving
one mountain-top after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire were
passing over them on its way to the home of light. Then, when the white
summits were all sad and corpse-like, I had to push homeward, for I was
under careful surveillance, and was allowed no late wanderings. This
disposition of mine was not favourable to the formation of intimate
friendships among the numerous youths of my own age who are always to
be found studying at Geneva. Yet I made ONE such friendship; and,
singularly enough, it was with a youth whose intellectual tendencies were
the very reverse of my own. I shall call him Charles Meunier; his real
surname--an English one, for he was of English extraction--having since
become celebrated. He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance
while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special genius.
Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating
inquiry and given up to contemplation, I should have been drawn towards
a youth whose strongest passion was science. But the bond was not an
intellectual one; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid
with the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical: it came from
community of feeling. Charles was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese
gamins, and not acceptable in drawing-rooms. I saw that he was isolated,
as I was, though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic
resentment, I made timid advances towards him. It is enough to say that
there sprang up as much comradeship between us as our different habits
would allow; and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Saleve
together, or took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to the
monologues in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future
experiment and discovery. I mingled them confusedly in my thought
with glimpses of blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of
birds and the distant glitter of the glacier. He knew quite well that my
mind was half absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we
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talk of our hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they love
us? I have mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion with a
strange and terrible scene which I shall have to narrate in my subsequent
life.
This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness,
which is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered
suffering, with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time.
Then came the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually
breaking into variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to take
longer and longer drives. On one of these more vividly remembered
days, my father said to me, as he sat beside my sofa
"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you
home with me. The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall
go through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places.
Our neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and
we shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague" . . .
My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he
left my mind resting on the word PRAGUE, with a strange sense that a
new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad
sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a long-
past century arrested in its course--unrefreshed for ages by dews of night,
or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur
of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like
deposed and superannuated kings in their regal gold-inwoven tatters.
The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of
metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along
the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns,
seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy,
trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral
visitants infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I
thought, who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned
time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their court
in the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its
monotonous length on the height; who worship wearily in the stifling air
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of the churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their doom to
be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit, as they live on
in perpetual midday, without the repose of night or the new birth of
morning.
A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became
conscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire- irons had
fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught. My heart was
palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my draught beside me; I
would take it presently.
As soon as I was alone again, I began to ask myself whether I had
been sleeping. Was this a dream--this wonderfully distinct vision- minute
in its distinctness down to a patch of rainbow light on the
pavement, transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star--of a
strange city, quite unfamiliar to my imagination? I had seen no picture of
Prague: it lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguely-remembered
historical associations--ill-defined memories of imperial grandeur and
religious wars.
Nothing of this sort had ever occurred in my dreaming experience
before, for I had often been humiliated because my dreams were only
saved from being utterly disjointed and commonplace by the frequent
terrors of nightmare. But I could not believe that I had been asleep, for I
remembered distinctly the gradual breaking-in of the vision upon me, like
the new images in a dissolving view, or the growing distinctness of the
landscape as the sun lifts up the veil of the morning mist. And while I
was conscious of this incipient vision, I was also conscious that Pierre
came to tell my father Mr. Filmore was waiting for him, and that my father
hurried out of the room. No, it was not a dream; was it--the thought was
full of tremulous exultation--was it the poet's nature in me, hitherto only a
troubled yearning sensibility, now manifesting itself suddenly as
spontaneous creation? Surely it was in this way that Homer saw the
plain of Troy, that Dante saw the abodes of the departed, that Milton saw
the earthward flight of the Tempter. Was it that my illness had wrought
some happy change in my organization--given a firmer tension to my
nerves--carried off some dull obstruction? I had often read of such
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effects--in works of fiction at least. Nay; in genuine biographies I had
read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on the mental
powers. Did not Novalis feel his inspiration intensified under the
progress of consumption?
When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea, it
seemed to me that I might perhaps test it by an exertion of my will. The
vision had begun when my father was speaking of our going to Prague.
did not for a moment believe it was really a representation of that city; I
believed--I hoped it was a picture that my newly liberated genius had
painted in fiery haste, with the colours snatched from lazy memory.
Suppose I were to fix my mind on some other place--Venice, for example,
which was far more familiar to my imagination than Prague: perhaps the
same sort of result would follow. I concentrated my thoughts on Venice;
I stimulated my imagination with poetic memories, and strove to feel
myself present in Venice, as I had felt myself present in Prague. But in
vain. I was only colouring the Canaletto engravings that hung in my old
bedroom at home; the picture was a shifting one, my mind wandering
uncertainly in search of more vivid images; I could see no accident of
form or shadow without conscious labour after the necessary conditions.
It was all prosaic effort, not rapt passivity, such as I had experienced half
an hour before. I was discouraged; but I remembered that inspiration
was fitful.
For several days I was in a state of excited expectation, watching for a
recurrence of my new gift. I sent my thoughts ranging over my world of
knowledge, in the hope that they would find some object which would
send a reawakening vibration through my slumbering genius. But no; my
world remained as dim as ever, and that flash of strange light refused to
come again, though I watched for it with palpitating eagerness.
