To you, Sir, I shall ever remain the most grateful and respectful of your servants.
CLEMENT MONTGOMERY
LETTER X
FROM CAROLINE ASHBURN
TO
ARTHUR MURDEN
Yes, rash and inconsiderate young man, I do accept your confidence, your offered friendship; but remember I cannot profess myself the friend of any one, to gloss over follies or vices. A friend, not blindly partial, but active to amend you, is the friend you must at once receive or at once reject in me.
I have heard myself called pedantic, inflexible, opinionated; I have been told, by some gentler people, that I am severe, misjudging, giving to those little foibles almost inseparable from human nature the name of vice, and this may be true; for you call yourself a foolish man—I call you vicious.—Nay start not, Murden; but lay your hand on your heart, and tell me, if you have well employed your time and talents? If you have done service to human kind, or if you have not in fraud and secresy bubbled away your happiness? and if it is the part of a virtuous man to sigh with black misanthropy in solitude a few passive years, and then lie down in the grave unblessing and unblessed?
Yet I do pity you, for I have neither a hard nor a cold heart, nor a heart that dare receive a sensation it will not for your example dare to acknowledge.—Yes, I confess I have loved you! yet, because I could not possess myself of the strong holds in your heart, shall I sink down and die?—No! no!—I bade the vague hope begone.—I refused to be the worst of slaves, the slave of self; and now, my friend, more worthy than ever of your friendship, I am ready to do any thing in your behalf that reason can approve.
That service is to gain Sibella for you. Again you retreat.—Your false delicacy and false refinement fly to guard you with their sevenfold shield from the attack.—But hear me, Murden:—I would not unite you as you are to the Sibella Valmont whom you have loved with all the fervour the most impassioned language can describe, the erring Sibella while she sees neither spot nor stain in him with whom she has pledged herself in union:—No! I would first subdue the fermentation of your senses, teach you to esteem Sibella's worth, pity her errors, and love her with infinite sincerity, but not so as to absorb your active virtues, to transform you from a man into a baby.—You are but two beings in the great brotherhood of mankind, and what right have you to separate your benevolence from your fellow-creatures and make a world between you, when you cannot separate your wants also?—You must be dependent for your blessings on the great mass of mankind, as they in part also depend on you.—When you can thus love, I would unite you to Sibella, who in turn shall be roused from the present mistaken zeal of her affections. Her soul will renounce the union her mistakes have formed, when she knows Clement as unworthy of her as he really is. From a struggle perhaps worse than death, she will rise dignified into superior happiness:—Claim you as her friend, her monitor, her guide; and devote her life, her love to your virtues!
O yes, I know it well!—your imagination teems with the rhapsodies of passion!—I hear your high-wrought declamation, the dictates of a fevered fancy. I do pity you, Murden, from my soul; and if I did not believe you able to overcome all the misery you deplore I should not pity you at all.