"As you please," said the old man,—"for you, but not for me. Day after day has taught me that very few men really live. Most of them are in a state of ceaseless dissipation: nay what they call thought and reflexion is itself the very same thing, a mere attempt to raise a mist around the nature and inborn feelings of their hearts, and to keep themselves from discerning them. And arrogance starts up, the consciousness of their dignity and strength goads and spurs them on, till they rave with ungovernable pride. This too I have known in my youth, and outlived it. Then I loved, as I deemed. How clear and rosy-hued, how bright and smiling the world lay before me! My heart too was as it were bathed in pure ether, blue, boundless, with sweet hope, like morning clouds, floating and scattering freshness through it. And the primary stock of this love, what is it? Silliness, animal passion, which intertwines itself with our seemingly tender feelings, which tricks itself out with blossoms, and then eats canker-like into them, to make them too shed their leaves, to trample that, which it called heavenly, in the mire, and—far worse than the comparatively innocent beasts of the field, that are driven by a blind instinct without anything of volition—to deface and spoil everything which but now it worshipt as holy. From this conflagration then shoot forth ever and anon those disasterous sparks, which again grow into children, and again awaken to the consciousness of woe, if not of sin. And so the wheel goes evermore round and round, through a measureless viewless eternity. And the charm, the beauty of the world! the fresh bloom of its appearances! Is not everything here again grounded upon that which nature teaches me to loathe and abhor? It is perhaps by this feeling alone, as an invisible inward prompter, that I understand what people mean by beauty. This, wheresoever it is found, in flower or tree, in human being, animal, or plant, takes its rise always out of filth and abominations. The lily and the rose falls to pieces in your hand, your touch withers it, and it leaves only rottenness behind: the youth's, the virgin's beauty and loveliness—look at it without any self-imposed illusion, without the brutish sting of the senses—is horrour and putridity and everything we revolt from! a few hours of death, a corpse dug out of its tomb, make this woe manifest to all.—And I myself! what is there within me but death? a ghost and a skeleton! the stench of my own corpse haunts me; and in all my feelings there is madness, in all my thoughts despair."
"Cannot religion then," replied Edward, "cannot philosophy, cannot the sight of the happiness you spread around you, lighten this gloomy mood, this melancholy, which is wasting your life away?"
"Alas, my dear good friend," continued the old man, "I assure you that all I have read of those christian anchorets and self-tormentors, who out of overheated zeal transformed their life into a never-ending martyrdom, for the sake of stifling every impulse and thought save the highest of all, is less, far less, than what I have practist on myself since I became conscious of the cheerlessness of my existence. I too had once found a home for my whole soul in those regions in which the faithful feel the presence and the love of the deity, full of confidence and a blessed serenity. My spirit was transfigured; all my feelings were purified; my whole nature seemed as it were unfolding itself in a single blossom; all within me was bliss and calm; and in this heavenly tranquillity there was a sweet impulse to new contemplations, a ravishing excitement to plunge yet deeper into the flood of joy. And what was the end of it?"
"Pray go on," said Edward.
"I discovered,"—thus the old man after a pause resumed his speech—"that here too sensuality, delusion, and folly, had again made me their captive. Those voluptuous tears which I often shed in my seemingly fervent devotion, which I took for the purest gush from my heart, even they sprang only out of sensuality and a state of bodily intoxication. My animal impulses had put on the mask of spirit; and the deliciousness of those tears soon seduced me into endeavouring to stir up such emotions artificially, into abusing this mysterious close relation to infinite love as a stimulus of the most refined sensual excitement, which I then extinguisht in a rapture of tears. I was appalled by this lie in my soul, when I detected and could no more deny it; and the fearfullest desolation of despair, the dismallest solitude of death closed round me again, when the deception had been broken, and the vision would no more descend among the apish toys of my imagination. When after this I wisht to pursue my inquiries beneath the light of truth, horrour itself met me in the very spot where but now, like a scene-painting, my rapture had been standing. I no longer felt doubt, for even in this there is still joy; I had no certainty, for even in the most terrible there is life; but the dead blank of the uttermost indifference, a barren enmity to everything holy, a scorn of all emotion, as being sheer foppishness and silliness, lay like a large field of snow in the wildernesses of my soul.—'Soul! spirit!'—thus I often cried to myself laughing, and even now I cannot refrain from laughter,—'can there be anything else? And if this be so, in what does spirit differ from matter? where is the party wall between life and death?' In the spectral phantom of life, in the sphinx-born riddle of being, in that terrific fiat out of which the worlds sprang forth, to roll convulsively onward and evermore onward, till they can drop back into rest and nothingness—in this all contradictions and contrarieties are mixt up and confounded, to petrify into an indissoluble curse."
Edward was silent at first for a while: then not without emotion he spake the following words: "I cannot understand what you say except in part; for the bent of your thoughts and feelings I am an utter stranger to. Whatever sorrows I have undergone, whatever unprofitable or cheerless meditations I have indulged in, still I have never strayed into these deserts, which lie, it would seem, at the horizon of all such as abandon themselves with too passionate intensity to captious inquiries. I have heard and read of strong minds, who in the recklessness of passion, or in the extravagancies of love, strove to burst the bolts of nature and of life, in order to become one with the universe and to possess it. Despair, self-loathing, hatred of God, have often been the doom and the unhappy lot of men thus under the mastery of their impulses. We feel no doubt that reason is not absolutely sufficient to reveal all that we wish to understand, to reconcile all that we wish to see in harmony with the workings of the deity. But it may be dangerous to seek for help in the regions of our feelings and imagination, to give ear to our visionary forebodings. They try to set up their own supremacy, and may easily fall out with reason, though at the outset they seem to uphold her. If they gain their aim, and this noble mediatorial power, which seated in the centre of all our spiritual powers, irradiating and swaying them, first converts them into true powers, is overthrown and cast into chains by them, then each of our higher impulses begets a giant as its son, that will war against God. For doubt, wit, unbelief, and scoffing are not the only faculties that fight against God: our imagination, our feelings, our enthusiasm do the same, though at first they seem to supply faith with so safe and mysterious an asylum. Consequently, my dear, my honoured friend, since our life is surrounded on all sides by these dizzying precipices, and every path, whatever course it takes, leads to them, what remains for us to do, except to trust with a certain kind of light-heartedness, which perhaps is also one among the noblest powers of our nature, with cheerfulness, gaiety, and humility, in the existence and the love of that infinite inexhaustible love, of that supreme wisdom, which puts on every shape, and can weave into its woof even what to us seems worthless and incongruous? so as to bear our life safely and easily, to take pleasure in our task-work, and to be happy, which we cannot else be, in the midst of affluence itself, making others happy as far as we are able. Is not this too piety and religion? I for my part have never met with them under any other form."
"All this might be so," answered the old man breaking off the discussion, "if the root of life sprang out of love."
"Does not every flower tell us so?" cried Edward, "every smile of a child, the meek thankful eye of the sufferer whom we relieve, the glance of the bride——"
He stopt short suddenly; for Rose's bright childly glance beamed at these words with all its might through his soul. When he lookt up again, he was greatly surprised to see his old friend's eyes wet with tears.
"Edward," said he greatly moved, "you shall know all. Rose is no adopted child; she is my own daughter, my own blood. Alas! this again is another deplorable story of human weakness and vanity. While I was living here alone, a young beautiful girl came as a maid-servant into my house. Her parents were exceedingly poor, but she had been well and religiously brought up. She was honest and virtuous. She was so fond of solitude that, when she had done her work, she used to withdraw from all society, especially from that of the young. In a very singular manner she attacht herself to me; her devotion or love had almost a superstitious character. She revered me, wretch as I am, like a supernatural being. Never yet had my passions been moved by any girl, and least of all were they so by her, beautiful as she was: I was an old man, and fancied I loved her like a father, and thought of looking out a husband for her. How it happened, I should not be able to tell you; everything might seem so untrue. She became pregnant. I had already long felt dismay at my own weakness and meanness. Shame, despair, dread of the world, waged war within my soul, and made me their recreant slave. I sent her away in my distress, provided for her, richly, prodigally; but my heart was turned to stone. Grief, sadness, doubts in herself and in God, bitter mortification that she had forfeited my love, or was unworthy of it, while she burst into fearful accusations against herself, as the most innocent are the readiest to do, snapt the thread of her life. Had I seduced her? Did I not really love her? No, a miserable seducer I was not; but I had not the courage to acknowledge my sin, and to reward the love of her innocent heart. And thus I was a base wretch. She died, and I regarded myself with still more hopeless scorn. The poor creature's parents, whom I placed in comfortable circumstances, blest me, old villain as I was, for not punishing their daughter's shame, and for bringing up her child in my house. This child, this fair girl, whom I love, beyond perhaps what is allowable—for her happiness is my thought day and night—will now perchance also be sacrificed to woe; for a destiny stronger than I constrains me to give her to Eleazar as his wife. Go now to him; he is to be my son-in-law; tell him the wedding will take place in a week; and if you cannot stay with me afterward, my dearest Edward, whom I also love as my own son, the fortune I designed for you shall be paid to you … and we too shall never meet again. Go now."