"Towards the close of autumn the pleasures of the chase frequently kept my father from home till midnight. During his absence I remained mostly in my own room, endeavoring to improve myself; this displeased Lady Edgarmond. 'What good will it do?' she said; 'will you be any the happier for it?' The words struck me with despair. What then is happiness, I thought, if it consist not in the development of our faculties? Might we not as well kill ourselves physically as morally? If I must stifle my mind, my soul, why preserve the miserable remains of life that would but agitate me in vain? But I was careful not to speak thus before my step-mother. I had essayed it once or twice, and her reply was, that women were made to manage their husbands' houses, and watch over the health of their children; all other accomplishments were dangerous, and the best advice she could give me was to hide those I possessed. This discourse, though so commonplace, was unanswerable; for enthusiasm is peculiarly dependent on encouragement, and withers like a flower beneath a dark or freezing sky. There is nothing easier than to assume a high moral air, while condemning all the attributes of an elevated spirit. Duty, the noblest destination of man, may be distorted, like all other ideas, into an offensive weapon by which narrow minds silence their superiors as their foes. One would think, if believing them, that duty enjoined the sacrifice of all the qualities that confer distinction; that wit were a fault, requiring the expiation of our leading precisely the same lives with those who have none; but does duty prescribe like rules to all characters? Are not great thoughts and generous feelings debts due to the world, from all who are capable of paying them? Ought not every woman, like every man, to follow the bent of her own talents? Must we imitate the instinct of the bees, whose every succeeding swarm copies the last, without improvement or variety? No, Oswald; pardon the pride of your Corinne, I believed myself intended for a different career. Yet I feel myself submissive to those I love as the females then around me, who had neither judgment nor wishes of their own. If it pleased you to pass your days in the heart of Scotland, I should be happy to live and die with you; but far from abjuring imagination, it would teach me the better to enjoy nature, and the further the empire of my mind extended, the more glory should I feel in declaring you its lord.
"Lady Edgarmond was almost as importunate respecting my thoughts as my actions. It sufficed not that I led the same life as herself, it must be from the same motives; for she wished all the faculties she did not share to be looked on as diseases. We lived pretty near the sea; at night, the north wind whistled through the long corridors of our old castle; by day, even when we reunited, it was wondrously favorable to our silence. The weather was cold and damp; I could scarce ever leave the house with pleasure. Nature, now, treated me with hostility, and deepened my regrets of her sweetness and benevolence in Italy. With the winter, we removed into the city, if so I may call a place without public buildings, theatre, music, or pictures.
"In the smallest Italian towns we have spectacles, improvisators, zeal for the fine arts, and a glorious sun; we feel that we live—but I almost forgot it in this assembly of gossips, this depository of disgusts, at once monotonous and varied. Births, deaths, and marriages, composed the history of our society; and these three events here differed not the least from what they are elsewhere. Figure to yourself what it must have been for me to be seated at a tea-table, many hours each day after dinner, with my step-mother's guests. These were the seven gravest women in Northumberland—two were old maids of fifty, timid as fifteen. One lady would say: 'My dear, do you think the water hot enough to pour on the tea?'—'My dear,' replied the other, 'I think it is too soon; the gentlemen are not ready yet.'—'Do you think they will sit late to-day, my dear?' says a third.—'I don't know,' answers a fourth; 'I believe the election takes place next week, so perhaps they are staying to talk over it.'—'No,' rejoins a fifth, 'I rather think they are occupied by the fox-hunt which occurred last week; there will be another on Monday; but for all that, I suppose they will come soon.'—'Ah! I hardly expect it,' sighs the sixth; and all again is silence.[2] The convents I had seen in Italy appeared all life to this; and I knew not what would become of me. Every quarter of an hour some voice was raised to ask an insipid question, which received a lukewarm reply; and ennui fell back with redoubled weight on these poor women, who must have thought themselves most miserable, had not habit from infancy instructed them to endure it. At last the gentlemen came up; yet this long hoped for moment brought no great change. They continued their conversation round the fire; the ladies sat in the centre of the room distributing cups of tea; and, when the hour of departure arrived, each went home with her husband, ready for another day, differing from the last merely by its date on the almanac. I cannot yet conceive how my talent escaped a mortal chill. There is no denying that every case has two sides; every subject may be attacked or defended; we may plead the cause of life, yet much is to be said for death, or a state thus resembling it. Such was my situation. My voice was a sound either useless or troublesome to its hearers. I could not, as in London or Edinburgh, enjoy the society of learned men, who, with a taste for intellectual conversation, would have appreciated that of a foreigner, even if she did not quite conform with the strict etiquettes of their country. I sometimes passed whole days with Lady Edgarmond and her friends, without hearing one word that echoed either thought or feeling, or beholding one expressive gesture. I looked on the faces of young girls, fair, fresh, and beautiful, but perfectly immovable. Strange union of contrasts! All ages partook of the same amusements; they drank tea, and played whist;[3] women grew old in this routine here. Time was sure not to miss them; he well knew where they were to be found.
"An automaton might have filled my place, and could have done all that was expected of me. In England, as elsewhere, the divers interests that do honor to humanity worthily occupy the leisure of men, whatever their retirement; but what remained for women in this isolated corner of the earth? Among the ladies who visited us there were some not deficient in mind, though they concealed it as a superfluity; and towards forty this slight impulse of the brain was benumbed like all the rest. Some of them I suspected, must, by reflection, have matured their natural abilities; sometimes a look or murmured accent told of thoughts that strayed from the beaten track; but the petty opinions, all-powerful in their own little sphere, repressed these inclinations. A woman was considered insane, or of doubtful virtue, if she ventured in any way to assert herself; and, what was worse than all these inconveniences, she could gain not one advantage by the attempt. At first, I endeavored to rouse this sleeping world. I proposed poetic readings and music, and a day was appointed for this purpose: but suddenly, one woman remembered that she had been three weeks invited to sup with her aunt; another, that she was in mourning for an old cousin she had never seen, and who had been dead for months; a third, that she had some domestic arrangements to make at home; all very reasonable; yet thus forever were intellectual pleasures rejected; and I so often heard them say, 'that cannot be done,' that, amid so many negations, not to live would have been to me the best of all. After some debates with myself I gave up my vain schemes, not that my father forbade them, he even enjoined his wife to cease tormenting me on my studies; but her insinuations, her stolen glances while I spoke, a thousand trivial hinderances, like the chains the Lilliputians wove round Gulliver, rendered it impossible for me to follow my own will; so I ended by doing as I saw others do, though dying of impatience and disgust. By the time I had passed four weary years thus, I really found, to my severe distress, that my mind grew dull, and, in spite of me, was filled by trifles. Where no interest is taken in science, literature, and liberal pursuits, mere facts and insignificant criticisms necessarily become the themes of discourse; and minds, strangers alike to activity and meditation, become so limited as to render all intercourse with them at once tasteless and oppressive. There was no enjoyment near me save in a certain methodical regularity, whose desire was that of reducing all things to its own level; a constant grief to characters called by heaven to destinies of their own. The ill-will I innocently excited, joined with my sense of the void all around me, seemed to check even my breath. Envy is only to be borne where it is excited by admiration; but oh the misery of living where jealousy itself awakens no enthusiasm! where we are hated as if powerful, though in fact allowed less influence than the obscurest of our rivals. It is impossible simply to despise the opinions of the herd: they sink, in spite of us, into the heart, and lie waiting the moments when our own superiority has involved us in distress; then, then, even an apparently temperate 'Well?' may prove the most insupportable word we can hear. In vain we tell ourselves, 'such a man is unworthy to judge me, such a woman is incapable of comprehending me:' the human face has great power over the human heart; and when we read there a secret disapprobation, it haunts us in defiance of our reason. The circle which surrounds you always hides the rest of the world: the smallest object close before your eyes intercepts their view of the sun. So is it with the set among whom we dwell: nor Europe nor posterity can render us insensible to the intrigues of our next door neighbor; and whoever would live happily in the cultivation of genius ought to be, above all things, cautious in the choice of his immediate mental atmosphere."
[1] If this was Corinne's first English dinner, how did she know the usual time for retiring?—TR.
[2] What a flattering picture of female society, at the country-house of an intelligent English peer, not fifty years since!—TR.
[3] Spelt wisk in the original.—TR.