Abiding by the counsel of the Angel, our hero marries, thus involving another in his fate. He makes a solemn vow to be faithful, in the keeping of which vow he takes upon himself the responsibility of the happiness of one of God's creatures, a pure and trusting woman, who loves him well. A husband and a father, he breaks his oath. Tempted by the phantom of a long-lost love, the Ideal under the form of a 'Maiden,' he deserts the real duties he has assumed to pursue this Ideal, personated indeed by Lucifer himself, and which becomes—true and fearful lesson for those who seek the infinite in the human!—a loathsome skeleton as soon as grasped. From the false and disappointing search into which he had been enticed by the demon, he returns to find the innocent wife, whom he had deserted, in a madhouse. False to human duties, his punishment came fast upon the heels of crime.
In the scene which occurs in Bedlam we find the key which admits us to much of the symbolism of this drama. We are conducted into the madhouse to visit the broken-hearted wife, and are there introduced into our still-existing society, formal, monotonous, cold, and about to be dissolved. Our hero had himself married the Past, a good and devout woman, but not the realization of his poetic dreams, which nothing could have satisfied save the infinite. In the midst of this scene of strange suffering, we hear the cries of the Future, and all is terror and tumult. This Future, with its turbulence, blood, and demonism, is represented as existing in its germs among the maniacs. Like the springs of a volcanic mountain, which are always disturbed before an eruption of fire, their cries break upon us; the broken words and shrill shrieks of the madmen are the clouds of murky smoke which burst from the explosive craters before the lava pours its burning flood. Voices from the right, from the left, from above, from below, represent the conflicting religious opinions and warring political parties of this dawning Future, already hurtling against those of the dissolving Present.
Into this pandemonium, by his desertion of her for a vain ideal, our hero has plunged his wife, the woman of the Past, whom he had sworn to make happy. And it is to be observed that she was not necessarily his inferior, but, in the world of heart, superior to himself. A true and pure character, feeling its inferiority and anxious to advance, cannot long remain in the background; it has sufficient stamina to attain the height of self-abnegating greatness. God sometimes deprives men of the strength necessary for action, but He never robs them of the faculty of progress, of spiritual elevation. Head and heart throb with the same pulsation; the brain thinks not aright without the healthful heart. Meanness and grovelling are always voluntary, and their essence is to resist superiority, to struggle against it, to try to degrade it: thus, all the bitter reactions of the Past against the changes truly needed for the development of the Future, spring from a primeval root of baseness.
An admirable picture of an exhausted and dying society is given us in the person of the precocious but decrepit child, the sole fruit of a sad marriage. Destined from its birth, to an early grave, its excitable imagination soon consumes its frail body. Nothing could be more exquisitely tender, more true to nature, than the portraiture of this unfortunate but lovely boy.
After the betrayal of our hero by his Ideal, the Guardian Angel again appears to give him simple but sage counsel:
'Return to thy house, and sin no more!
'Return to thy house, and love thy child!'
But vain this sage advice! As if driven to the desert to be tempted, we again meet our hero in the midst of storm and tempest, wildly communing with Nature, trying to read in her changeful phenomena lessons he should have sought in the depths of his own soul; seeking from her dumb lips oracles only to be found in his fulfilment of sacred duties; for only thus is to be solved the perplexing riddle of human destiny. 'Peace to men of good will!' Roaming through the wilderness, sad and hopeless, and in his despair about to fall into the gloomy and blighting sin of caring for no one but himself, the Angel again appears, and again chants to him the divine lesson that only in self-sacrificing love and lowly duties, can the true path to the Future be found:
'Love the sick, the hungry, the despairing!
'Love thy neighbor, thy poor neighbor, as thyself, and thou wilt be redeemed!'