<p>Shortly after this last occurrence—I think the very next day—I
began to be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from
the languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my
illness, I had not been alive before. This was the obtrusion on
my mind of the mental process going forward in first one person, and
then another, with whom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant, frivolous
ideas and emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance—Mrs. Filmore,
for example—would force themselves on my consciousness like an
importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of
an imprisoned insect. But this unpleasant sensibility was fitful,
and left me moments of rest, when the souls of my companions were once
more shut out from me, and I felt a relief such as silence brings to
wearied nerves. I might have believed this importunate insight
to be merely a diseased activity of the imagination, but that my prevision
of incalculable words and actions proved it to have a fixed relation
to the mental process in other minds. But this superadded consciousness,
wearying and annoying enough when it urged on me the trivial experience
of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief when it seemed
to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation
to me—when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned
phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters,
were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed
all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the
struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories,
and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge
like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.</p>
<p>At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome, self-confident
man of six-and-twenty—a thorough contrast to my fragile, nervous,
ineffectual self. I believe I was held to have a sort of half-womanish,
half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters, who are thick as weeds
at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them, and I had been the model
of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture. But I thoroughly disliked
my own physique and nothing but the belief that it was a condition of
poetic genius would have reconciled me to it. That brief hope
was quite fled, and I saw in my face now nothing but the stamp of a
morbid organization, framed for passive suffering—too feeble for
the sublime resistance of poetic production. Alfred, from whom
I had been almost constantly separated, and who, in his present stage
of character and appearance, came before me as a perfect stranger, was
bent on being extremely friendly and brother-like to me. He had
the superficial kindness of a good-humoured, self-satisfied nature,
that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties. I
am not sure that my disposition was good enough for me to have been
quite free from envy towards him, even if our desires had not clashed,
and if I had been in the healthy human condition which admits of generous
confidence and charitable construction. There must always have
been an antipathy between our natures. As it was, he became in
a few weeks an object of intense hatred to me; and when he entered the
room, still more when he spoke, it was as if a sensation of grating
metal had set my teeth on edge. My diseased consciousness was
more intensely and continually occupied with his thoughts and emotions,
than with those of any other person who came in my way. I was
perpetually exasperated with the petty promptings of his conceit and
his love of patronage, with his self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant’s
passion for him, with his half-pitying contempt for me—seen not
in the ordinary indications of intonation and phrase and slight action,
which an acute and suspicious mind is on the watch for, but in all their
naked skinless complication.</p>
<p>For we were rivals, and our desires clashed, though he was not aware
of it. I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha Grant produced
in me on a nearer acquaintance. That effect was chiefly determined
by the fact that she made the only exception, among all the human beings
about me, to my unhappy gift of insight. About Bertha I was always
in a state of uncertainty: I could watch the expression of her face,
and speculate on its meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the real
interest of ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch for her
smile with hope and fear: she had for me the fascination of an unravelled
destiny. I say it was this fact that chiefly determined the strong
effect she produced on me: for, in the abstract, no womanly character
could seem to have less affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic,
passionate youth than Bertha’s. She was keen, sarcastic,
unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining critical and unmoved in
the most impressive scenes, inclined to dissect all my favourite poems,
and especially contemptous towards the German lyrics which were my pet
literature at that time. To this moment I am unable to define
my feeling towards her: it was not ordinary boyish admiration, for she
was the very opposite, even to the colour of her hair, of the ideal
woman who still remained to me the type of loveliness; and she was without
that enthusiasm for the great and good, which, even at the moment of
her strongest dominion over me, I should have declared to be the highest
element of character. But there is no tyranny more complete than
that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over a morbidly
sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support. The
most independent people feel the effect of a man’s silence in
heightening their value for his opinion—feel an additional triumph
in conquering the reverence of a critic habitually captious and satirical:
no wonder, then, that an enthusiastic self-distrusting youth should
watch and wait before the closed secret of a sarcastic woman’s
face, as if it were the shrine of the doubtfully benignant deity who
ruled his destiny. For a young enthusiast is unable to imagine
the total negation in another mind of the emotions which are stirring
his own: they may be feeble, latent, inactive, he thinks, but they are
there—they may be called forth; sometimes, in moments of happy
hallucination, he believes they may be there in all the greater strength
because he sees no outward sign of them. And this effect, as I
have intimated, was heightened to its utmost intensity in me, because
Bertha was the only being who remained for me in the mysterious seclusion
of soul that renders such youthful delusion possible. Doubtless
there was another sort of fascination at work—that subtle physical
attraction which delights in cheating our psychological predictions,
and in compelling the men who paint sylphs, to fall in love with some
<i>bonne et brave femme</i>, heavy-heeled and freckled.</p>
<p>Bertha’s behaviour towards me was such as to encourage all
my illusions, to heighten my boyish passion, and make me more and more
dependent on her smiles. Looking back with my present wretched
knowledge, I conclude that her vanity and love of power were intensely
gratified by the belief that I had fainted on first seeing her purely
from the strong impression her person had produced on me. The
most prosaic woman likes to believe herself the object of a violent,
a poetic passion; and without a grain of romance in her, Bertha had
that spirit of intrigue which gave piquancy to the idea that the brother
of the man she meant to marry was dying with love and jealousy for her
sake. That she meant to marry my brother, was what at that time
I did not believe; for though he was assiduous in his attentions to
her, and I knew well enough that both he and my father had made up their
minds to this result, there was not yet an understood engagement—there
had been no explicit declaration; and Bertha habitually, while she flirted
with my brother, and accepted his homage in a way that implied to him
a thorough recognition of its intention, made me believe, by the subtlest
looks and phrases—feminine nothings which could never be quoted
against her—that he was really the object of her secret ridicule;
that she thought him, as I did, a coxcomb, whom she would have pleasure
in disappointing. Me she openly petted in my brother’s presence,
as if I were too young and sickly ever to be thought of as a lover;
and that was the view he took of me. But I believe she must inwardly
have delighted in the tremors into which she threw me by the coaxing
way in which she patted my curls, while she laughed at my quotations.
Such caresses were always given in the presence of our friends; for
when we were alone together, she affected a much greater distance towards
me, and now and then took the opportunity, by words or slight actions,
to stimulate my foolish timid hope that she really preferred me.
And why should she not follow her inclination? I was not in so
advantageous a position as my brother, but I had fortune, I was not
a year younger than she was, and she was an heiress, who would soon
be of age to decide for herself.</p>
<p>The fluctuations of hope and fear, confined to this one channel,
made each day in her presence a delicious torment. There was one
deliberate act of hers which especially helped to intoxicate me.
When we were at Vienna her twentieth birthday occurred, and as she was
very fond of ornaments, we all took the opportunity of the splendid
jewellers’ shops in that Teutonic Paris to purchase her a birthday
present of jewellery. Mine, naturally, was the least expensive;
it was an opal ring—the opal was my favourite stone, because it
seems to blush and turn pale as if it had a soul. I told Bertha
so when I gave it her, and said that it was an emblem of the poetic
nature, changing with the changing light of heaven and of woman’s
eyes. In the evening she appeared elegantly dressed, and wearing
conspicuously all the birthday presents except mine. I looked
eagerly at her fingers, but saw no opal. I had no opportunity
of noticing this to her during the evening; but the next day, when I
found her seated near the window alone, after breakfast, I said, “You
scorn to wear my poor opal. I should have remembered that you
despised poetic natures, and should have given you coral, or turquoise,
or some other opaque unresponsive stone.” “Do I despise
it?” she answered, taking hold of a delicate gold chain which
she always wore round her neck and drawing out the end from her bosom
with my ring hanging to it; “it hurts me a little, I can tell
you,” she said, with her usual dubious smile, “to wear it
in that secret place; and since your poetical nature is so stupid as
to prefer a more public position, I shall not endure the pain any longer.”</p>
<p>She took off the ring from the chain and put it on her finger, smiling
still, while the blood rushed to my cheeks, and I could not trust myself
to say a word of entreaty that she would keep the ring where it was
before.</p>
<p>I was completely fooled by this, and for two days shut myself up
in my own room whenever Bertha was absent, that I might intoxicate myself
afresh with the thought of this scene and all it implied.</p>
<p>I should mention that during these two months—which seemed
a long life to me from the novelty and intensity of the pleasures and
pains I underwent—my diseased anticipation in other people’s
consciousness continued to torment me; now it was my father, and now
my brother, now Mrs. Filmore or her husband, and now our German courier,
whose stream of thought rushed upon me like a ringing in the ears not
to be got rid of, though it allowed my own impulses and ideas to continue
their uninterrupted course. It was like a preternaturally heightened
sense of hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others
find perfect stillness. The weariness and disgust of this involuntary
intrusion into other souls was counteracted only by my ignorance of
Bertha, and my growing passion for her; a passion enormously stimulated,
if not produced, by that ignorance. She was my oasis of mystery
in the dreary desert of knowledge. I had never allowed my diseased
condition to betray itself, or to drive me into any unusual speech or
action, except once, when, in a moment of peculiar bitterness against
my brother, I had forestalled some words which I knew he was going to
utter—a clever observation, which he had prepared beforehand.
He had occasionally a slightly affected hesitation in his speech, and
when he paused an instant after the second word, my impatience and jealousy
impelled me to continue the speech for him, as if it were something
we had both learned by rote. He coloured and looked astonished,
as well as annoyed; and the words had no sooner escaped my lips than
I felt a shock of alarm lest such an anticipation of words—very
far from being words of course, easy to divine—should have betrayed
me as an exceptional being, a sort of quiet energumen, whom every one,
Bertha above all, would shudder at and avoid. But I magnified,
as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could produce on others;
for no one gave any sign of having noticed my interruption as more than
a rudeness, to be forgiven me on the score of my feeble nervous condition.</p>
<p>While this superadded consciousness of the actual was almost constant
with me, I had never had a recurrence of that distinct prevision which
I have described in relation to my first interview with Bertha; and
I was waiting with eager curiosity to know whether or not my vision
of Prague would prove to have been an instance of the same kind.
A few days after the incident of the opal ring, we were paying one of
our frequent visits to the Lichtenberg Palace. I could never look
at many pictures in succession; for pictures, when they are at all powerful,
affect me so strongly that one or two exhaust all my capability of contemplation.
This morning I had been looking at Giorgione’s picture of the
cruel-eyed woman, said to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia. I
had stood long alone before it, fascinated by the terrible reality of
that cunning, relentless face, till I felt a strange poisoned sensation,
as if I had long been inhaling a fatal odour, and was just beginning
to be conscious of its effects. Perhaps even then I should not
have moved away, if the rest of the party had not returned to this room,
and announced that they were going to the Belvedere Gallery to settle
a bet which had arisen between my brother and Mr. Filmore about a portrait.
I followed them dreamily, and was hardly alive to what occurred till
they had all gone up to the gallery, leaving me below; for I refused
to come within sight of another picture that day. I made my way
to the Grand Terrace, since it was agreed that we should saunter in
the gardens when the dispute had been decided. I had been sitting
here a short space, vaguely conscious of trim gardens, with a city and
green hills in the distance, when, wishing to avoid the proximity of
the sentinel, I rose and walked down the broad stone steps, intending
to seat myself farther on in the gardens. Just as I reached the
gravel-walk, I felt an arm slipped within mine, and a light hand gently
pressing my wrist. In the same instant a strange intoxicating
numbness passed over me, like the continuance or climax of the sensation
I was still feeling from the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia. The gardens,
the summer sky, the consciousness of Bertha’s arm being within
mine, all vanished, and I seemed to be suddenly in darkness, out of
which there gradually broke a dim firelight, and I felt myself sitting
in my father’s leather chair in the library at home. I knew
the fireplace—the dogs for the wood-fire—the black marble
chimney-piece with the white marble medallion of the dying Cleopatra
in the centre. Intense and hopeless misery was pressing on my
soul; the light became stronger, for Bertha was entering with a candle
in her hand—Bertha, my wife—with cruel eyes, with green
jewels and green leaves on her white ball-dress; every hateful thought
within her present to me . . . “Madman, idiot! why don’t
you kill yourself, then?” It was a moment of hell.
I saw into her pitiless soul—saw its barren worldliness, its scorching
hate—and felt it clothe me round like an air I was obliged to
breathe. She came with her candle and stood over me with a bitter
smile of contempt; I saw the great emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded
serpent with diamond eyes. I shuddered—I despised this woman
with the barren soul and mean thoughts; but I felt helpless before her,
as if she clutched my bleeding heart, and would clutch it till the last
drop of life-blood ebbed away. She was my wife, and we hated each
other. Gradually the hearth, the dim library, the candle-light
disappeared—seemed to melt away into a background of light, the
green serpent with the diamond eyes remaining a dark image on the retina.
Then I had a sense of my eyelids quivering, and the living daylight
broke in upon me; I saw gardens, and heard voices; I was seated on the
steps of the Belvedere Terrace, and my friends were round me.</p>
<p>The tumult of mind into which I was thrown by this hideous vision
made me ill for several days, and prolonged our stay at Vienna.
I shuddered with horror as the scene recurred to me; and it recurred
constantly, with all its minutiæ, as if they had been burnt into
my memory; and yet, such is the madness of the human heart under the
influence of its immediate desires, I felt a wild hell-braving joy that
Bertha was to be mine; for the fulfilment of my former prevision concerning
her first appearance before me, left me little hope that this last hideous
glimpse of the future was the mere diseased play of my own mind, and
had no relation to external realities. One thing alone I looked
towards as a possible means of casting doubt on my terrible conviction—the
discovery that my vision of Prague had been false—and Prague was
the next city on our route.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I was no sooner in Bertha’s society again than I
was as completely under her sway as before. What if I saw into
the heart of Bertha, the matured woman—Bertha, my wife?
Bertha, the <i>girl</i>, was a fascinating secret to me still: I trembled
under her touch; I felt the witchery of her presence; I yearned to be
assured of her love. The fear of poison is feeble against the
sense of thirst. Nay, I was just as jealous of my brother as before—just
as much irritated by his small patronizing ways; for my pride, my diseased
sensibility, were there as they had always been, and winced as inevitably
under every offence as my eye winced from an intruding mote. The
future, even when brought within the compass of feeling by a vision
that made me shudder, had still no more than the force of an idea, compared
with the force of present emotion—of my love for Bertha, of my
dislike and jealousy towards my brother.</p>
<p>It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and
sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a
distant day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after
with an impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside
them for evermore. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road,
to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path
lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude,
with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of
old time.</p>
<p>My mind speculated eagerly on the means by which I should become
my brother’s successful rival, for I was still too timid, in my
ignorance of Bertha’s actual feeling, to venture on any step that
would urge from her an avowal of it. I thought I should gain confidence
even for this, if my vision of Prague proved to have been veracious;
and yet, the horror of that certitude! Behind the slim girl Bertha,
whose words and looks I watched for, whose touch was bliss, there stood
continually that Bertha with the fuller form, the harder eyes, the more
rigid mouth—with the barren, selfish soul laid bare; no longer
a fascinating secret, but a measured fact, urging itself perpetually
on my unwilling sight. Are you unable to give me your sympathy—you
who react this? Are you unable to imagine this double consciousness
at work within me, flowing on like two parallel streams which never
mingle their waters and blend into a common hue? Yet you must
have known something of the presentiments that spring from an insight
at war with passion; and my visions were only like presentiments intensified
to horror. You have known the powerlessness of ideas before the
might of impulse; and my visions, when once they had passed into memory,
were mere ideas—pale shadows that beckoned in vain, while my hand
was grasped by the living and the loved.</p>
<p>In after-days I thought with bitter regret that if I had foreseen
something more or something different—if instead of that hideous
vision which poisoned the passion it could not destroy, or if even along
with it I could have had a foreshadowing of that moment when I looked
on my brother’s face for the last time, some softening influence
would have been shed over my feeling towards him: pride and hatred would
surely have been subdued into pity, and the record of those hidden sins
would have been shortened. But this is one of the vain thoughts
with which we men flatter ourselves. We try to believe that the
egoism within us would have easily been melted, and that it was only
the narrowness of our knowledge which hemmed in our generosity, our
awe, our human piety, and hindered them from submerging our hard indifference
to the sensations and emotions of our fellows. Our tenderness
and self-renunciation seem strong when our egoism has had its day—when,
after our mean striving for a triumph that is to be another’s
loss, the triumph comes suddenly, and we shudder at it, because it is
held out by the chill hand of death.</p>
<p>Our arrival in Prague happened at night, and I was glad of this,
for it seemed like a deferring of a terribly decisive moment, to be
in the city for hours without seeing it. As we were not to remain
long in Prague, but to go on speedily to Dresden, it was proposed that
we should drive out the next morning and take a general view of the
place, as well as visit some of its specially interesting spots, before
the heat became oppressive—for we were in August, and the season
was hot and dry. But it happened that the ladies were rather late
at their morning toilet, and to my father’s politely-repressed
but perceptible annoyance, we were not in the carriage till the morning
was far advanced. I thought with a sense of relief, as we entered
the Jews’ quarter, where we were to visit the old synagogue, that
we should be kept in this flat, shut-up part of the city, until we should
all be too tired and too warm to go farther, and so we should return
without seeing more than the streets through which we had already passed.
That would give me another day’s suspense—suspense, the
only form in which a fearful spirit knows the solace of hope.
But, as I stood under the blackened, groined arches of that old synagogue,
made dimly visible by the seven thin candles in the sacred lamp, while
our Jewish cicerone reached down the Book of the Law, and read to us
in its ancient tongue—I felt a shuddering impression that this
strange building, with its shrunken lights, this surviving withered
remnant of medieval Judaism, was of a piece with my vision. Those
darkened dusty Christian saints, with their loftier arches and their
larger candles, needed the consolatory scorn with which they might point
to a more shrivelled death-in-life than their own.</p>
<p>As I expected, when we left the Jews’ quarter the elders of
our party wished to return to the hotel. But now, instead of rejoicing
in this, as I had done beforehand, I felt a sudden overpowering impulse
to go on at once to the bridge, and put an end to the suspense I had
been wishing to protract. I declared, with unusual decision, that
I would get out of the carriage and walk on alone; they might return
without me. My father, thinking this merely a sample of my usual
“poetic nonsense,” objected that I should only do myself
harm by walking in the heat; but when I persisted, he said angrily that
I might follow my own absurd devices, but that Schmidt (our courier)
must go with me. I assented to this, and set off with Schmidt
towards the bridge. I had no sooner passed from under the archway
of the grand old gate leading an to the bridge, than a trembling seized
me, and I turned cold under the midday sun; yet I went on; I was in
search of something—a small detail which I remembered with special
intensity as part of my vision. There it was—the patch of
rainbow light on the pavement transmitted through a lamp in the shape
of a star.</p>
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