The Lifted Veil .....................................................................................................................................................1

George Eliot .............................................................................................................................................1

The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary

course of things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many months.

Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional

mental character, I shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence. If it

were to be otherwiseif I were to live on to the age most men desire and provide forI should for once

have known whether the miseries of delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true provision. For I

Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o'clock

at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope. Just as I

am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction

will begin at my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of

suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why. My two servants are lovers, and will have

quarrelled. My housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry

will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little

scullerymaid is asleep on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake her. The sense of suffocation

increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long

for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known,

and be weary of it: I am content. Agony of pain and suffocationand all the while the earth, the fields, the

pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morning through my

chamberwindow, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty airwill darkness close over them for ever?

Darknessdarknessno painnothing but darkness: but I am passing on and on through the darkness: my

Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my

experience. I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust

much in the sympathy of my fellowmen. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some

tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiventhe living only

from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart

beats, bruise itit is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid

entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost

sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering

compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of

injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognitionmake hasteoppress it with your ill considered

judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by be

still"ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit"; the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf; the

brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work. Then your charitable speeches may find vent;

then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour to

the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them.

That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it? It has little reference to me, for I shall leave no works

behind me for men to honour. I have no near relatives who will make up, by weeping over my grave, for the

wounds they inflicted on me when I was among them. It is only the story of my life that will perhaps win a

little more sympathy from strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain from my friends

My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by contrast with all the afteryears. For then

the curtain of the future was as impenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight in the present

hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and I had a tender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse

of long years, a slight trace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress as she held me on her

kneeher arms round my little body, her cheek pressed on mine. I had a complaint of the eyes that made me

blind for a little while, and she kept me on her knee from morning till night. That unequalled love soon

vanished out of my life, and even to my childish consciousness it was as if that life had become more chill I

rode my little white pony with the groom by my side as before, but there were no loving eyes looking at me

as I mounted, no glad arms opened to me when I came back. Perhaps I missed my mother's love more than

most children of seven or eight would have done, to whom the other pleasures of life remained as before; for

I was certainly a very sensitive child. I remember still the mingled trepidation and delicious excitement with

which I was affected by the tramping of the horses on the pavement in the echoing stables, by the loud

resonance of the groom's voices, by the booming bark of the dogs as my father's carriage thundered under the

archway of the courtyard, by the din of the gong as it gave notice of luncheon and dinner. The measured

tramp of soldiery which I sometimes heardfor my father's house lay near a county town where there were

large barracksmade me sob and tremble; and yet when they were gone past, I longed for them to come

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in

fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his

only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was fiveandforty when he married her. He was a

firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active

landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to

day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in great

awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which,

perhaps, helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one

with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to

be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of

course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the

attainment of an aristocratic position. But, intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred

spirits"; having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's AEschylus, and

dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent

connexion with mining speculations; namely, that a scientific education was the really useful training for a

younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit to encounter the rough

experience of a public school. Mr. Letherall had said so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall was a large man in

spectacles, who one day took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an

exploratory, auspicious mannerthen placed each of his great thumbs on my temples, and pushed me a little

way from him, and stared at me with glittering spectacles. The contemplation appeared to displease him, for

he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his thumbs across my eyebrows

"The deficiency is there, sirthere; and here," he added, touching the upper sides of my head, "here is the

I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the object of reprobation, partly in the agitation

of my first hatred hatred of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy and

I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the system afterwards adopted towards me, but it was

presently clear that private tutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages, were the appliances by

which the defects of my organization were to be remedied. I was very stupid about machines, so I was to be

greatly occupied with them; I had no memory for classification, so it was particularly necessary that I should

study systematic zoology and botany; I was hungry for human deeds and humane motions, so I was to be

plentifully crammed with the mechanical powers, the elementary bodies, and the phenomena of electricity

and magnetism. A betterconstituted boy would certainly have profited under my intelligent tutors, with their

scientific apparatus; and would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and magnetism as

fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they were. As it was, I could have paired off, for ignorance of

whatever was taught me, with the worst Latin scholar that was ever turned out of a classical academy. I read

Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied myself in that way with wandering

thoughts, while my tutor was assuring me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was

a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill." I had no desire to be this improved man; I was glad of

the running water; I could watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the bright green

waterplants, by the hour together. I did not want to know WHY it ran; I had perfect confidence that there

There is no need to dwell on this part of my life. I have said enough to indicate that my nature was of the

sensitive, unpractical order, and that it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster it into

happy, healthy development. When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva to complete my course of education;

and the change was a very happy one to me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as we

descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and the three years of my life there were

spent in a perpetual sense of exaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of Nature in all

her awful loveliness. You will think, perhaps, that I must have been a poet, from this early sensibility to

Nature. But my lot was not so happy as that. A poet pours forth his song and BELIEVES in the listening ear

and answering soul, to which his song will be floated sooner or later. But the poet's sensibility without his

voicethe poet's sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunny bank, when the noonday light

sparkles on the water, or in an inward shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the sight of a cold human

eyethis dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in the society of one's fellowmen. My least

solitary moments were those in which I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of the lake; it

seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountaintops, and the wide blue water, surrounded me with a

cherishing love such as no human face had shed on me since my mother's love had vanished out of my life. I

used to do as Jean Jacques didlie down in my boat and let it glide where it would, while I looked up at the

departing glow leaving one mountaintop after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire were passing over

them on its way to the home of light. Then, when the white summits were all sad and corpselike, I had to

push homeward, for I was under careful surveillance, and was allowed no late wanderings. This disposition of

mine was not favourable to the formation of intimate friendships among the numerous youths of my own age

who are always to be found studying at Geneva. Yet I made ONE such friendship; and, singularly enough, it

was with a youth whose intellectual tendencies were the very reverse of my own. I shall call him Charles

Meunier; his real surnamean English one, for he was of English extractionhaving since become

celebrated. He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance while he pursued the medical studies for

which he had a special genius. Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating inquiry

and given up to contemplation, I should have been drawn towards a youth whose strongest passion was

science. But the bond was not an intellectual one; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid with

the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical: it came from community of feeling. Charles was poor and ugly,

derided by Genevese gamins, and not acceptable in drawingrooms. I saw that he was isolated, as I was,

though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic resentment, I made timid advances towards

him. It is enough to say that there sprang up as much comradeship between us as our different habits would

allow; and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Saleve together, or took the boat to Vevay, while I

listened dreamily to the monologues in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future experiment and

discovery. I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of blue water and delicate floating cloud,

with the notes of birds and the distant glitter of the glacier. He knew quite well that my mind was half absent,

yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we talk of our hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds,

when they love us? I have mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion with a strange and terrible

This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness, which is partly a blank to me, partly a time

of dimlyremembered suffering, with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time. Then came the

languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually breaking into variety and distinctness as my strength

enabled me to take longer and longer drives. On one of these more vividly remembered days, my father said

"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you home with me. The journey will amuse

you and do you good, for I shall go through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places. Our

neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and we shall all go together to Vienna, and

My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he left my mind resting on the word

PRAGUE, with a strange sense that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad

sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a longpast century arrested in its

courseunrefreshed for ages by dews of night, or the rushing raincloud; scorching the dusty, weary,

timeeaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like deposed and

superannuated kings in their regal goldinwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad river

seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the

unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and

owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral

visitants infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of ancient

faded children, in those tanned timefretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their court in

the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who

worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their doom to

be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual midday, without the

A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became conscious of the objects in my room

again: one of the fire irons had fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught. My heart was

palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my draught beside me; I would take it presently.

As soon as I was alone again, I began to ask myself whether I had been sleeping. Was this a dreamthis

wonderfully distinct vision minute in its distinctness down to a patch of rainbow light on the pavement,

transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a starof a strange city, quite unfamiliar to my

imagination? I had seen no picture of Prague: it lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguelyremembered

historical associationsilldefined memories of imperial grandeur and religious wars.

Nothing of this sort had ever occurred in my dreaming experience before, for I had often been humiliated

because my dreams were only saved from being utterly disjointed and commonplace by the frequent terrors

of nightmare. But I could not believe that I had been asleep, for I remembered distinctly the gradual

breakingin of the vision upon me, like the new images in a dissolving view, or the growing distinctness of

the landscape as the sun lifts up the veil of the morning mist. And while I was conscious of this incipient

vision, I was also conscious that Pierre came to tell my father Mr. Filmore was waiting for him, and that my

father hurried out of the room. No, it was not a dream; was itthe thought was full of tremulous

exultationwas it the poet's nature in me, hitherto only a troubled yearning sensibility, now manifesting

itself suddenly as spontaneous creation? Surely it was in this way that Homer saw the plain of Troy, that

Dante saw the abodes of the departed, that Milton saw the earthward flight of the Tempter. Was it that my

illness had wrought some happy change in my organizationgiven a firmer tension to my nervescarried

off some dull obstruction? I had often read of such effectsin works of fiction at least. Nay; in genuine

biographies I had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on the mental powers. Did not

When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea, it seemed to me that I might perhaps test it by

an exertion of my will. The vision had begun when my father was speaking of our going to Prague. I did not

for a moment believe it was really a representation of that city; I believedI hoped it was a picture that my

newly liberated genius had painted in fiery haste, with the colours snatched from lazy memory. Suppose I

were to fix my mind on some other placeVenice, for example, which was far more familiar to my

imagination than Prague: perhaps the same sort of result would follow. I concentrated my thoughts on

Venice; I stimulated my imagination with poetic memories, and strove to feel myself present in Venice, as I

had felt myself present in Prague. But in vain. I was only colouring the Canaletto engravings that hung in my

old bedroom at home; the picture was a shifting one, my mind wandering uncertainly in search of more vivid

images; I could see no accident of form or shadow without conscious labour after the necessary conditions. It

was all prosaic effort, not rapt passivity, such as I had experienced half an hour before. I was discouraged; but

For several days I was in a state of excited expectation, watching for a recurrence of my new gift. I sent my

thoughts ranging over my world of knowledge, in the hope that they would find some object which would

send a reawakening vibration through my slumbering genius. But no; my world remained as dim as ever, and

that flash of strange light refused to come again, though I watched for it with palpitating eagerness.

My father accompanied me every day in a drive, and a gradually lengthening walk as my powers of walking

increased; and one evening he had agreed to come and fetch me at twelve the next day, that we might go

together to select a musical box, and other purchases rigorously demanded of a rich Englishman visiting

Geneva. He was one of the most punctual of men and bankers, and I was always nervously anxious to be

quite ready for him at the appointed time. But, to my surprise, at a quarter past twelve he had not appeared. I

felt all the impatience of a convalescent who has nothing particular to do, and who has just taken a tonic in

Unable to sit still and reserve my strength, I walked up and down the room, looking out on the current of the

Rhone, just where it leaves the darkblue lake; but thinking all the while of the possible causes that could

Suddenly I was conscious that my father was in the room, but not alone: there were two persons with him.

Strange! I had heard no footstep, I had not seen the door open; but I saw my father, and at his right hand our

neighbour Mrs. Filmore, whom I remembered very well, though I had not seen her for five years. She was a

commonplace middleaged woman, in silk and cashmere; but the lady on the left of my father was not more

than twenty, a tall, slim, willowy figure, with luxuriant blond hair, arranged in cunning braids and folds that

looked almost too massive for the slight figure and the smallfeatured, thinlipped face they crowned. But

the face had not a girlish expression: the features were sharp, the pale grey eyes at once acute, restless, and

sarcastic. They were fixed on me in halfsmiling curiosity, and I felt a painful sensation as if a sharp wind

were cutting me. The palegreen dress, and the green leaves that seemed to form a border about her pale

blond hair, made me think of a WaterNixiefor my mind was full of German lyrics, and this pale,

fataleyed woman, with the green weeds, looked like a birth from some cold sedgy stream, the daughter of an

But while the last word was in my ears, the whole group vanished, and there was nothing between me and the

Chinese printed folding screen that stood before the door. I was cold and trembling; I could only totter

forward and throw myself on the sofa. This strange new power had manifested itself again . . . But WAS it a

power? Might it not rather be a diseasea sort of intermittent delirium, concentrating my energy of brain

into moments of unhealthy activity, and leaving my saner hours all the more barren? I felt a dizzy sense of

unreality in what my eye rested on; I grasped the bell convulsively, like one trying to free himself from

"I'm tired of waiting, Pierre," I said, as distinctly and emphatically as I could, like a man determined to be

sober in spite of wine; "I'm afraid something has happened to my fatherhe's usually so punctual. Run to the

Pierre left the room at once, with a soothing "Bien, Monsieur"; and I felt the better for this scene of simple,

waking prose. Seeking to calm myself still further, I went into my bedroom, adjoining the salon, and opened

a case of eaudeCologne; took out a bottle; went through the process of taking out the cork very neatly, and

then rubbed the reviving spirit over my hands and forehead, and under my nostrils, drawing a new delight

from the scent because I had procured it by slow details of labour, and by no strange sudden madness.

Already I had begun to taste something of the horror that belongs to the lot of a human being whose nature is

Still enjoying the scent, I returned to the salon, but it was not unoccupied, as it had been before I left it. In

front of the Chinese foldingscreen there was my father, with Mrs. Filmore on his right hand, and on his

leftthe slim, blondhaired girl, with the keen face and the keen eyes fixed on me in halfsmiling curiosity.

I heard no more, felt no more, till I became conscious that I was lying with my head low on the sofa, Pierre,

and my father by my side. As soon as I was thoroughly revived, my father left the room, and presently

"I've been to tell the ladies how you are, Latimer. They were waiting in the next room. We shall put off our

Presently he said, "That young lady is Bertha Grant, Mrs. Filmore's orphan niece. Filmore has adopted her,

and she lives with them, so you will have her for a neighbour when we go homeperhaps for a near relation;

for there is a tenderness between her and Alfred, I suspect, and I should be gratified by the match, since

Filmore means to provide for her in every way as if she were his daughter. It had not occurred to me that you

He made no further allusion to the fact of my having fainted at the moment of seeing her, and I would not for

the world have told him the reason: I shrank from the idea of disclosing to any one what might be regarded as

a pitiable peculiarity, most of all from betraying it to my father, who would have suspected my sanity ever

I do not mean to dwell with particularity on the details of my experience. I have described these two cases at

Shortly after this last occurrenceI think the very next dayI 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 acquaintanceMrs. Filmore, for examplewould force themselves on my

consciousness like an importunate, illplayed 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 mewhen the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the

wittilyturned 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 makeshift

thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.

At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome, self confident man of sixandtwentya

thorough contrast to my fragile, nervous, ineffectual self. I believe I was held to have a sort of

halfwomanish, halfghostly beauty; for the portraitpainters, 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 sufferingtoo 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

brotherlike to me. He had the superficial kindness of a goodhumoured, selfsatisfied 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 selfcomplacent

belief in Bertha Grant's passion for him, with his halfpitying contempt for meseen not in the ordinary

indications of intonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspicious mind is on the watch

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 selfcentred

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 opinionfeel an

additional triumph in conquering the reverence of a critic habitually captious and satirical: no wonder, then,

that an enthusiastic selfdistrusting 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 therethey 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 workthat subtle physical

attraction which delights in cheating our psychological predictions, and in compelling the men who paint

sylphs, to fall in love with some bonne et brave femme, heavy heeled and freckled.

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 engagementthere 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

phrasesfeminine nothings which could never be quoted against herthat 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.

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 ringthe 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

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

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.

I should mention that during these two monthswhich seemed a long life to me from the novelty and

intensity of the pleasures and pains I underwentmy 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

uttera 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 wordsvery far from being words of course, easy to divineshould

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

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 crueleyed 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 gravelwalk, 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 fireplacethe dogs for the woodfirethe black marble chimneypiece 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 wifewith cruel

eyes, with green jewels and green leaves on her white balldress; 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

soulsaw its barren worldliness, its scorching hateand 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 shudderedI 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 candlelight disappearedseemed 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 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 minutiae, 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 hellbraving 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

convictionthe discovery that my vision of Prague had been falseand Prague was the next city on our

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 womanBertha, my wife? Bertha, the GIRL, 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 beforejust 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

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

tramroad, 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

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 mouthwith 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 sympathyyou 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 ideaspale shadows that beckoned in

In afterdays I thought with bitter regret that if I had foreseen something more or something differentif

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 selfrenunciation seem strong when our egoism has had its

daywhen, after our mean striving for a triumph that is to be another's loss, the triumph comes suddenly,

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

oppressivefor 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 politelyrepressed 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, shutup 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 suspensesuspense, 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 tongueI 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

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 somethinga small detail which I

remembered with special intensity as part of my vision. There it wasthe patch of rainbow light on the

Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still stood thick on the beeches in our park, my

brother and Bertha were engaged to each other, and it was understood that their marriage was to take place

early in the next spring. In spite of the certainty I had felt from that moment on the bridge at Prague, that

Bertha would one day be my wife, my constitutional timidity and distrust had continued to benumb me, and

the words in which I had sometimes premeditated a confession of my love, had died away unuttered. The

same conflict had gone on within me as beforethe longing for an assurance of love from Bertha's lips, the

dread lest a word of contempt and denial should fall upon me like a corrosive acid. What was the conviction

of a distant necessity to me? l trembled under a present glance, I hungered after a present joy, I was clogged

and chilled by a present fear. And so the days passed on: I witnessed Bertha's engagement and heard her

marriage discussed as if I were under a conscious nightmareknowing it was a dream that would vanish, but

When I was not in Bertha's presenceand I was with her very often, for she continued to treat me with a

playful patronage that wakened no jealousy in my brotherI spent my time chiefly in wandering, in

strolling, or taking long rides while the daylight lasted, and then shutting myself up with my unread books;

for books had lost the power of chaining my attention. My selfconsciousness was heightened to that pitch of

intensity in which our own emotions take the form of a drama which urges itself imperatively on our

contemplation, and we begin to weep, less under the sense of our suffering than at the thought of it. I felt a

sort of pitying anguish over the pathos of my own lot: the lot of a being finely organized for pain, but with

hardly any fibres that responded to pleasureto whom the idea of future evil robbed the present of its joy,

and for whom the idea of future good did not still the uneasiness of a present yearning or a present dread. I

went dumbly through that stage of the poet's suffering, in which he feels the delicious pang of utterance, and

I was left entirely without remonstrance concerning this dreamy wayward life: I knew my father's thought

about me: "That lad will never be good for anything in life: he may waste his years in an insignificant way on

the income that falls to him: I shall not trouble myself about a career for him."

One mild morning in the beginning of November, it happened that I was standing outside the portico patting

lazy old Caesar, a Newfoundland almost blind with age, the only dog that ever took any notice of mefor

the very dogs shunned me, and fawned on the happier people about mewhen the groom brought up my

brother's horse which was to carry him to the hunt, and my brother himself appeared at the door, florid,

broadchested, and selfcomplacent, feeling what a goodnatured fellow he was not to behave insolently to

"Latimer, old boy," he said to me in a tone of compassionate cordiality, "what a pity it is you don't have a run

"Low spirits!" I thought bitterly, as he rode away; "that is the sort of phrase with which coarse, narrow

natures like yours think to describe experience of which you can know no more than your horse knows. It is

to such as you that the good of this world falls: ready dulness, healthy selfishness, goodtempered conceit

The quick thought came, that my selfishness was even stronger than hisit was only a suffering selfishness

instead of an enjoying one. But then, again, my exasperating insight into Alfred's self complacent soul, his

freedom from all the doubts and fears, the unsatisfied yearnings, the exquisite tortures of sensitiveness, that

had made the web of my life, seemed to absolve me from all bonds towards him. This man needed no pity, no

love; those fine influences would have been as little felt by him as the delicate white mist is felt by the rock it

caresses. There was no evil in store for HIM: if he was not to marry Bertha, it would be because he had found

Mr. Filmore's house lay not more than half a mile beyond our own gates, and whenever I knew my brother

was gone in another direction, I went there for the chance of finding Bertha at home. Later on in the day I

walked thither. By a rare accident she was alone, and we walked out in the grounds together, for she seldom

went on foot beyond the trimlyswept gravelwalks. I remember what a beautiful sylph she looked to me as

the low November sun shone on her blond hair, and she tripped along teasing me with her usual light banter,

to which I listened half fondly, half moodily; it was all the sign Bertha's mysterious inner self ever made to

me. To day perhaps, the moodiness predominated, for I had not yet shaken off the access of jealous hate

which my brother had raised in me by his parting patronage. Suddenly I interrupted and startled her by

She looked at me with surprise for a moment, but soon her light smile came again, and she answered

"What! your wisdom thinks I must love the man I'm going to marry? The most unpleasant thing in the world.

I should quarrel with him; I should be jealous of him; our menage would be conducted in a very illbred

"Bertha, that is not your real feeling. Why do you delight in trying to deceive me by inventing such cynical

"I need never take the trouble of invention in order to deceive you, my small Tasso" (that was the mocking

name she usually gave me). "The easiest way to deceive a poet is to tell him the truth."

She was testing the validity of her epigram in a daring way, and for a moment the shadow of my visionthe

Bertha whose soul was no secret to mepassed between me and the radiant girl, the playful sylph whose

feelings were a fascinating mystery. I suppose I must have shuddered, or betrayed in some other way my

"Tasso!" she said, seizing my wrist, and peeping round into my face, "are you really beginning to discern

what a heartless girl I am? Why, you are not half the poet I thought you were; you are actually capable of

The shadow passed from between us, and was no longer the object nearest to me. The girl whose light fingers

grasped me, whose elfish charming face looked into minewho, I thought, was betraying an interest in my

feelings that she would not have directly avowed,this warm breathing presence again possessed my senses

and imagination like a returning siren melody which had been overpowered for an instant by the roar of

threatening waves. It was a moment as delicious to me as the waking up to a consciousness of youth after a

dream of middle age. I forgot everything but my passion, and said with swimming eyes

"Bertha, shall you love me when we are first married? I wouldn't mind if you really loved me only for a little

Her look of astonishment, as she loosed my hand and started away from me, recalled me to a sense of my

"Forgive me," I said, hurriedly, as soon as I could speak again; "I did not know what I was saying."

"Ah, Tasso's mad fit has come on, I see," she answered quietly, for she had recovered herself sooner than I

had. "Let him go home and keep his head cool. I must go in, for the sun is setting."

I left herfull of indignation against myself. I had let slip words which, if she reflected on them, might rouse

in her a suspicion of my abnormal mental conditiona suspicion which of all things I dreaded. And besides

that, I was ashamed of the apparent baseness I had committed in uttering them to my brother's betrothed wife.

I wandered home slowly, entering our park through a private gate instead of by the lodges. As I approached

the house, I saw a man dashing off at full speed from the stableyard across the park. Had any accident

happened at home? No; perhaps it was only one of my father's peremptory business errands that required this

Nevertheless I quickened my pace without any distinct motive, and was soon at the house. I will not dwell on

the scene I found there. My brother was deadhad been pitched from his horse, and killed on the spot by a

I went up to the room where he lay, and where my father was seated beside him with a look of rigid despair. I

had shunned my father more than any one since our return home, for the radical antipathy between our

natures made my insight into his inner self a constant affliction to me. But now, as I went up to him, and

stood beside him in sad silence, I felt the presence of a new element that blended us as we had never been

blent before. My father had been one of the most successful men in the moneygetting world: he had had no

sentimental sufferings, no illness. The heaviest trouble that had befallen him was the death of his first wife.

But he married my mother soon after; and I remember he seemed exactly the same, to my keen childish

observation, the week after her death as before. But now, at last, a sorrow had comethe sorrow of old age,

which suffers the more from the crushing of its pride and its hopes, in proportion as the pride and hope are

narrow and prosaic. His son was to have been married soonwould probably have stood for the borough at

the next election. That son's existence was the best motive that could be alleged for making new purchases of

land every year to round off the estate. It is a dreary thing onto live on doing the same things year after year,

without knowing why we do them. Perhaps the tragedy of disappointed youth and passion is less piteous than

As I saw into the desolation of my father's heart, I felt a movement of deep pity towards him, which was the

beginning of a new affectionan affection that grew and strengthened in spite of the strange bitterness with

which he regarded me in the first month or two after my brother's death. If it had not been for the softening

influence of my compassion for himthe first deep compassion I had ever feltI should have been stung by

the perception that my father transferred the inheritance of an eldest son to me with a mortified sense that fate

had compelled him to the unwelcome course of caring for me as an important being. It was only in spite of

himself that he began to think of me with anxious regard. There is hardly any neglected child for whom death

Gradually, however, my new deference to his wishes, the effect of that patience which was born of my pity

for him, won upon his affection, and he began to please himself with the endeavour to make me fill any

brother's place as fully as my feebler personality would admit. I saw that the prospect which by and by

presented itself of my becoming Bertha's husband was welcome to him, and he even contemplated in my case

what he had not intended in my brother'sthat his son and daughterinlaw should make one household

with him. My softened feelings towards my father made this the happiest time I had known since

childhood;these last months in which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha, of longing and

doubting and hoping that she might love me. She behaved with a certain new consciousness and distance

towards me after my brother's death; and I too was under a double constraint that of delicacy towards my

brother's memory and of anxiety as to the impression my abrupt words had left on her mind. But the

additional screen this mutual reserve erected between us only brought me more completely under her power:

no matter how empty the adytum, so that the veil be thick enough. So absolute is our soul's need of something

hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life,

that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond today, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the

hours that lie between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and our one afternoon; we

should rush fiercely to the Exchange for our last possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment: we

should have a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a nocrisis within the only twentyfour hours

left open to prophecy. Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were

selfevident except one, which was to become selfevident at the close of a summer's day, but in the

meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature and

science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the

more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more

adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our

Bertha, the slim, fairhaired girl, whose present thoughts and emotions were an enigma to me amidst the

fatiguing obviousness of the other minds around me, was as absorbing to me as a single unknown todayas

a single hypothetic proposition to remain problematic till sunset; and all the cramped, hemmedin belief and

disbelief, trust and distrust, of my nature, welled out in this one narrow channel.

And she made me believe that she loved me. Without ever quitting her tone of BADINAGE and playful

superiority, she intoxicated me with the sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease, unless I

was near her, submitting to her playful tyranny. It costs a woman so little effort to beset us in this way! A

half repressed word, a moment's unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will serve

us as hashish for a long while. Out of the subtlest web of scarcely perceptible signs, she set me weaving the

fancy that she had always unconsciously loved me better than Alfred, but that, with the ignorant fluttered

sensibility of a young girl, she had been imposed on by the charm that lay for her in the distinction of being

admired and chosen by a man who made so brilliant a figure in the world as my brother. She satirized herself

in a very graceful way for her vanity and ambition. What was it to me that I had the light of my wretched

provision on the fact that now it was I who possessed at least all but the personal part of my brother's

advantages? Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions, like effects of colour that we know to be

We were married eighteen months after Alfred's death, one cold, clear morning in April, when there came

hail and sunshine both together; and Bertha, in her white silk and palegreen leaves, and the pale hues of her

hair and face, looked like the spirit of the morning. My father was happier than he had thought of being

again: my marriage, he felt sure, would complete the desirable modification of my character, and make me

practical and worldly enough to take my place in society among sane men. For he delighted in Bertha's tact

and acuteness, and felt sure she would be mistress of me, and make me what she chose: I was only twenty

one, and madly in love with her. Poor father! He kept that hope a little while after our first year of marriage,

and it was not quite extinct when paralysis came and saved him from utter disappointment.

I shall hurry through the rest of my story, not dwelling so much as I have hitherto done on my inward

experience. When people are well known to each other, they talk rather of what befalls them externally,

We lived in a round of visits for some time after our return home, giving splendid dinnerparties, and making

a sensation in our neighbourhood by the new lustre of our equipage, for my father had reserved this display of

his increased wealth for the period of his son's marriage; and we gave our acquaintances liberal opportunity

for remarking that it was a pity I made so poor a figure as an heir and a bridegroom. The nervous fatigue of

this existence, the insincerities and platitudes which I had to live through twice overthrough my inner and

outward sensewould have been maddening to me, if I had not had that sort of intoxicated callousness

which came from the delights of a first passion. A bride and bridegroom, surrounded by all the appliances of

wealth, hurried through the day by the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments with hastilysnatched

caresses, are prepared for their future life together as the novice is prepared for the cloisterby experiencing

Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha's inward self remained shrouded from me, and I still read

her thoughts only through the language of her lips and demeanour: I had still the human interest of wondering

whether what I did and said pleased her, of longing to hear a word of affection, of giving a delicious

exaggeration of meaning to her smile. But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner towards

me; sometimes strong enough to be called haughty coldness, cutting and chilling me as the hail had done that

came across the sunshine on our marriage morning; sometimes only perceptible in the dexterous avoidance of

a teteatete walk or dinner to which I had been looking forward. I had been deeply pained by thishad

even felt a sort of crushing of the heart, from the sense that my brief day of happiness was near its setting; but

still I remained dependent on Bertha, eager for the last rays of a bliss that would soon be gone for ever,

I rememberhow should I not remember?the time when that dependence and hope utterly left me, when

the sadness I had felt in Bertha's growing estrangement became a joy that I looked back upon with longing as

a man might look back on the last pains in a paralysed limb. It was just after the close of my father's last

illness, which had necessarily withdrawn us from society and thrown us more on each other. It was the

evening of father's death. On that evening the veil which had shrouded Bertha's soul from mehad made me

find in her alone among my fellowbeings the blessed possibility of mystery, and doubt, and

expectationwas first withdrawn. Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of my passion for her, in

which that passion was completely neutralized by the presence of an absorbing feeling of another kind. I had

been watching by my father's deathbed: I had been witnessing the last fitful yearning glance his soul had cast

back on the spent inheritance of lifethe last faint consciousness of love he had gathered from the pressure

of my hand. What are all our personal loves when we have been sharing in that supreme agony? In the first

moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our

In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sittingroom. She was seated in a leaning posture on a

settee, with her back towards the door; the great rich coils of her pale blond hair surmounting her small neck,

visible above the back of the settee. I remember, as I closed the door behind me, a cold tremulousness seizing

me, and a vague sense of being hated and lonelyvague and strong, like a presentiment. I know how I

looked at that moment, for I saw myself in Bertha's thought as she lifted her cutting grey eyes, and looked at

me: a miserable ghostseer, surrounded by phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when the

leaves were still, without appetite for the common objects of human desires, but pining after the

moonbeams. We were front to front with each other, and judged each other. The terrible moment of

complete illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden no landscape from me, but

only a blank prosaic wall: from that evening forth, through the sickening years which followed, I saw all

round the narrow room of this woman's soulsaw petty artifice and mere negation where I had delighted to

believe in coy sensibilities and in wit at war with latent feelingsaw the light floating vanities of the girl

defining themselves into the systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the womansaw repulsion

and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving pain only for the sake of wreaking itself.

For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She had believed that my wild poet's passion

for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With the

essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was unable to conceive the fact that

sensibilities were anything else than weaknesses. She had thought my weaknesses would put me in her

power, and she found them unmanageable forces. Our positions were reversed. Before marriage she had

completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret to me; and I created the unknown thought before

which I trembled as if it were hers. But now that her soul was laid open to me, now that I was compelled to

share the privacy of her motives, to follow all the petty devices that preceded her words and acts, she found

herself powerless with me, except to produce in me the chill shudder of repulsionpowerless, because I

could be acted on by no lever within her reach. I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all the

incentives within the compass of her narrow imagination, and I lived under influences utterly invisible to her.

She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the world thought. A graceful, brilliant woman, like

Bertha, who smiled on morning callers, made a figure in ballrooms, and was capable of that light repartee

which, from such a woman, is accepted as wit, was secure of carrying off all sympathy from a husband who

was sickly, abstracted, and, as some suspected, crack brained. Even the servants in our house gave her the

balance of their regard and pity. For there were no audible quarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion

from each other, lay within the silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress went out a great deal, and

seemed to dislike the master's society, was it not natural, poor thing? The master was odd. I was kind and just

to my dependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, halfcontemptuous pity; for this class of men and

women are but slightly determined in their estimate of others by general considerations, or even experience,

of character. They judge of persons as they judge of coins, and value those who pass current at a high rate.

After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits that it might seem wonderful how her hatred towards me

could grow so intense and active as it did. But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary betrayal of

mine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in methat fitfully, at least, I was strangely cognizant

of her thoughts and intentions, and she began to be haunted by a terror of me, which alternated every now and

then with defiance. She meditated continually how the incubus could be shaken off her lifehow she could

be freed from this hateful bond to a being whom she at once despised as an imbecile, and dreaded as an

inquisitor. For a long while she lived in the hope that my evident wretchedness would drive me to the

commission of suicide; but suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely swayed by the sense that I was

in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power of selfrelease. Towards my own destiny I had

become entirely passive; for my one ardent desire had spent itself, and impulse no longer predominated over

knowledge. For this reason I never thought of taking any steps towards a complete separation, which would

have made our alienation evident to the world. Why should I rush for help to a new course, when I was only

suffering from the consequences of a deed which had been the act of my intensest will? That would have

been the logic of one who had desires to gratify, and I had no desires. But Bertha and I lived more and more

That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sentences filled the space of years. So much

miseryso slow and hideous a growth of hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence! And men judge

of each other's lives through this summary medium. They epitomize the experience of their fellowmortal,

and pronounce judgment on him in neat syntax, and feel themselves wise and virtuousconquerors over the

temptations they define in well selected predicates. Seven years of wretchedness glide glibly over the lips of

the man who has never counted them out in moments of chill disappointment, of head and heart throbbings,

of dread and vain wrestling, of remorse and despair. We learn WORDS by rote, but not their meaning; THAT

must be paid for with our lifeblood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

But I will hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those

Some years after my father's death, I was sitting by the dim firelight in my library one January

eveningsitting in the leather chair that used to be my father'swhen Bertha appeared at the door, with a

candle in her hand, and advanced towards me. I knew the balldress she had onthe white balldress, with

the green jewels, shone upon by the light of the wax candle which lit up the medallion of the dying Cleopatra

on the mantelpiece. Why did she come to me before going out? I had not seen her in the library, which was

my habitual place for months. Why did she stand before me with the candle in her hand, with her cruel

contemptuous eyes fixed on me, and the glittering serpent, like a familiar demon, on her breast? For a

moment I thought this fulfilment of my vision at Vienna marked some dreadful crisis in my fate, but I saw

nothing in Bertha's mind, as she stood before me, except scorn for the look of overwhelming misery with

which I sat before her . . . "Fool, idiot, why don't you kill yourself, then?"that was her thought. But at

length her thoughts reverted to her errand, and she spoke aloud. The apparently indifferent nature of the

"I have had to hire a new maid. Fletcher is going to be married, and she wants me to ask you to let her

husband have the public house and farm at Molton. I wish him to have it. You must give the promise now,

"Very well; you may promise her," I said, indifferently, and Bertha swept out of the library again.

I always shrank from the sight of a new person, and all the more when it was a person whose mental life was

likely to weary my reluctant insight with worldly ignorant trivialities. But I shrank especially from the sight

of this new maid, because her advent had been announced to me at a moment to which I could not cease to

attach some fatality: I had a vague dread that I should find her mixed up with the dreary drama of my

lifethat some new sickening vision would reveal her to me as an evil genius. When at last I did

unavoidably meet her, the vague dread was changed into definite disgust. She was a tall, wiry, darkeyed

woman, this Mrs. Archer, with a face handsome enough to give her coarse hard nature the odious finish of

bold, selfconfident coquetry. That was enough to make me avoid her, quite apart from the contemptuous

feeling with which she contemplated me. I seldom saw her; but I perceived that she rapidly became a

favourite with her mistress, and, after the lapse of eight or nine months, I began to be aware that there had

arisen in Bertha's mind towards this woman a mingled feeling of fear and dependence, and that this feeling

was associated with ill defined images of candlelight scenes in her dressingroom, and the lockingup of

something in Bertha's cabinet. My interviews with my wife had become so brief and so rarely solitary, that I

had no opportunity of perceiving these images in her mind with more definiteness. The recollections of the

past become contracted in the rapidity of thought till they sometimes bear hardly a more distinct resemblance

to the external reality than the forms of an oriental alphabet to the objects that suggested them.

Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been going forward in my mental condition, and was

growing more and more marked. My insight into the minds of those around me was becoming dimmer and

more fitful, and the ideas that crowded my double consciousness became less and less dependent on any

personal contact. All that was personal in me seemed to be suffering a gradual death, so that I was losing the

organ through which the personal agitations and projects of others could affect me. But along with this relief

from wearisome insight, there was a new development of what I concludedas I have since found

rightlyto be a provision of external scenes. It was as if the relation between me and my fellowmen was

more and more deadened, and my relation to what we call the inanimate was quickened into new life. The

more I lived apart from society, and in proportion as my wretchedness subsided from the violent throb of

agonized passion into the dulness of habitual pain, the more frequent and vivid became such visions as that I

had had of Pragueof strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright

constellations, of mountainpasses, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs:

I was in the midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all these mighty

shapesthe presence of something unknown and pitiless. For continual suffering had annihilated religious

faith within me: to the utterly miserablethe unloving and the unlovedthere is no religion possible, no

worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my

deaththe pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in vain.

Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year. I had become entirely free from insight, from my

abnormal cognizance of any other consciousness than my own, and instead of intruding involuntarily into the

world of other minds, was living continually in my own solitary future. Bertha was aware that I was greatly

changed. To my surprise she had of late seemed to seek opportunities of remaining in my society, and had

cultivated that kind of distant yet familiar talk which is customary between a husband and wife who live in

polite and irrevocable alienation. I bore this with languid submission, and without feeling enough interest in

her motives to be roused into keen observation; yet I could not help perceiving something triumphant and

excited in her carriage and the expression of her facesomething too subtle to express itself in words or

tones, but giving one the idea that she lived in a state of expectation or hopeful suspense. My chief feeling

was satisfaction that her inner self was once more shut out from me; and I almost revelled for the moment in

the absent melancholy that made me answer her at cross purposes, and betray utter ignorance of what she had

been saying. I remember well the look and the smile with which she one day said, after a mistake of this kind

on my part: "I used to think you were a clairvoyant, and that was the reason why you were so bitter against

other clairvoyants, wanting to keep your monopoly; but I see now you have become rather duller than the rest

I said nothing in reply. It occurred to me that her recent obtrusion of herself upon me might have been

prompted by the wish to test my power of detecting some of her secrets; but I let the thought drop again at

once: her motives and her deeds had no interest for me, and whatever pleasures she might be seeking, I had

no wish to baulk her. There was still pity in my soul for every living thing, and Bertha was livingwas

Just at this time there occurred an event which roused me somewhat from my inertia, and gave me an interest

in the passing moment that I had thought impossible for me. It was a visit from Charles Meunier, who had

written me word that he was coming to England for relaxation from too strenuous labour, and would like too

see me. Meunier had now a European reputation; but his letter to me expressed that keen remembrance of an

early regard, an early debt of sympathy, which is inseparable from nobility of character: and I too felt as if his

presence would be to me like a transient resurrection into a happier preexistence.

He came, and as far as possible, I renewed our old pleasure of making teteatete excursions, though, instead

of mountains and glacers and the wide blue lake, we had to content ourselves with mere slopes and ponds and

artificial plantations. The years had changed us both, but with what different result! Meunier was now a

brilliant figure in society, to whom elegant women pretended to listen, and whose acquaintance was boasted

of by noblemen ambitious of brains. He repressed with the utmost delicacy all betrayal of the shock which I

am sure he must have received from our meeting, or of a desire to penetrate into my condition and

circumstances, and sought by the utmost exertion of his charming social powers to make our reunion

agreeable. Bertha was much struck by the unexpected fascinations of a visitor whom she had expected to find

presentable only on the score of his celebrity, and put forth all her coquetries and accomplishments.

Apparently she succeeded in attracting his admiration, for his manner towards her was attentive and

flattering. The effect of his presence on me was so benignant, especially in those renewals of our old

teteatete wanderings, when he poured forth to me wonderful narratives of his professional experience, that

more than once, when his talk turned on the psychological relations of disease, the thought crossed my mind

that, if his stay with me were long enough, I might possibly bring myself to tell this man the secrets of my lot.

Might there not lie some remedy for me, too, in his science? Might there not at least lie some comprehension

and sympathy ready for me in his large and susceptible mind? But the thought only flickered feebly now and

then, and died out before it could become a wish. The horror I had of again breaking in on the privacy of

another soul, made me, by an irrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely around my

When Meunier's visit was approaching its conclusion, there happened an event which caused some

excitement in our household, owing to the surprisingly strong effect it appeared to produce on Berthaon

Bertha, the selfpossessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to feminine agitations, and did even her hate in

a selfrestrained hygienic manner. This event was the sudden severe illness of her maid, Mrs. Archer. I have

reserved to this moment the mention of a circumstance which had forced itself on my notice shortly before

Meunier's arrival, namely, that there had been some quarrel between Bertha and this maid, apparently during

a visit to a distant family, in which she had accompanied her mistress. I had overheard Archer speaking in a

tone of bitter insolence, which I should have thought an adequate reason for immediate dismissal. No

dismissal followed; on the contrary, Bertha seemed to be silently putting up with personal inconveniences

from the exhibitions of this woman's temper. I was the more astonished to observe that her illness seemed a

cause of strong solicitude to Bertha; that she was at the bedside night and day, and would allow no one else to

officiate as headnurse. It happened that our family doctor was out on a holiday, an accident which made

Meunier's presence in the house doubly welcome, and he apparently entered into the case with an interest

which seemed so much stronger than the ordinary professional feeling, that one day when he had fallen into a

"No," he answered, "it is an attack of peritonitis, which will be fatal, but which does not differ physically

from many other cases that have come under my observation. But I'll tell you what I have on my mind. I want

to make an experiment on this woman, if you will give me permission. It can do her no harmwill give her

no painfor I shall not make it until life is extinct to all purposes of sensation. I want to try the effect of

transfusing blood into her arteries after the heart has ceased to beat for some minutes. I have tried the

experiment again and again with animals that have died of this disease, with astounding results, and I want to

try it on a human subject. I have the small tubes necessary, in a case I have with me, and the rest of the

apparatus could be prepared readily. I should use my own bloodtake it from my own arm. This woman

won't live through the night, I'm convinced, and I want you to promise me your assistance in making the

experiment. I can't do without another hand, but it would perhaps not be well to call in a medical assistant

from among your provincial doctors. A disagreeable foolish version of the thing might get abroad."

"Have you spoken to my wife on the subject?" I said, "because she appears to be peculiarly sensitive about

"To tell you the truth," said Meunier, "I don't want her to know about it. There are always insuperable

difficulties with women in these matters, and the effect on the supposed dead body may be startling. You and

I will sit up together, and be in readiness. When certain symptoms appear I shall take you in, and at the right

I need not give our farther conversation on the subject. He entered very fully into the details, and overcame

my repulsion from them, by exciting in me a mingled awe and curiosity concerning the possible results of his

We prepared everything, and he instructed me in my part as assistant. He had not told Bertha of his absolute

conviction that Archer would not survive through the night, and endeavoured to persuade her to leave the

patient and take a night's rest. But she was obstinate, suspecting the fact that death was at hand, and

supposing that he wished merely to save her nerves. She refused to leave the sickroom. Meunier and I sat up

together in the library, he making frequent visits to the sickroom, and returning with the information that the

case was taking precisely the course he expected. Once he said to me, "Can you imagine any cause of ill

"I think there was some misunderstanding between them before her illness. Why do you ask?"

"Because I have observed for the last five or six hourssince, I fancy, she has lost all hope of

recoverythere seems a strange prompting in her to say something which pain and failing strength forbid

her to utter; and there is a look of hideous meaning in her eyes, which she turns continually towards her

"I am not surprised at an indication of malevolent feeling in her," I said. "She is a woman who has always

inspired me with distrust and dislike, but she managed to insinuate herself into her mistress's favour." He was

silent after this, looking at the fire with an air of absorption, till he went upstairs again. He stayed away

I followed him to the chamber where death was hovering. The dark hangings of the large bed made a

background that gave a strong relief to Bertha's pale face as I entered. She started forward as she saw me

enter, and then looked at Meunier with an expression of angry inquiry; but he lifted up his hand as it to

impose silence, while he fixed his glance on the dying woman and felt her pulse. The face was pinched and

ghastly, a cold perspiration was on the forehead, and the eyelids were lowered so as to conceal the large dark

eyes. After a minute or two, Meunier walked round to the other side of the bed where Bertha stood, and with

his usual air of gentle politeness towards her begged her to leave the patient under our careeverything

should be done for hershe was no longer in a state to be conscious of an affectionate presence. Bertha was

hesitating, apparently almost willing to believe his assurance and to comply. She looked round at the ghastly

dying face, as if to read the confirmation of that assurance, when for a moment the lowered eyelids were

raised again, and it seemed as if the eyes were looking towards Bertha, but blankly. A shudder passed through

Bertha's frame, and she returned to her station near the pillow, tacitly implying that she would not leave the

The eyelids were lifted no more. Once I looked at Bertha as she watched the face of the dying one. She wore

a rich peignoir, and her blond hair was half covered by a lace cap: in her attire she was, as always, an elegant

woman, fit to figure in a picture of modern aristocratic life: but I asked myself how that face of hers could

ever have seemed to me the face of a woman born of woman, with memories of childhood, capable of pain,

needing to be fondled? The features at that moment seemed so preternaturally sharp, the eyes were so hard

and eagershe looked like a cruel immortal, finding her spiritual feast in the agonies of a dying race. For

across those hard features there came something like a flash when the last hour had been breathed out, and we

all felt that the dark veil had completely fallen. What secret was there between Bertha and this woman? I

turned my eyes from her with a horrible dread lest my insight should return, and I should be obliged to see

what had been breeding about two unloving women's hearts. I felt that Bertha had been watching for the

moment of death as the sealing of her secret: I thanked Heaven it could remain sealed for me.

Meunier said quietly, "She is gone." He then gave his arm to Bertha, and she submitted to be led out of the

I suppose it was at her order that two female attendants came into the room, and dismissed the younger one

who had been present before. When they entered, Meunier had already opened the artery in the long thin neck

that lay rigid on the pillow, and I dismissed them, ordering them to remain at a distance till we rang: the

doctor, I said, had an operation to performhe was not sure about the death. For the next twenty minutes I

forgot everything but Meunier and the experiment in which he was so absorbed, that I think his senses would

have been closed against all sounds or sights which had no relation to it. It was my task at first to keep up the

artificial respiration in the body after the transfusion had been effected, but presently Meunier relieved me,

and I could see the wondrous slow return of life; the breast began to heave, the inspirations became stronger,

the eyelids quivered, and the soul seemed to have returned beneath them. The artificial respiration was

Just then I heard the handle of the door moving: I suppose Bertha had heard from the women that they had

been dismissed: probably a vague fear had arisen in her mind, for she entered with a look of alarm. She came

The dead woman's eyes were wide open, and met hers in full recognitionthe recognition of hate. With a

sudden strong effort, the hand that Bertha had thought for ever still was pointed towards her, and the haggard

"You mean to poison your husband . . . the poison is in the black cabinet . . . I got it for you . . . you laughed

at me, and told lies about me behind my back, to make me disgusting . . . because you were jealous . . . are

The lips continued to murmur, but the sounds were no longer distinct. Soon there was no soundonly a

slight movement: the flame had leaped out, and was being extinguished the faster. The wretched woman's

heartstrings had been set to hatred and vengeance; the spirit of life had swept the chords for an instant, and

was gone again for ever. Great God! Is this what it is to live again . . . to wake up with our unstilled thirst

upon us, with our unuttered curses rising to our lips, with our muscles ready to act out their halfcommitted

Bertha stood pale at the foot of the bed, quivering and helpless, despairing of devices, like a cunning animal

whose hidingplaces are surrounded by swiftadvancing flame. Even Meunier looked paralysed; life for that

moment ceased to be a scientific problem to him. As for me, this scene seemed of one texture with the rest of

my existence: horror was my familiar, and this new revelation was only like an old pain recurring with new

Since then Bertha and I have lived apartshe in her own neighbourhood, the mistress of half our wealth, I as

a wanderer in foreign countries, until I came to this Devonshire nest to die. Bertha lives pitied and admired;

for what had I against that charming woman, whom every one but myself could have been happy with? There

had been no witness of the scene in the dying room except Meunier, and while Meunier lived his lips were

Once or twice, weary of wandering, I rested in a favourite spot, and my heart went out towards the men and

women and children whose faces were becoming familiar to me; but I was driven away again in terror at the

approach of my old insightdriven away to live continually with the one Unknown Presence revealed and

yet hidden by the moving curtain of the earth and sky. Till at last disease took hold of me and forced me to

rest hereforced me to live in dependence on my servants. And then the curse of insightof my double

consciousness, came again, and has never left me. I know all their narrow thoughts, their feeble regard, their

It is the 20th of September, 1850. I know these figures I have just written, as if they were a long familiar

inscription. I have seen them on this pace in my desk unnumbered times, when the scene of my dying