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THE LIFTED VEIL
THE LIFTED VEIL GEORGE ELIOT by George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]
CHAPTER I
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
otherwise--if I were to live on to the age most men desire and
provide for--I should for once have known whether the miseries of
delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true provision.
For I foresee when I shall die and everything that will happen in
my last moments.
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 scullery-maid 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 suffocation--and 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 chamber-window
the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air--will darkness close
over them for ever?
Darkness--darkness--no pain--nothing but darkness: but I am
passing on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the
darkness but always with a sense of moving onward . . .
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 fellow-men. 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
forgiven--the 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 it--it 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 recognition--make haste--oppress 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 while I was living.
My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was by
contrast with all the after-years. 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 knee--her 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 heard--for my
father's house lay near a county town where there were large
barracks--made me sob and tremble; and yet when they were gone
past I longed for them to come back again.
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 five-and-forty 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
manner--then 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 sir--there; and here" he added touching
the upper sides of my head "here is the excess. That must be
brought out sir and this must be laid to sleep."
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 cheapen it.
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 better-constituted 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 water-plants by the hour together. I did not
want to know WHY it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were
good reasons for what was so very beautiful.
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
voice--the 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 eye--this dumb passion brings with it a
fatal solitude of soul in the society of one's fellow-men. 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 mountain-tops 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
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