The French Lieutenant's Woman (60 page)

He read much, and kept a
journal of his travels; but it was an exterior thing, about places
and incidents, not about his own mind--a mere way of filling time in
the long evenings in deserted khans and alberghi. His only attempt to
express his deeper self was in the way of verse, for he discovered in
Tennyson a greatness comparable with that of Darwin in his field. The
greatness he found was, to be sure, not the greatness the age saw in
the Poet Laureate. Maud, a poem then almost universally
despised--considered quite unworthy of the master--became Charles's
favorite; he must have read it a dozen times, and parts of it a
hundred. It was the one book he carried constantly with him. His own
verse was feeble in comparison; he would rather have died than show
it to anyone else. But here is one brief specimen just to show how he
saw himself during his exile.

Oh cruel seas I
cross, and mountains harsh,
O
hundred cities of an alien tongue,
To
me no more than
some
accursed marsh
Are
all your happy scenes I pass among.

Where e'er I go
I ask of life the same;
What
drove me here?
And
now what drives me hence?
No
more is it at best than flight from shame,
At
worst an iron law's mere consequence?

And to get the taste of
that from your mouth, let me quote a far greater poem--one he
committed to heart,  and one thing he and I could have agreed
on: perhaps the noblest short poem of the whole Victorian era.

Yes; in the sea
of life enisl'd,
With
echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting
the shoreless watery wild,
We
mortal millions live alone.

The islands
feel the enclasping flow,
And
then their endless bounds they know.
But
when the moon their hollows lights
And
they are swept by balms of spring,
And
in their glens, on starry nights.

The
nightingales divinely sing;
And
lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across
the sounds and channels pour,
Oh
then a longing like despair
Is
to their farthest caverns sent;

For surely
once, they feel, we were
Parts
of a single continent.
Now
round us spreads the watery plain--
Oh
might our marges meet again!
Who
order'd, that their longing's fire

Should be, as
soon as kindled, cool'd?
Who
renders vain their deep desire?--
A
God, a God their severance ruled;
And
bade betwixt their shores to be
The
unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.*
[*Matthew
Arnold, "To Marguerite" (1853).]

Yet through all this
self-riddling gloom Charles somehow never entertained thoughts of
suicide. When he had had his great vision of himself freed from his
age, his ancestry and class and country, he had not realized how much
the freedom was embodied in Sarah; in the assumption of a shared
exile. He no longer much believed in that freedom; he felt he had
merely changed traps, or prisons. But yet there was something in his
isolation
that he could cling to; he was the outcast, the not like other men,
the result of a decision few could have taken, no matter whether it
was ultimately foolish or wise. From time to time the sight of some
newly wed couple would remind him of Ernestina. He would search his
soul then. Did he envy them or pity them? He found that there at
least he had few regrets. However bitter his destiny, it was nobler
than that one he had rejected. These European and Mediterranean
travels lasted some fifteen months, during which he not once returned
to England. He corresponded intimately with no one; most of his few
letters were addressed to Montague, and dealt with business,
instructions where next to send money and the rest. Montague had been
empowered to place from time to time advertisements in the London
newspapers: "Would Sarah Emily Woodruff or anyone knowing her
present domicile ..." but there was never an answer.

Sir Robert had taken the
news of the broken engagement badly when it first came to him, by
letter; but then, under the honeyed influence of his own imminent
happiness, he had shrugged it off. Charles was young, damn it, he
would find as good, a great deal better, a girl somewhere else; and
he had at least spared Sir Robert the embarrassment of the Freeman
connection. The nephew went once, before he left England, to pay his
respects to Mrs. Bella Tomkins; he did not like the lady, and felt
sorry for his uncle. He then declined the renewed offer of the Little
House; and did not speak of Sarah. He had promised to return to
attend the wedding; but that promise was easily broken by the
invention of a dose of malaria. Twins did not come, as he had
imagined, but a son and heir duly made his appearance in the
thirteenth month of his exile. By that time he was too well inured to
his fatality to feel much more, after the letter of congratulation
was sent, than a determination never to set foot in Winsyatt again.

If he did not remain
quite celibate technically--it was well known among the better hotels
of Europe that English gentlemen went abroad to misbehave themselves,
and opportunities were frequent--he remained so emotionally. He
performed (or deformed) the act with a kind of mute cynicism, rather
as he stared at ancient Greek temples or ate his meals. It was mere
hygiene. Love had left the world. Sometimes, in some cathedral or art
gallery, he would for a moment dream Sarah beside him. After such
moments he might have been seen to draw himself up and take a deep
breath. It was not only that he forbade himself the luxury of a vain
nostalgia; he became increasingly unsure of the frontier between the
real Sarah and the Sarah he had created in so many such dreams: the
one Eve personified, all mystery and love and profundity, and the
other a half-scheming, half-crazed governess from an obscure seaside
town. He even saw himself coming upon her again--and seeing nothing
in her but his own folly and delusion. He did not cancel the
insertion of the advertisements; but he began to think it as well
that they might never be answered.

His greatest enemy was
boredom; and it was boredom, to be precise an evening in Paris when
he realized that he neither wanted to be in Paris nor to travel again
to Italy, or Spain, or anywhere else in Europe, that finally drove
him home.

You must think I mean
England; but I don't: that could never become home for Charles again,
though that is where he went for a week, when he left Paris. It had
so happened that on his way from Leghorn to Paris he had traveled in
the company of two Americans, an elderly gentleman and his nephew.
They hailed from Philadelphia. Perhaps it was the pleasure of
conversing with someone in a not too alien tongue, but Charles rather
fell for them; their unsophisticated pleasure in their
sightseeing--he guided them himself round Avignon and took them to
admire Vezelay--was absurd, to be sure. Yet it was accompanied by a
lack of cant. They were not at all the stupid Yankees the Victorian
British liked to suppose were universal in the States. Their
inferiority was strictly limited to their innocence of Europe. The
elder Philadelphian was indeed a well-read man, and a shrewd judge of
life. One evening after dinner he and Charles had engaged, with the
nephew as audience, on a lengthy discussion as to the respective
merits of the mother country and the rebellious colony; and the
American's criticisms, though politely phrased, of England awoke a
very responsive chord in Charles. He detected, under the American
accent, very similar views to his own; and he even glimpsed, though
very dimly and only by virtue of a Darwinian analogy, that one day
America might supersede the older species. I do not mean, of course,
that he thought of emigrating there, though thousands of a poorer
English class were doing that every year. The Canaan they saw across
the Atlantic (encouraged by some of the most disgraceful lies in the
history of advertising) was not the Canaan he dreamed: a land
inhabited by a soberer, simpler kind of gentleman--just like this
Philadelphian and his pleasantly attentive nephew--living in a
simpler society. It had been put very concisely to him by the uncle:
"In general back home we say what we think. My impression of
London was--forgive me, Mr. Smithson--heaven help you if you don't
say what you don't think."

Nor was that all.
Charles put the idea up to Montague over a dinner in London. As to
America, Montague was lukewarm.

"I can't imagine
that there are many speakables per acre there, Charles. You can't
offer yourself as the repository of the riffraff of Europe and
conduct a civilized society, all at the same time. Though I daresay
some of the older cities are agreeable enough, in their way." He
sipped his port. "Yet there, by the bye, is where she may be. I
suppose that must have occurred to you. I hear these cheap-passage
packets are full of young women in pursuit of a husband." He
added hastily, "Not that that would be her reason, of course."

"I had not thought
of it. To tell you the truth, I haven't thought very much of her at
all, these last months. I have given up hope."

"Then go to
America, and drown your sorrows on the bosom of some charming
Pocahontas. I hear a well-born English gentleman can have his pick of
some very beautiful young women--pour la dot comme pour la figure--if
he so inclines."

Charles smiled: whether
at the idea of the doubly beautiful young women or at the knowledge,
not yet imparted to Montague, that his passage was already booked,
must be left to the imagination.
 
 

59

Weary of
myself, and sick of asking
What
I am, and what I ought to be,
At
the vessel's prow I stand, which bears me
Forwards,
forwards, o'er the starlit sea.
--
Matthew
Arnold, "Self-Dependence" (1854)

He did not have a happy
passage from Liverpool. He spoke frequently to the storm-basin; and
when he was not being sick, spent most of his time wondering why he
had ever embarked for the primitive other side of the world. Perhaps
it was just as well. He had begun to envisage Boston as a miserable
assembly of log cabins--and the reality, one sunlit morning, of a
city of mellow brick and white wooden spires, with that one opulently
gold dome, came as a pleasant reassurance. Nor did Boston belie its
first appearance. Just as he had fallen for his Philadelphians, he
fell for the mixed graciousness and candor of Boston society. He was
not exactly feted; but within a week of his arrival the two or three
introductions he had brought with him had multiplied into open
invitations to several houses. He was invited to use the Athenaeum,
he had shaken hands with a senator, no less; and with the wrinkled
claw of one even greater, if less hectoringly loquacious--the elder
Dana, a Founding Father of American letters, and then in his
eightieth year. A far more famous writer still, whom one might have
not very interestedly chatted to if one had chanced to gain entry to
the Lowell circle in Cambridge, and who was himself on the early
threshold of a decision precisely the opposite in its motives and
predispositions, a ship, as it were, straining at its moorings in a
contrary current and arming for its sinuous and loxodromic voyage to
the richer though silted harbor of Rye (but I must not ape the
master), Charles did not meet.

Even though he dutifully
paid his respects to the Cradle of Liberty in Faneuil Hall, he
encountered also a certain amount of hostility, for Britain was not
forgiven its recent devious part in the Civil War, and there existed
a stereotype of John Bull just as grossly oversimplified as that of
Uncle Sam. But Charles quite plainly did not fit that stereotype; he
proclaimed that he saw very well the justice of the War of
Independence, he admired Boston as the center of American learning,
of the Anti-Slavery Movement, and countless other things. He let
himself be ribbed about tea parties and redcoats with a smiling
sang-froid, and took very great care not to condescend. I think two
things pleased him best--the delicious newness of the nature: new
plants, new trees, new birds--and, as he discovered when he crossed
the river of his name and visited Harvard, some entrancing new
fossils. And the other pleasure lay in the Americans themselves. At
first, perhaps, he noticed a certain lack of the finer shades of
irony; and he had to surmount one or two embarrassing contretemps
when humorously intended remarks were taken at face value. But there
were such compensations ... a frankness, a directness of approach, a
charming curiosity that accompanied the open hospitality: a naivety,
perhaps, yet with a face that seemed delightfully fresh-complexioned
after the farded culture of Europe. This face took, very soon, a
distinctly female cast. Young American women were far more freely
spoken than their European contemporaries; the transatlantic
emancipation movement was already twenty years old. Charles found
their forwardness very attractive.