I keep but a man and a maid, ever ready to slander and steal . . .
—Tennyson, Maud (1855)
Charles found the curate’s house and rang the bell. A maid answered, but the bewhiskered young man himself hovered in the hallway behind her. The maid retreated, as her master came forward to take the heavy old key.
“Thank you, sir. I celebrate Holy Communion at eight every morning. You stay long in Exeter?”
“Alas, no. I am simply en passage.”
“I had hoped to see you again. I can be of no further assistance?”
And he gestured, the poor young shrimp, towards a door behind which no doubt lay his study. Charles had already noted a certain ostentation about the church furnishings; and he knew he was being invited to Confession. It did not need magical powers to see through the wall and discern a prie-dieu and a discreet statue of the Virgin; for this was one of the young men born too late for the Tractarian schism and who now dallied naughtily but safely—since Dr. Phillpotts was High Church—with rituals and vestments, a very preva-lent form of ecclesiastical dandyism. Charles measured him a moment and took heart in his own new vision: it could not be more foolish than this. So he bowed and refused, and went on his way. He was shriven of established religion for the rest of his life.
His way ... you think, perhaps, that that must lead straight back to Endicott’s Family Hotel. A modern man would no doubt have gone straight back there. But Charles’s accursed sense of Duty and Propriety stood like castle walls against that. His first task was to cleanse himself of past obligations; only then could he present himself to offer his hand.
He began to understand Sarah’s deceit. She knew he loved her; and she knew he had been blind to the true depth of that love. The false version of her betrayal by Varguennes, her other devices, were but stratagems to unblind him; all she had said after she had brought him to the realization was but a test of his new vision. He had failed miserably; and she had then used the same stratagems as a proof of her worthless-ness. Out of what nobility must such self-sacrifice spring! If he had but sprung forward and taken her into his arms again, told her she was his, ungainsayably!
And if only—he might have added, but didn’t—there were not that fatal dichotomy (perhaps the most dreadful result of their mania for categorization) in the Victorians, which led them to see the “soul” as more real than the body, far more real, their only real self; indeed hardly connected with the body at all, but floating high over the beast; and yet, by some inexplicable flaw in the nature of things, reluctantly dragged along in the wake of the beast’s movements, like a white captive balloon behind a disgraceful and disobedient child.
This—the fact that every Victorian had two minds—is the one piece of equipment we must always take with us on our travels back to the nineteenth century. It is a schizophrenia seen at its clearest, its most notorious, in the poets I have quoted from so often—in Tennyson, Clough, Arnold, Hardy; but scarcely less clearly in the extraordinary political veerings from Right to Left and back again of men like the younger Mill and Gladstone; in the ubiquitous neuroses and psy-chosomatic illnesses of intellectuals otherwise as different as Charles Kingsley and Darwin; in the execration at first poured on the Pre-Raphaelites, who tried—or seemed to be trying—to be one-minded about both art and life; in the endless tug-of-war between Liberty and Restraint, Excess and Moderation, Propriety and Conviction, between the princi-pled man’s cry for Universal Education and his terror of Universal Suffrage; transparent also in the mania for editing and revising, so that if we want to know the real Mill or the real Hardy we can learn far more from the deletions and alterations of their autobiographies than from the published versions . . . more from correspondence that somehow es-caped burning, from private diaries, from the petty detritus of the concealment operation. Never was the record so completely confused, never a public facade so successfully passed off as the truth on a gullible posterity; and this, I think, makes the best guidebook to the age very possibly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Behind its latterday Gothick lies a very profound and epoch-revealing truth.
Every Victorian had two minds; and Charles had at least that. Already, as he walked up Fore Street towards the Ship, he was rehearsing the words his white balloon would utter when the wicked child saw Sarah again; the passionate yet honorable arguments that would reduce her to a tearful gratitude and the confession that she could not live without him. He saw it all, so vividly I feel tempted to set it down. But here is reality, in the form of Sam, standing at the doors of the ancient inn.
“The service was hagreeable, Mr. Charles?”
“I ... I lost my way, Sam. And I’ve got damnably wet.” Which was not at all the adjective to apply to Sam’s eyes. “Fill a tub for me, there’s a good fellow. I’ll sup in my rooms.”
“Yes, Mr. Charles.”
Some fifteen minutes later you might have seen Charles stark naked and engaged in an unaccustomed occupation: that of laundering. He had his bloodstained garments pressed against the side of the vast hip bath that had been filled for him and was assiduously rubbing them with a piece of soap. He felt foolish, and did not make a very good job of it. When Sam came, some time later, with the supper tray, the gar-ments lay as if thrown negligently half in and half out of the bath. Sam collected them up without remark; and for once Charles was grateful for his notorious carelessness in such matters.
Having eaten his supper, he opened his writing case.
My dearest,
One half of me is inexpressibly glad to address you thus, while the other wonders how he can so speak of a being he yet but scarcely understands. Something in you I would fain say I know profoundly: and something else I am as ignorant of as when I first saw you. I say this not to excuse, but to explain my behavior this evening. I cannot excuse it; yet I must believe that there was one way in which it may be termed fortunate, since it prompted a searching of my conscience that was long overdue. I shall not go into all the circumstance. But I am resolved, my sweet and mys-terious Sarah, that what now binds us shall bind us forevermore. I am but too well aware that I have no right to see you again, let alone to ask to know you fully, in my present situation. My first necessity is therefore to terminate my engagement.
A premonition that it was folly to enter into that arrangement has long been with me—before ever you came into my life. I im-plore you, therefore, not to feel guilt in that respect. What is to blame is a blindness in myself as to my own real nature. Had I been ten years younger, had I not seen so much in my age and my society with which I am not in sympathy, I have no doubt I could have been happy with Miss Freeman. My mistake was to forget that I am............