Delphi Complete Works of William Godwin 1st ed. (2022), page 138
part #1 of Delphi Classics Series
I observed, with surprise, that Sir Charles was received upon a very different footing at Paris, from what he had been at Oxford. Here he performed the part of an elegant, and was generally admitted as a man of breeding, amusement, and fashion. No one laughed at, and almost every one courted him.
It has frequently occurred to me to see this metamorphosis, and to remark persons, who in their boyish years had been thought dull and poor fellows, afterward making a grave and no dishonoured figure upon the theatre of life. At school, certainly, the number of dunces is much beyond its due proportion (particularly if we have regard to the higher classes of society), to those who are ordinarily put down for such in maturer life. Perhaps scarcely more than one boy in a hundred is clever; but, when these boys grow up to be men, the dullard will frequently play his part to the great satisfaction of the spectators; and not only outstrip his more ingenious competitor in the road of fortune, but even be more highly esteemed, and more respectfully spoken of, by the majority of those who know him. I have often been desirous to ascertain in what manner we are to account for so curious a phenomenon; and I have found that there are two ways in which it may happen.
First, the man who plays his part upon the theatre of life, almost always maintains what may be called an artificial character. Gravity has been styled by the satirist, ‘a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind’; and young men educated together are scarcely ever grave. They appear in simple and unvarnished colours; theirs is not the age of disguise; and, if they were to attempt it, the attempt, so far as related to their colleagues, would be fruitless. The mind of a young man at college is tried in as many ways, and turned and essayed in as various attitudes, as the body of an unfortunate captive in the slave-market of Algiers. The captive might, with as much probability of success, endeavour to conceal his crooked back or misshapen leg, as the Oxonian or Cantab to hide his dulness, his ill-temper, or his cowardice. But, when the same persons are brought out into the world, there are certain decorums, and restrictions from good manners, which operate most wonderfully to level the varying statures of mind: and (to pursue the idea suggested by the slave-market) the courtier, the professional man, or the fine lady, do not more abound in advantages for concealing their bodily deformities, than for keeping out of sight those mental imbecilities, which the lynx-eyed sagacity and frolic malice of schoolboy against schoolboy are sure to discover and expose.
Beside which, secondly, the part which a man has to play upon the theatre of life is usually of much easier performance than that of a stripling among his fellows. The stripling is treated with a want of ceremony, which deters him from properly displaying many of his powers. It has been remarked, that the severity of criticism in ages of refinement suppresses those happier and more daring fruits of genius, which the dawn of science and observation warmed into life; and in these respects the entrance of a young man into the world operates in a way something similar to the transportation of the poet to a period of primeval simplicity. He is no longer rudely stared out of countenance. To change the similitude, a college-life may be compared with a polar climate; fruits of a hardy vegetation only prosper in it, while those of a more delicate organisation wither and die. The young man, having attained the age of manhood, no longer suffers the liberties to which he was formerly subjected, and assumes confidence in himself. This confidence is in many ways favourable to his reputation and success. It grows into a habit; and every day the probationer is better enabled to act with propriety, to explain his meaning effectually, and to display that promptitude and firmness which may command approbation. I should prefer, however, I must confess, the schoolboy hero to the plausible and well-seeming man of the world. Mistakes may occur, indeed, respecting the former as well as the latter. A false taste may lead his fellow-pupils to give the palm to a wild, adventurous, and boastful youth, over his more tranquil competitor, though the latter should be endowed with the most perspicuous intellect, the finest imagination, or the most generous temper. There is, too, a ready faculty of little depth, a rapid mimetic, superficial memory, which will sometimes pass on inexperienced observers for a consummate genius. The judgment, however, which is formed on the phenomena of early youth, has two advantages: first, as this period of human life is free from deception and false colours; and, secondly, as qualities then discovered may be supposed more rooted and essential in the character, than such as discover themselves only in a season of maturity.
To return to Sir Charles Gleed. I found him, as I have said, established on an unequivocal and honourable footing at Paris. He was received with distinction by a minister of state, who invited him to his most select parties. He was a favoured guest in the coteries of ladies of fashion, and often spent his mornings in the ruelle of a duchess. Sir Charles was certainly a man of displeasing physiognomy. It was a picture so rudely sketched, that the spectator could scarcely guess what was designed to be represented by it. The eyes were small and pinking; the nose colossal and gigantic, but ill-defined. The muscular parts were fleshy, substantial, and protuberant. His stature, however, was considerably above the middle size; and his form, at least to an ignorant observer, seemed expressive of animal force.
Sir Charles was perhaps sensible how little he was indebted to the bounty of nature; and he was careful to compensate his personal defects, by the most minute vigilance in conduct and demeanour. By some accident he had acquired, since he left the university, the happiest of all foundations for success in the world, a tranquil confidence in himself. His speech, his motions, were all slow; but, as no part was lost in false efforts, in something done that was afterward to be done again, his slowness had, to a certain degree, the air and effect of haste. He continually approached to the brink of enterprise, and was never enterprising. He perpetually advanced to the verge of wit and observation, and never said any thing that was absolutely the one or the other. The man however must, I believe, be admitted to have had some portion of judgment and good sense, who could so speciously imitate qualities, to the reality of which he was a stranger. If he committed a blunder, the bystander might look in his face, and would discern there such an unsuspecting composure, as might lead him almost to doubt his opinion, and believe that there was no blunder. With the ladies he was attentive, officious, and useful, but never bustling or ridiculous; by which means his services never lost their just value. Nothing of a nature more weighty ever thrust the details of a gallant demeanour out of his thoughts; and the sex was flattered to see a man so ample in his dimensions, and therefore, according to their reckoning, so manly, devoted to their pleasure. For the rest, whatever they observed, which would have been less acceptable in a Frenchman, was attributed to, and forgiven in consideration of, his being a stranger to their language, and having a disposition and bent of mind, appropriate, as they supposed, to the nation from which he came.
Such was the man who generously performed for me the part of gentlemanusher, and introduced me to the society of the courtiers and belles of France. Our characters were strikingly contrasted. He was set, disciplined, and regular; I was quick, sensitive, and variable. He had speciousness; I sensibility. He never did a foolish thing; I was incessantly active, and therefore, though frequently brilliant and earning applause, yet not seldom falling into measures the most injurious to the purposes I had in view. Naturally I was too tremblingly alive, to be well adapted to the commerce of the world: I had worn off a part of this at Oxford; I had gained a certain degree of self-possession and assurance; yet was my sensibility too great, not frequently to lead me into false steps, though I had afterward the fortitude and presence of mind to repair them.
Sir Charles and I, having every reason to be satisfied with our reception in this celebrated metropolis, engaged amicably in similar pursuits, and succeeded with persons of different predilections and tastes, without in the smallest degree interfering with each other. The court of Louis the Fifteenth, the then reigning sovereign, was licentious and profligate, without decency, decorum, and character; and the manners which prevailed within the walls of the palace, were greedily imitated by every one who laid claim to, or who aped, rank, refinement, or fashion. It were superfluous for me here to describe, what the reader may find in so many volumes amply and ambitiously detailed, the contempt for the marriage bond, and the universal toleration then extended to adultery and debauchery, with the condition only that they should be covered with a thin and almost transparent veil, and not march entirely naked.
Prepared, as I had been, by my adventures at Oxford, I fell but too easily into the maxims and manners then in vogue in the court of France. Could I have been abruptly introduced to a scene like this, immediately after my departure from Merionethshire, I should have contemplated it with inexpressible horror. But my experience at the university had killed the purity and delicacy of my moral discrimination. In Wales, the end I proposed to myself in my actions was my own approbation; at Oxford, I had regulated my conduct by the sentiments of others, not those of my own heart. I had been a noisy and jovial companion; I had associated freely and cordially with characters of either sex, that my judgment did not approve. Friendships like these had indeed been of short duration; but they were of sufficient power to contaminate the mind and distort the rectitude of feeling and habit. From intimacies built on so slight and inadequate a basis, from a practical disregard of continence and modesty, the transition was easy to the toleration and abetting of the most shameless adultery.
At the university, I had been driven from a sort of necessity to live upon the applauses of others; and, the habit being once formed, I carried it along with me in my excursion to the Continent. In the societies to which I was introduced, no man was considered as any thing, unless he were, what they styled, un homme à bonnes fortunes, that is, an individual devoted to the formation of intrigues, and a favourite with those ladies of honourable seeming, who held their virtue at a cheap rate. The men who were regarded in Paris as models of politeness, stimulated me to pursuits of this sort by the tenor of their conversation, while the women, from time to time, who boasted of rank, beauty, and elegant manners, invited me by their insinuations and carriage, and taught me to believe that I should not be unsuccessful in my enterprises. I was young and unguarded; I had no Mentor to set my follies before me in their true light; I had passed the Rubicon of vice, and therefore was deficient in the salutary checks of reflection. My vanity was flattered by the overtures of the fair; my ambition was awakened by the example of the prosperous and the gay: I soon made my choice, and determined that I also would be un homme à bonnes fortunes.
CHAPTER VI
THE FIRST WOMAN who in this career fixed my regard was a finished coquette, by which epithet I understand a woman whose ruling passion is her vanity, and whose invention is hourly on the rack for means of gratifying it. She was a lady of high rank, and married to a person of great figure at court. I first obtained her attention under favour of the epithet by which the Parisian belles thought proper to distinguish me, of the handsome Englishman. Sir Charles, my introducer, was certainly of more established vogue than myself, and in this respect might have seemed a conquest still more flattering to a person of her character. But the Marchioness easily discerned that he would have afforded her less occupation and amusement. Sir Charles would perhaps have equalled me in constancy and perseverance; but he had a calmness of temper in affairs of this sort, which to her tastes would have been intolerable. Obedient, obsequious, patient of injuries, he would undoubtedly have shown himself; he was of a character unalterably obliging toward the fair; to violence he would have opposed no violence in return, but would have waited till the storm was dissipated, and then have sought to improve the lucky moment when the bird of peace brooded over the subsiding billows, and the tumult of the bosom was ended.
My character was of an opposite sort. Sir Charles appeared to the animated and restless spirit of the Marchioness more like a convenient instrument, or a respectable piece of furniture, than a living being whose passions were to mix, and shock, and contend, and combine, with her own. She would have preferred a lap-dog who, when she pinched or slapped him, would ruffle his hairs, and snarl and bark in return, to such a lover. To vex the temper and alarm the fears of her admirer was her delight. She would not have thought him worth her care, if she did not ten times in the day make him curse himself, his mistress, and all the world. She desired no sympathy and love that were not ushered in by a prelude of something like hate. In a word, she aspired to the character ascribed by Martial to one of his friends: There was no living with him, nor without him.’
The singularities of this woman’s temper particularly displayed themselves in the gradations she introduced into the favours by which my attachment was ultimately crowned. I might describe the transport of my soul, when I first became assured that there was no mark of her good will which she was inclined to withhold from me. I might delineate the ravishing sweetness of the weather on the day which first gave me possession of her person, the delightful excursion we made on the water, the elegantly furnished cottage that received us, the very room, with all its furniture, which witnessed the consummation of my joys. All these things live in my memory, and constitute a picture which will never be obliterated while this heart continues to beat. But I suppress these circumstances at the risk of rendering my narrative flat and repulsive by its generalities. I write no book that shall tend to nourish the pruriency of the debauched, or that shall excite one painful emotion, one instant of debate, in the bosom of the virtuous and the chaste.
The Marchioness tormented me with her flights and uncertainty, both before and after the completing my wishes. In the first of these periods I thought myself ten times at the summit of my desires, when again I was, in the most unexpected manner, baffled and thrown back by her caprices and frolics. Even after, as I have said, the first ceremonies were adjusted, and the treaty of offence was not only signed, but sealed,
‘Me of my yielded pleasure she beguiled,
And taught me oft forbearance;’
though I cannot say, in the sense in which Shakspeare has imputed it to his heroine, that she did it, with
‘A pudency so rosy, the sweet look on’t
Might well have warm’d old Saturn; that I thought her
As chaste as unsunn’d snow.’
It was in my nature to attach myself strongly, where I attached myself at all, and by parity of reason to be anxious concerning propriety of conduct, and the minuteness of behaviour, in the person I loved. This was exceedingly unfortunate for me in my affair with the Marchioness. It was almost impossible to make her serious. At moments when all other human beings are grave, and even in allowing those freedoms which ought to be pledges of the soul, she could not put off an air of badinage and raillery. Her mind greatly resembled in its constitution the sleek and slippery form of the eel; it was never at rest, and, when I thought I possessed it most securely, it escaped me with the rapidity of lightning. No strength could detain it; no stratagem could hold it; no sobriety and seriousness of expostulation could fix it to any consistency of system.
Had this been the only characteristic of her mind, a person of my temper would soon have been worn out with the inexhaustibleness of her freaks and follies. But she had an ingenuousness of carriage by which I was for a long time deceived. She seemed, when I could gain her ear for a moment, to confess her faults and absurdities with a simplicity and unreserve that were inexpressiblycharming: and she had in herself an equability of soul that nothing could destroy. Where other women would have been exasperated, she laughed; and when by her flightiness she had driven her lover to the extremity of human bearing, she mollified him in a moment by a gentleness and defencelessness of concession that there was no resisting. Yet it often happened that she had no sooner by this expedient won my forgiveness, than she flew off again with her customary wildness, and urged me almost to madness.
One passion which eminently distinguished the Marchioness, was the perpetual desire of doing something that should excite notice and astonishment. If in the privacy of the tête-à-tête she was not seldom in a singular degree provoking, in public and in society she was, if possible, still worse. The human being, who is perpetually stimulated with the wish to do what is extraordinary, will almost infallibly be often led into what is absurd, indelicate, and unbecoming. It is incredible what excesses of this sort the Marchioness committed. Her passion seemed particularly to prompt her to the bold, the intrepid, and the masculine. An impudent and Amazonian stare, a smack of the whip, a slap on the back, a loud and unexpected accost that made the hearer start again, were expedients frequently employed by her to excite the admiration of those with whom she associated. In the theatre she would talk louder than the performers; in a dance, by some ridiculous caprice, she would put out those with whom she was engaged; she was never satisfied unless the observation of all eyes were turned on her.
It might seem at first sight that a demeanour of this sort would excite general disapprobation, and make every one her enemy. On the contrary, the Marchioness was a universal favourite, at least with the male sex. Her countenance was exquisitely beautiful; in her eye was combined a feminine softness with vivacity and fire; her figure, which a little exceeded the middle size, seemed moulded by the Graces; and every thing she did was done with an ease and elegance that dazzled the beholders. What would have been absurd and indecorous in most women, became pleasing and ornamental in her. Though the substance of the action was wrong, the manner seemed to change its nature, and render it brilliant and beautiful. She did impudent things without assumption and arrogance; and what in another would have been beyond endurance, seemed in her an emanation of the purest artlessness and innocence. Besides, that such was the rapidity and quickness of her nature, she did not allow to ordinary observers the time to disapprove. She never dwelt upon any thing; nothing was done with slowness and deliberation; and she passed so incessantly from one object of attention and mode of action to another, that every thing seemed obliterated as soon as seen, and nothing was left in the common mind but a general impression of wonder and delight.
