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    We should d 6 out utmost to encotirdge the Beautiful , for the Useful encourages itself .-( jOJSXxiE

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    THE APPRENTICESHIP OF LIFE . BY G . H . LEWES . Chap . IX . —The New Vista . I suppose everyone knows the strange delirious joy , the tumult of the brain , which agitates a man as he returns home for the first time assured that he is beloved . Armand was in that condition . Adrienne loved him ! Her eyes had confessed it—her soul had spoken through her eyes . One glance—one rapid , flashing , tender , melting glance—was all he had to persuade him : but that was enough . His heart bounded with exultant joy !

    He felt as if new life were opened to him I Adrienne passed the night in a passion of tears—delicious tears ! for the pain was mingled with ecstacies , transient and confused , but springing from the depths of an impassioned heart . She wept over her love , wept over it as a crime , a madness , but yet hugged it as the sweetest consolation . That her love was hopeless she knew ; that she must never see Armand again was an instantaneous resolution . But , although her love seemed to bring with it nothing but sorrow , it was a sorrow on the whole welcomer than any ordinary joy . And thus she wept through the night .

    She rose in the morning determined never to see him again . She was calm , because a plan of action had presented itself . Directly her father appeared she would frankly tell him the whole affair ; she would thus prevent the possibility of Armand being received into the house . But , alas ! no sooner did her father appear than all her resolution vanished . It was a delicate matter to confess that she loved a married man ; and she shrunk from it as impossible . No ! she would find some other plan . Many plans were schemed , but all found wanting . By the evening she had no better excuse than a headache ! It served , however , to get over the first evening : fresh expedients could be found for the emergencies as they arose .

    Armand was disappointed , savage . He perfectly understood Adrienne s absence , and it made him thoughtful . He began to see more clearly than he had seen before tha * his position was one of inextricable difficulty : he began to think of Hortense , not merely as the woman who no longer had his heart , but as an obstacle ! This startled him . Hortense an obstacle !—Hortense , his wife—his dear , idving , and devoted wife , an obstacle ! and to what ? to a passion which , while his whole being testified to its sincerity and necessity , his moral code

    pitilessly condemned as an immorality ! This startled and arrested him . This began the revolution in his philosophy : out of his own individual suffering he was to learn to sympathise with the great suffering of thousands : out of his own experience he was to learn the true source of the errors which perplex mankind . The dilemma in which he was placed caused him to look afresh into the nature of those laws which created the dilemma . His moral code was in direct antagonism to his moral nature . his organization told him energetically that he did not love Hortense , and that he did love Adrienne ; while his conscience told him as energetically that he ought to love Hortense ,

    and ought not to love Adrienne . After all , our philosophy is nothing but the formula of our own personality . If we are conscious of being moved by generous impulses we believe in generosity ; if we are conscious of passion playing a great part in our lives , we believe in the greatness and efficacy of passion ; if we are conscious that the moral code presses unfairly upon our worthiest efforts , we believe the moral code to be imperfect .

    Armand formerly was a rigid moralist : at that time his own nature had never rebelled against the conclusions of his understanding ; he adopted , therefore , the absolute expression of an absolute code . Now , experience shakes that confidence he had : his nature contradicts his opinions ; and , consequently , his opinions become modified ! We shall see hereafter the turn they will take ; we shall see how , guided by the light of his own experience , he traverses the labyrinth of morals ; at present we have but to indicate this as th » great result of the Initiation of Love . Chap . X . —Death to the King .

    I have been anticipating a little ; but as this pretends to be a philosophical romance , and not a " thrilling story , " it was allowable in me to finish indicating the argument and to narrate events afterwards . The first result of Armand ' s perception that he was outraging his own moral code , was precisely that of Adrienne , viz ., the determination to evade the peril by absence . I observe that this determination is invariably taken , and almost as invariably broken ! Armand did not return . He was three days without approaching the house . Three days of incessant struggle and incessant misery . Adrienne interpreted his feelings by her own .

    On the fourth day ho was horrified by reading in the papers that General Laboissiere and Captain Cassone had been arrested for the murder of Marchand , the police agent . The evidence against them was this . It will be remembered that on the day when Mnrcliand accosted the General in the Cafe de Paris , a spy in the

    disguise of a waiter was attentively listening , and only gave up When hopeless of understanding its drift . He had caught several names , however , such as Mademoiselle Gock , Madame de Berg , and Mademoiselle Helene ; and afterwards learned that they were Bonapartist ciphers which the police had recently discovered . Putting together this fact with the fact of Laboissiere being a notorious Bonapartist , he jumped to t he conclusion that the General had very excellent reasons for wishing Marchand out of the way , and communicated his suspicions , accompanied by the fact that Marchand had left the cafe in company with Laboissiere and Cassone , had driven to the General ' s house with them , and no one testified to having seen him since that , until his corpse was discovered at St . Denis . ^

    The General ' s arrest was one of those accidents which in life thwart our best resolutions , and bring about denouments quite contrary to all we scheme . Probably Armand would rarely have seen Adrienne had it not been for this ; I say probably , because , though I doubt not the sincerity of his resolution , my observation of human nature has led me to be somewhat sceptical of the strength of our virtue in any continuous combat with the passions . I believe in the possibility of one victorious effort , but not in repeated efforts . A man may tear himself away from temptation , but he cannot long resist temptation .

    All this is mediocre morality , perhaps ; but I am striving to give expression to the truth , recording what is the course of life as I actually observe it ; the morality I must leave for others to settle . I have very little doubt that many of my readers are " shocked" at Armand ' s falling in love with Adrienne . " He ought not to have done so ; " they will say . If the " Apprenticeship of Life" were an Utopia , my hero should not have committed such an impropriety ; but I ask my fair antagonist whether she thinks consonant with truth that Armand should outlive his passion for Hortense , and whether ,

    having outlived it , he was not , by the laws of his own passionate nature , forced to love again ? Do we not see similar cases every day of our lives ? And if the fact be patent , upon what pretext is the novelist with philosophical pretensions to be denied the right of presenting facts ? One apology I must be allowed . I have not brought Armand into this critical dilemma for the sake of what is called the " situation" : not for the sake of harrowing the feelings , or making the reader agreeably excited

    as to the denoument . The progress of the story hitherto has sufficiently been overlaid with comment and analysis to prove that I have thought less of " powerful effects" and " thrilling incidents" than of " pointing a moral " to adorn my tale . " To make my hero understand life I am forced to make him pass through all the great typical dilemmas of life , so that at the close we may say of him as of the " many wandering and many-teared" Ulysses , e / AocHev € < b' uv evade : " he learned from all he had suffered . " be

    Enough . The General ' s arrest broke through Armand ' s resolution , - cause it forced him to see Adrienne repeatedly . In the great trouble and anxiety of such an event all friends naturally came foi ward to render their assistance ; and Armand ' s assistance was more readily , though unconsciously , accepted by Adrienne than that of any other friend . Thus were they thrown together ; thus was their unhappy passion fostered even against their own wills . Not a syllable escaped them on the subject ; not a caress , unless it were the caresses of manner , tones , and looks .

    Is it necessary for me to dwell longer on this point ? Does not every one thoroughly see the whole course these lovers must pursue ? They were hurried irresistibly into that mutual confession which while it taught them nothing , yet greatly relieved their hearts . They wept together over their wretched fate ; they blushed together at their guilty passion . One evening Armand was summoned to attend a meeting of patriots . He was told that several Free Brothers would be present , and he went , though he knew scarcely anything of the man who invited him . convent in

    The place of meeting was an old and dismal house close by the the Rue des Postes , a quiet and deserted part of the Quartier Latin . Armand showed his ticket of invitation to the concierge and was told to mount au cinquiarne . He did so . He there tapped at a door , which was opened by a ferocious looking fellow dressed in a blouse , his hands blackened as fr Jin an anvil , his eyes bleared , his complexion . sallow . " What name ? " he enqaired . " Armand dc Fayol . " " Pardon , Monsieur , I did not know you . Enter , enter . It is a great joy for one to behold M . de Fayol ; a name dear to all Republicans !" Armand entered the miserable anteroom ; his admirer then closed the door , and led the way through a bedroom till he tapped thrice at another door , which opened , and Armand was announced .

    Seated on a raised chair at the farther end of the room was an elderly man with thin grey hair , dark eyebrows , and dark moustachios , presenting an appearance of half soldier , half ruffian , his small restless eyes giving a tinge of insanity to his countenance , which was fully borne out by the wild vehemence of his language . Before him lay a pair of pistols , an inkstand , pens , and some loose sheets of paper . This was Baptiste Renaudot , president of the meeting , and well known all over France as one who had grown grey in conspiracies ; his fierce eyes and extravagant gestures were conspicuous in every emeute . ^ He belonged to the Free Brothers , but Armand had always steadily refused

    to admit him into the Brothers , because he looked upon him as a mere brutal conspirator—one who conspired , not out of indignation at wrong , but from the savage delight in uproar . Seated round the table were twenty other notorious conspirators , and three less known and more moderate Republicans . A small lamp nickered on the

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• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), June 1, 1850, page 236, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1841/page/18/