Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 02

								



* "But in understanding your natural condition, use the means

    which are proper to it; and pretend not to govern by any other

    way than by that which constitutes you governor."
IN the heart as in the ocean, the great tides ebb and flow.  The waves
which had once urged on the spirit of Ernest Maltravers to the rocks and
shoals of active life had long since receded back upon the calm depths,
and left the strand bare.  With a melancholy and disappointed mind, he
had quitted the land of his birth; and new scenes, strange and wild, had
risen before his wandering gaze.  Wearied with civilization, and sated
with many of the triumphs for which civilized men drudge and toil, and
disquiet themselves in vain, he had plunged amongst hordes, scarce
redeemed from primeval barbarism.  The adventures through which he had
passed, and in which life itself could only be preserved by wary
vigilance and ready energies, had forced him, for a while, from the
indulgence of morbid contemplations.  His heart, indeed, had been left
inactive; but his intellect and his physical powers had been kept in
hourly exercise.  He returned to the world of his equals with a mind
laden with the treasures of a various and vast experience, and with much
of the same gloomy moral as that which, on emerging from the Catacombs,
assured the restless speculations of Rasselas of the vanity of human life
and the folly of moral aspirations.
Ernest Maltravers, never a faultless or completed character, falling
short in practice of his own capacities, moral and intellectual, from his
very desire to overpass the limits of the Great and Good, was seemingly
as far as heretofore from the grand secret of life.  It was not so in
reality; his mind had acquired what before it wanted,--hardness; and we
are nearer to true virtue and true happiness when we demand too little
from men than when we exact too much.
Nevertheless, partly from the strange life that had thrown him amongst
men whom safety itself made it necessary to command despotically, partly
from the habit of power and disdain of the world, his nature was
incrusted with a stern imperiousness of manner, often approaching to the
harsh and morose, though beneath it lurked generosity and benevolence.
Many of his younger feelings, more amiable and complex, had settled into
one predominant quality, which more or less had always characterized
him,--Pride!  Self-esteem made inactive, and Ambition made discontented,
usually engender haughtiness.  In Maltravers this quality, which,
properly controlled and duly softened, is the essence and life of honour,
was carried to a vice.  He was perfectly conscious of its excess, but he
cherished it as a virtue.  Pride had served to console him in sorrow, and
therefore it was a friend; it had supported him when disgusted with
fraud, or in resistance to violence, and therefore it was a champion and
a fortress.  It was a pride of a peculiar sort: it attached itself to no