Alice, or the Mysteries — Complete

								

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 one point in especial,--not to talent, knowledge,
mental gifts, still less to the vulgar commonplaces of birth and
fortune; it rather resulted from a supreme and wholesale contempt of all
other men, and all their objects,--of ambition, of glory, of the hard
business of life. His favourite virtue was fortitude; it was on this
that he now mainly valued himself. He was proud of his struggles against
others, prouder still of conquests over his own passions. He looked upon
FATE as the arch enemy against whose attacks we should ever prepare.
He fancied that against fate he had thoroughly schooled himself. In the
arrogance of his heart he said, "I can defy the future." He believed in
the boast of the vain old sage,--"I am a world to myself!" In the wild
career through which his later manhood had passed, it is true that he
had not carried his philosophy into a rejection of the ordinary world.
The shock occasioned by the death of Florence yielded gradually to time
and change; and he had passed from the deserts of Africa and the East to
the brilliant cities of Europe. But neither his heart nor his reason had
ever again been enslaved by his passions. Never again had he known the
softness of affection. Had he done so, the ice had been thawed, and the
fountain had flowed once more into the great deeps. He had returned to
England,--he scarce knew wherefore, or with what intent, certainly not
with any idea of entering again upon the occupations of active life;
it was, perhaps, only the weariness of foreign scenes and unfamiliar
tongues, and the vague, unsettled desire of change, that brought him
back to the fatherland. But he did not allow so unphilosophical a cause
to himself: and, what was strange, he would not allow one much more
amiable, and which was, perhaps, the truer cause,--the increasing
age and infirmities of his old guardian, Cleveland, who prayed him
affectionately to return. Maltravers did not like to believe that his
heart was still so kind. Singular form of pride! No, he rather sought
to persuade himself that he intended to sell Burleigh, to arrange his
affairs finally, and then quit forever his native land. To prove to