SELF-TORMENTORS.
N0 one can read the Life of either Mr. or Mrs. Carlyle without being struck by the extraordinary genius for self-tormenting which both these remarkable persons pos- sessed. Not that we mean to impute it to either of them that there was any superfluity of naughtiness in the torment inflicted. Neither of them could have given up the practice at will. The elements of which each alike was all compact, secured this self-tormenting as inevitably as an exposed nerve secures anguish, or a gouty constitution secures irritability of temper. It is quite a mistake to suppose that self-tormentors are usually at all more responsible for the misery the conflicting elements of their constitution entail
upon them, than they are for the hardships inflicted by a severe climate or a revolutionary war. We might as well assume that a man who frets himself to fiddlestrings like Carlyle could, if he chose, be tranquil and placid, as that a man who has had curvature of the spine from his birth could, if he chose, be vigorous and athletic. Incompatible elements within the mind are no less involuntary, and often much more oppres- sive, than incompatible elements within the body. Carlyle had a powerful imagination, and a very impatient and fitful temper. He anticipated evil ; his vivid imagination exag- gerated it tenfold when it did come upon him ; he wrestled with it with a fury that only made it a thousand times more galling. He could not bear to submit, and he dashed himself against the bars of his cage like an untameable hymna. It was not he that tormented himself so much as his irritable imagina- tion which tormented him for not conquering an enemy whom he could only conquer by submitting to defeat, and recognising that in submission was the true victory. Airs. Carlyle had both the eager and proud temper of a man, and the fine and sensitive tenderness of a woman, indissolubly united within her, and the consequence was, that the man ill her rebelled against that which the woman in her craved, while the woman in her shrank from that which the man in her resolved on. No mental constitution more happily adapted for self-torment could have been conceived. There was a constant struggle in her as of fire with water, the flame hissing against the stream which extinguished it, and the water drying up under the flame. No wonder that she was unhappy; the only wonder is, that she did not much sooner succumb to what St. Paul calls the war in her members.
Neither of these skilful self-tormentors, who were always preaching renunciation, knew how to renounce, at least till they had striven fiercely against the bare idea of renunciation for many weary years. Yet they were not the worst of self- tormentors, for they did apparently both learn in the end something of the secret of resignation, and did not pass out of the world like mere helpless self-tormentors,—]ike Swift, for example,—with rage and despair in their hearts.
The popular notion of self-tormentors,--namely, persons who really and truly, and of deliberate purpose, give them- selves keen suffering because they intend to punish themselves for their sins and shortcomings,—concerns a class of persons very much less miserable; for the ascetic, however much he expatiates in penances, is, after all, only training himself to endure patiently what he thinks he ought to endure, and, like every one who puts himself to hard discipline for a purpose, he more or less enjoys the sense of self-mastery which gradually grows upon him, even if he does not, as he often does, recompense himself by a good deal of secret self- laudation for his self-inflicted sufferings. Tennyson has painted the most terrible picture of asceticism in "St. Simeon Stylites," and we all know that he was not without his secret comfort :— " Yield not me the praise :
God only thro' his bounty bath thought fit,
Among the powers and princes of this world, To make me an example to rnsnkind Which few can reach to. Yet I do not say But that a time may come,—yea, even now.
Now, now, his footsteps smite the threshold stones Of life,—I say, that time is at the doors When you may worship me without reproach; For I will leave my relics in your land, And you may carve a shrine about my dust, And burn a fragrant lamp before my bones, When I am gathered to the glorious saints."
A man with such a fixed belief as that, whatever his bodily torture, is the subject of much less cruel mental torment than one who, instead of torturing himself, is tortured by himself, by the very nature which he cannot escape, and which yet humiliates him with a sense of loathing. There is a sort of satisfaction in the carrying out of a deliberate purpose that answers to one's whole belief, which mitigates the suffering
it causes. No doubt it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, for us in this age to believe that ascetic tortures, amounting, as we think now, to suicide, such as were very commonly inflicted on themselves by the early ascetics, can be according
to God's will. We do not believe,—hardly any of us, hardly even the most ascetic Trappist, we suppose, now believes,—
that it is pleasing to God to kill the body with torments in order to render the will supple and obedient. But those who did so believe,—and it was believed at one time,—could apparently reap a great deal of satisfaction from their own fixed determination. Far from feeling, as the involuntary self-tormentor does, that his whole life is an utter failure, they felt something of the inspiration of achieving a great victory over themselves. Like the trainer who trains a horse to obey his will, they felt the pride in the victory, though they felt also, what the horse feels and what the horse-trainer does not feel, the suffering of the subjection. The subduing of the body by the mind is, of course, a very mixed sensation, the pain no doubt often greatly overpowering the satisfaction. But at least the working out of a deliberate purpose of slow and steady growth can never be the cause of that chaos and con- fusion which is the worst suffering of the involuntary self- tormentor, who very often does not doubt,—it is evident that Mrs. Carlyle often did not doubt,—that the whole life is a wreck, and a wreck that need not and should not have been made. The self-tormenting that is not deliberate, that is not the consequence of a fixed purpose, is accompanied by a sense of bewilderment and helplessness far more oppressive than the self-inflicted penance of clear purpose. If one had to choose between the gadfly and voluntary scourging, the man who chose the gadfly would deserve what he got. It is probably the worst of all torments to believe that your nature has been made, and is, so thoroughly awry, that nothing can relieve you from the anguish of a character at war with itself, and doomed to be at war with itself so long as it exists at all. That is the most terrible consequence of religious scepticism when combined with an ardent and restless nature so full of its own vitality that it can hardly ever throw off, much as it wishes to throw off, the conviction that it is immortal. There evidently are self-tormentors who believe in immortality without God, who cannot comfort themselves either with the hope of extinction or with the hope that their sufferings will end in peace. Mrs. Carlyle at times seems to us to have been plunged in this horror, though it is clear that she lost it in very great measure before the end. She had, before her last and worst illness, all that vividness of life which regards even death as a positive and not a negative experience, and with it a passionate sense of the chaos within her which made the vividness of her very life a torment. She thought she had immolated herself to a man who was so wrapt up in his own moody thoughts that he could not care for her; she thought that if he could have cared for anybody, it was for a woman very different from herself; and she thought that in her own insane ambition she had sacrificed both a great capacity for love and a very original intellectual life to one who could not appreciate the sacrifice, and was, indeed, none the better for it. She was no doubt far from being wholly wrong in these impressions. Carlyle's love for her was certainly greater after her death than it ever was before; and, so far as we can judge, her marriage was really a mistaken one,—a mistake due to too much deliberation,— though it ended much better than at one time seemed at all probable. Still, her career teaches us that even for the most ardent and elaborate self-tormentors, there may be peace at the last, if they only keep true amidst all confusions, as she certainly did, to the leading purpose of their life. She sacrificed herself to Carlyle's genius; but she stuck to her purpose, and in the end she attained something like peace, and,—though this mattered much less,—she borrowed from that genius a halo of reflected light.
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