Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.Fuller, Margaret
History
Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
Fuller, Margaret
Essays; Literature -- History and criticism; Poetry
We say makes _him_, but it increases our own interest in Brown, that, a
prophet in this respect of a better era, he has usually placed this
thinking, royal mind in the body of a woman. This personage, too, is
always feminine, both in her character and circumstances, but a
conclusive proof that the term _feminine_ is not a synonyme for _weak_.
Constantia, Clara Wieland, have loving hearts, graceful and plastic
natures, but they have also noble, thinking minds, full of resource,
constancy, courage. The Marguerite of Godwin, no less, is all refinement
and the purest tenderness; but she is also the soul of honor, capable of
deep discernment, and of acting in conformity with the inferences she
draws. The Man of Brown and Godwin has not eaten of the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, and been driven to sustain himself by the sweat of
his brow for nothing, but has learned the structure and laws of things,
and become a being, natural, benignant, various, and desirous of
supplying the loss of innocence by the attainment of virtue. So his
Woman need not be quite so weak as Eve, the slave of feeling or of
flattery; she also has learned to guide her helm amid the storm across
the troubled waters.
The horrors which mysteriously beset these persons, and against which,
so far as outward facts go, they often strive in vain, are but a
representation of those powers permitted to work in the same way
throughout the affairs of this world. Their demoniacal attributes only
represent a morbid state of the intellect, gone to excess from want of
balance with the other powers. There is an intellectual as well as a
physical drunkenness, and which, no less, impels to crime. Carwin, urged
on to use his ventriloquism till the presence of such a strange agent
wakened the seeds of fanaticism in the breast of Wieland, is in a state
no more foreign to nature than that of the wretch executed last week,
who felt himself drawn as by a spell to murder his victim, because he
had thought of her money and the pleasures it might bring him, till the
feeling possessed his brain that hurls the gamester to ruin. The victims
of such agency are like the soldier of the Rio Grande, who, both legs
shot off, and his life-blood rushing out with every pulse, replied
serenely to his pitying comrades, that "he had now that for which the
soldier enlisted." The end of the drama is not in this world, and the
fiction which rounds off the whole to harmony and felicity before the
curtain falls, sins against truth, and deludes the reader. The Nelsons
of the human race are all the more exposed to the assaults of Fate, that
they are decorated with the badges of well-earned glory. Who but feels
as they fall in death, or rise again to a mutilated existence, that the
end is not yet? Who, that thinks, but must feel that the recompense is,
where Brown places it, in the accumulation of mental treasure, in the
severe assay by fire that leaves the gold pure to be used some
time--somewhere?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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