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This is not the romantic melancholy of youth, which dreams of infinite things, but the pain of manhood, which feels the limitations of life, which can laugh at the mockery of attainment, which is sensible of the shame that dwells at the heart of glory, yet which already has begun to hanker after the mean delights of the world, and cannot dispense with the sorry pleasures of self-degradation.
Did envy for his cousin's greatness and resentment of his undisguised contempt the passions of one who had been used for vile ends conscious of self-degradation and the loss of honour, yet mindful of his intellectual superiority did these emotions take fire in him and mingle with a scholar's reminiscences of antique heroism, prompting him to plan a deed which should at least assume the show of patriotic zeal, and prove indubitable courage in its perpetrator?
This self-degradation had an infinite charm, for it brought him down to the level of Uarda, and she, lying near him, sick and anxious, with her dishevelled hair, exactly suited the future which he painted to himself. "Do you hear nothing?" Uarda asked suddenly. He listened.
For the first time since our departure from home the thought of writing to her entered my mind. Amid many tears I composed a long, passionate letter to her that night, in which I told of all my tortures, my raptures, my struggles, my wondrous love and my deep self-degradation and self-contempt.
To divest himself of it would be to lower himself towards the level of the bird, and to commit such an act of self-degradation would occasion to him an amount of pain which he is not disposed to incur for the sake of any amount of pleasure obtainable at its expense. It is, then, the fear of pain which prevents his wishing to be turned into a lark.
Who, keen and clear-sighted enough in fields which they had not selected as their special parade-ground for self-conceit, trained him on to knavery and self-degradation?
Holding self-degradation to be a virtue, and independence as a carnal vice; glorying in being slaves themselves, till to become, under the name of holy obedience, 'perinde ac cadaver, was the ideal of a good monk; and accustomed, themselves, to degrading corporal punishment; they did not shrink from inflicting, even on boys and women, tortures as dastardly as indecent.
How unlike the terror and self-degradation of the man who 'scrabbled on the doors, and let 'the spittle run down his beard, is the heroic and saintly constancy of this noble psalm!
The fame as a singer which comes suddenly to him draws Sordello out of his Goito solitude to the worldly society of Mantua, and his experiences of disillusion and half voluntary self-degradation are those which had been faintly shadowed forth in Pauline, and exhibited more fully and yet with a difference in the Basil experiences of Paracelsus.
But her impulse of friendliness had been killed; she once more, as I saw only too plainly, felt for me that sense of repulsion, felt for herself that sense of self-degradation. "I can not marry you!" she muttered. "You can and will and must," I cried, infuriated by her look. There was a long silence. I could easily guess what was being fought out in her mind. At last she slowly drew herself up.
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