A PORTRAIT.
MYSTERIOUS impulse at the heart, which never suffers us to be at rest,
which urges us onward as by an unseen yet irresistible law--human
planets in a petty orbit, hurried forever and forever, till our course
is run and our light is quenched--through the circle of a dark and
impenetrable destiny! art thou not some faint forecast and type of our
wanderings hereafter; of the unslumbering nature of the soul; of the
everlasting progress which we are predoomed to make through the
countless steps and realms and harmonies in the infinite creation? Oh,
often in my rovings have I dared to dream so,--often have I soared on
the wild wings of thought above the "smoke and stir" of this dim earth,
and wrought, from the restless visions of my mind, a chart of the
glories and the wonders which the released spirit may hereafter visit
and behold!
What a glad awakening from self,--what a sparkling and fresh draught
from a new source of being,--what a wheel within wheel, animating,
impelling, arousing all the rest of this animal machine, is the first
excitement of Travel! the first free escape from the bonds of the linked
and tame life of cities and social vices,--the jaded pleasure and the
hollow love, the monotonous round of sordid objects and dull
desires,--the eternal chain that binds us to things and beings,
mockeries of ourselves,--alike, but oh, how different! the shock that
brings us nearer to men only to make us strive against them, and learn,
from the harsh contest of veiled deceit and open force, that the more we
share the aims of others, the more deeply and basely rooted we grow to
the littleness of self!
I passed more lingeringly through France than I did through the other
portions of my route. I had dwelt long enough in the capital to be
anxious to survey the country. It was then that the last scale which
the magic of Louis Quatorze and the memory of his gorgeous court had
left upon the mortal eye fell off, and I saw the real essence of that
monarch's greatness and the true relics of his reign. I saw the poor,
and the degraded, and the racked, and the priest-ridden, tillers and
peoplers of the soil, which made the substance beneath the glittering
and false surface,--the body of that vast empire, of which I had
hitherto beheld only the face, and THAT darkly, and for the most part
covered by a mask!
No man can look upon France, beautiful France,--her rich soil, her
temperate yet maturing clime, the gallant and bold spirits which she
produces, her boundaries so indicated and protected by Nature itself,
her advantages of ocean and land, of commerce and agriculture,--and not
wonder that her prosperity should be so bloated, and her real state so
wretched and diseased.
Let England draw the moral, and beware not only of wars which exhaust,
but of governments which impoverish. A waste of the public wealth is
the most lasting of public afflictions; and "the treasury which is
drained by extravagance must be refilled by crime."*
* Tacitus.
I remember one beautiful evening an accident to my carriage occasioned
my sojourn for a whole afternoon in a small village. The Cure honoured
me with a visit; and we strolled, after a slight repast, into the
hamlet. The priest was complaisant, quiet in manner, and not ill
informed for his obscure station and scanty opportunities of knowledge;
he did not seem, however, to possess the vivacity of his countrymen, but
was rather melancholy and pensive, not only in his expression of
countenance, but his cast of thought.
"You have a charming scene here: I almost feel as if it were a sin to
leave it so soon."
We were, indeed, in a pleasant and alluring spot at the time I addressed
this observation to the good Cure. A little rivulet emerged from the
copse to the left, and ran sparkling and dimpling beneath our feet, to
deck with a more living verdure the village green, which it intersected
with a winding nor unmelodious stream. We had paused, and I was leaning
against an old and solitary chestnut-tree, which commanded the whole
scene. The village was a little in the rear, and the smoke from its few
chimneys rose slowly to the silent and deep skies, not wholly unlike the
human wishes, which, though they spring from the grossness and the fumes
of earth, purify themselves as they ascend to heaven. And from the
village (when other sounds, which I shall note presently, were for an
instant still) came the whoop of children, mellowed by distance into a
confused yet thrilling sound, which fell upon the heart like the voice
of our gone childhood itself. Before, in the far expanse, stretched a
chain of hills on which the autumn sun sank slowly, pouring its yellow
beams over groups of peasantry, which, on the opposite side of the
rivulet and at some interval from us, were scattered, partly over the
green, and partly gathered beneath the shade of a little grove. The
former were of the young, and those to whom youth's sports are dear, and
were dancing to the merry music, which (ever and anon blended with the
laugh and the tone of a louder jest) floated joyously on our ears. The
fathers and matrons of the hamlet were inhaling a more quiet joy beneath
the trees, and I involuntarily gave a tenderer interest to their
converse by supposing them to sanction to each other the rustic loves
which they might survey among their children.
"Will not Monsieur draw nearer to the dancers?" said the Cure; "there is
a plank thrown over the rivulet a little lower down."
"No!" said I, "perhaps they are seen to better advantage where we are:
what mirth will bear too close an inspection?"
True, Sir," remarked the priest, and he sighed.
"Yet," I resumed musingly, and I spoke rather to myself than to my
companion, "yet, how happy do they seem! what a revival of our Arcadian
dreams are the flute and the dance, the glossy trees all glowing in the
autumn sunset, the green sod, and the murmuring rill, and the buoyant
laugh, startling the satyr in his leafy haunts; and the rural loves
which will grow sweeter still when the sun has set, and the twilight has
made the sigh more tender and the blush of a mellower hue! Ah, why is
it only the revival of a dream? why must it be only an interval of
labour and woe, the brief saturnalia of slaves, the green resting-spot
in a dreary and long road of travail and toil?"
"You are the first stranger I have met," said the Cure, "who seems to
pierce beneath the thin veil of our Gallic gayety; the first to whom the
scene we now survey is fraught with other feelings than a belief in the
happiness of our peasantry, and an envy at its imagined exuberance. But
as it is not the happiest individuals, so I fear it is not the happiest
nations, that are the gayest."
I looked at the Cure with some surprise. "Your remark is deeper than
the ordinary wisdom of your tribe, my Father," said I.
"I have travelled over three parts of the globe," answered the Cure: "I
was not always intended for what I am;" and the priest's mild eyes
flashed with a sudden light that as suddenly died away. "Yes, I have
travelled over the greater part of the known world," he repeated, in a
more quiet tone; "and I have noted that where a man has many comforts to
guard, and many rights to defend, he necessarily shares the thought and
the seriousness of those who feel the value of a treasure which they
possess, and whose most earnest meditations are intent upon providing
against its loss. I have noted, too, that the joy produced by a
momentary suspense of labour is naturally great in proportion to the
toil; hence it is that no European mirth is so wild as that of the
Indian slave, when a brief holiday releases him from his task. Alas!
that very mirth is the strongest evidence of the weight of the previous
chains; even as, in ourselves, we find the happiest moment we enjoy is
that immediately succeeding the cessation of deep sorrow to the mind or
violent torture to the body."*
* This reflection, if true, may console us for the loss of those village
dances and pleasant holidays for which "merry England" was once
celebrated. The loss of them has been ascribed to the gloomy influence
of the Puritans; but it has never occurred to the good poets, who have
so mourned over that loss, that it is also to be ascribed to the
/liberty/ which those Puritans /generalized/, if they did not
introduce.--ED.
I was struck by this observation of the priest.
"I see now," said I, "that as an Englishman I have no reason to repine
at the proverbial gravity of my countrymen, or to envy the lighter
spirit of the sons of Italy and France."
"No," said the Cure; "the happiest nations are those in whose people you
witness the least sensible reverses from gayety to dejection; and that
/thought/, which is the noblest characteristic of the isolated man, is
also that of a people. Freemen are serious; they have objects at their
heart worthy to engross attention. It is reserved for slaves to indulge
in groans at one moment and laughter at another."
"At that rate," said I, "the best sign for France will be when the
gayety of her sons is no longer a just proverb, and the laughing lip is
succeeded by the thoughtful brow."
We remained silent for several minutes; our conversation had shed a
gloom over the light scene before us, and the voice of the flute no
longer sounded musically on my ear. I proposed to the Cure to return to
my inn. As we walked slowly in that direction, I surveyed my companion
more attentively than I had hitherto done. He was a model of masculine
vigour and grace of form; and, had I not looked earnestly upon his
cheek, I should have thought him likely to outlive the very oaks around
the hamlet church where he presided. But the cheek was worn and hectic,
and seemed to indicate that the keen fire which burns at the deep heart,
unseen, but unslaking, would consume the mortal fuel, long before Time
should even have commenced his gradual decay.
"You have travelled, then, much, Sir?" said I, and the tone of my voice
was that of curiosity.
The good Cure penetrated into my desire to hear something of his
adventures; and few are the recluses who are not gratified by the
interest of others, or who are unwilling to reward it by recalling those
portions of life most cherished by themselves. Before we parted that
night, he told me his little history. He had been educated for the
army; before he entered the profession he had seen the daughter of a
neighbour, loved her, and the old story,--she loved him again, and died
before the love passed the ordeal of marriage. He had no longer a
desire for glory, but he had for excitement. He sold his little
property and travelled, as he had said, for nearly fourteen years,
equally over the polished lands of Europe and the far climates where
Truth seems fable and Fiction finds her own legends realized or
excelled.
He returned home poor in pocket and wearied in spirit. He became what I
beheld him. "My lot is fixed now," said he, in conclusion; "but I find
there is all the difference between quiet and content: my heart eats
itself away here; it is the moth fretting the garment laid by, more than
the storm or the fray would have worn it."
I said something, commonplace enough, about solitude, and the blessings
of competence, and the country. The Cure shook his head gently, but
made no answer; perhaps he did wisely in thinking the feelings are ever
beyond the reach of a stranger's reasoning. We parted more
affectionately than acquaintances of so short a date usually do; and
when I returned from Russia, I stopped at the village on purpose to
inquire after him. A few months had done the work: the moth had already
fretted away the human garment; and I walked to his lowly and nameless
grave, and felt that it contained the only quiet in which monotony is
not blended with regret!