says, "one of that species of men who are properly denominated
castle-builders, who scorn to be beholden to the earth for a foundation,
or dig in the bowels of it for materials; but erect their structures in
the most unstable of elements, the air; fancy alone laying the line,
marking the extent, and shaping the model. It would be difficult to
enumerate what august palaces and stately porticoes have grown under my
forming imagination, or what verdant meadows and shady groves have
started into being by the powerful feat of a warm fancy. A
castle-builder is ever just what he pleases, and as such I have grasped
imaginary sceptres, and delivered uncontrollable edicts, from a throne
to which conquered nations yielded obeisance. There is no art or
profession, whose most celebrated masters I have not eclipsed. Wherever
I have afforded my salutary presence, fevers have ceased to burn and
agues to shake the human fabric. When an eloquent fit has been upon me,
an apt gesture and proper cadence has animated each sentence, and gazing
crowds have found their passions worked up into a rage, or soothed into
a calm. I am short, and not very well made; yet upon sight of a fine
woman, I have stretched into proper stature, and killed with a good air
and mien. These are the gay phantoms that dance before my waking eyes,
and compose my day-dreams. I should be the most contented happy man
alive, were the chimerical happiness which springs from the paintings of
fancy less fleeting and transitory. But alas! it is with grief of mind I
tell you, the least breath of wind has often demolished my magnificent
edifices, swept away my groves, and left no more trace of them than if
they had never been. My exchequer has sunk and vanished by a rap on my
door, the salutation of a friend has cost me a whole continent, and in
the same moment I have been pulled by the sleeve, my crown has fallen
from my head. The ill consequence of these reveries is inconceivably
great, seeing the loss of imaginary possessions makes impressions of
real woe. Besides, bad economy is visible and apparent in builders of
invisible mansions. My tenants' advertisements of ruins and
dilapidations often cast a damp on my spirits, even in the instant when
the sun, in all his splendor, gilds my Eastern palaces."
"Alas!" cries Heine, in his Confessions, "fame, once sweet as sugared
pine-apple and flattery, has for a long time been nauseous to me; it
tastes as bitter to me now as wormwood. With Romeo I can say, 'I am the
fool of fortune.' The bowl stands full before me, but I lack the spoon.
What does it avail me that at banquets my health is pledged in the
choicest wines, drunk from golden goblets, if at the same time I, with
all that makes life pleasant denied to me, may only wet my lips with an
insipid, disagreeable, medicinal drink? What benefit is it to me that
enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with laurel
wreaths, if meanwhile the shriveled fingers of an aged hired nurse press
a blister of Spanish flies to the back of my head? What does it avail me
that all the roses of Sharon tenderly glow and bloom for me? Alas!
Sharon is two thousand miles away from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where I in
the dreary solitude of my sick-room have nothing to smell, unless it be
the perfume of warmed-over poultices."
"When I look around me," said Goethe, "and see how few of the companions
of earlier years are left to me, I think of a summer residence at a
bathing-place. When you arrive, you first become acquainted with those
who have already been there some weeks, and who leave you in a few days.
This separation is painful. Then you turn to the second generation, with
which you live a good while, and become really intimate. But this goes
also, and leaves us lonely with the third, which comes just as we are
going away, and with which we have, properly, nothing to do.... I have
ever been considered one of Fortune's chiefest favorites; nor can I
complain of the course my life has taken. Yet, truly, there has been
nothing but toil and care; and in my seventy-fifth year, I may say that
I have never had four weeks of genuine pleasure. The stone was ever to
be rolled up anew."
"What a multitude of past friends can I number amongst the dead!"
exclaimed another venerable worthy in literature. "It is the melancholy
consequence of old age; if we outlive our feelings we are nothing worth;
if they remain in force, a thousand sad occurrences remind us that we
live too long." It was Sir William Temple's opinion that "life is like
wine; who would drink it pure must not draw it to the dregs." Dr.
Sherlock thought "the greatest part of mankind have great reason to be
contented with the shortness of life, because they have no temptation to
wish it longer." De Tocqueville said, "Man is a traveler toward a colder
and colder region, and the higher his latitude, the faster ought to be
his walk. The great malady of the soul is cold. It must be combated by
activity and exertion, by contact with one's fellow-creatures, and with
the business of the world. In these days one must not live upon what one
has already learnt, one must learn more; and instead of sleeping away
our acquired ideas, we should seek for fresh ones, make the new opinions
fight with the old ones, and those of youth with those of an altered
state of thought and of society."
The following authentic memorial was found in the closet of Abdalrahman,
who established the throne of Cordova, and who, during his life, enjoyed
thousands of wives, millions upon millions of wealth, and was the object
of universal admiration and envy: "I have now reigned above fifty years
in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and
respected by my allies. Riches and honor, power and pleasure, have
waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been
wanting to my felicity. In this situation I have diligently numbered the
days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they
amount to fourteen. O man, place not thy confidence in this present
world!"
Voltaire makes Candide sit down to supper at Venice with six strangers
who were staying at the same hotel with himself, and as the servants, to
his astonishment, addressed each of them by the title of "your majesty,"
he asked for an explanation of the pleasantry. "I am not jesting," said
the first, "I am Achmet III.; I was sultan several years; I dethroned
my brother, and my nephew dethroned me. They have cut off the heads of
my viziers; I shall pass the remainder of my days in the old seraglio;
my nephew, the Sultan Mahmoud, sometimes permits me to travel for my
health, and I have come to pass the Carnival at Venice." A young man who
was close to Achmet spoke next, and said, "My name is Ivan; I have been
Emperor of all the Russias; I was dethroned when I was in my cradle; my
father and my mother have been incarcerated; I was brought up in prison;
I have sometimes permission to travel attended by my keepers, and I have
come to pass the Carnival at Venice." The third said, "I am Charles
Edward, King of England; my father has surrendered his rights to me; I
have fought to sustain them; my vanquishers have torn out the hearts of
eight hundred of my partisans; I have been put into prison; I am going
to Rome to pay a visit to my father, dethroned like my grandfather and
myself, and I have come to pass the Carnival at Venice." The fourth then
spoke, and said, "I am King of Poland; the fortune of war has deprived
me of my hereditary states; my father experienced the same reverses; I
resign myself to the will of Providence, like the Sultan Achmet, the
Emperor Ivan, and the King Charles Edward, to whom God grant a long
life; and I have come to pass the Carnival at Venice." The fifth said,
"I am also King of Poland; I have lost my kingdom twice, but Providence
has given me another in which I have done more good than all the kings
of Sarmatia put together have ever done on the banks of the Vistula. I
also resign myself to the will of Providence, and I have come to pass
the Carnival at Venice." There remained a sixth monarch to speak.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I am not as great a sovereign as the rest, but I,
too, have been a king. I am Theodore, who was elected King of Corsica; I
was called 'your majesty,' and at present am hardly called 'sir;' I
have caused money to be coined, and do not now possess a penny; I have
had two secretaries of state, and have now scarcely a servant; I have
sat upon a throne, and was long in a prison in London, upon straw, and
am afraid of being treated in the same manner here, although I have
come, like your majesties, to pass the Carnival at Venice." The other
five kings heard this confession with a noble compassion. Each of them
gave King Theodore twenty sequins to buy some clothes and shirts.
Candide presented him with a diamond worth two thousand sequins. "Who,"
said the five kings, "is this man who can afford to give a hundred times
as much as any of us? Are you, sir, also a king?" "No, your majesties,
and I have no desire to be."
Bacon's contemporary and cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, who was principal
secretary of state to Queen Elizabeth and James I., and ultimately lord
high treasurer, when he was acknowledged to be the ablest, as he
appeared the most enviable, statesman of his time, wrote to a friend,
"Give heed to one that hath sorrowed in the bright lustre of a court and
gone heavily over the best seeming fair ground. It is a great task to
prove one's honesty, and yet not spoil one's fortune.... I am pushed
from the shore of comfort, and know not where the winds and waves of a
court will bear me; I know it bringeth little comfort on earth; and he
is, I reckon, no wise man that looketh this way to heaven." Bacon
himself says, in one of his Essays, "Certainly great persons have need
to borrow other men's opinions to think themselves happy; for if they
judge by their own feeling they cannot find it; but if they think with
themselves what others think of them, and that other men would fain be
as they are, then they are happy as it were by report, when, perhaps,
they find the contrary within; for they are the first that find their
own griefs, though they be the last that find their own faults."
Madame de Stael, surrounded by the most brilliant men of genius, beloved
by a host of faithful and devoted friends, the centre of a circle of
unsurpassed attractions, was yet doomed to mourn "the solitude of life."
A short time before her death, she said to Chateaubriand, "I am now what
I have always been--lively and sad."
The illustrious Madame Recamier, "after forty years of unchallenged
queenship in French society, constantly enveloped in an intoxicating
incense of admiration and love won not less by her goodness and purity
than by her beauty and grace," writes thus from Dieppe to her niece: "I
am here in the centre of fetes, princesses, illuminations, spectacles.
Two of my windows face the ball-room, the other two front the theatre.
Amidst this clatter I am in a perfect solitude. I sit and muse on the
shore of the ocean. I go over all the sad and joyous circumstances of my
life. I hope you will be more happy than I have been."
Madame de Pompadour, recalling her follies, serious matters they were to
her, said to the Prince de Soubise, "It is like reading a strange book;
my life is an improbable romance; I do not believe it." "Gray hairs had
come on like daylight streaming in,--daylight and a headache with it.
Pleasure had gone to bed with the rouge on her cheeks."
"Ah!" wrote also Madame de Maintenon to her niece, "alas that I cannot
give you my experience; that I could only show you the weariness of soul
by which the great are devoured--the difficulty which they find in
getting through their days! Do you not see how they die of sadness in
the midst of that fortune which has been a burden to them? I have been
young and beautiful; I have tasted many pleasures; I have been
universally beloved. At a more advanced age, I have passed years in the
intercourse of talent and wit, and I solemnly protest to you that all
conditions leave a frightful void."
Coleridge sums up all more wisely. "I have known," he says, "what the
enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined
pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all
the experience that more than three-score years can give, I now, on the
eve of my departure, declare to you that health is a great
blessing,--competence obtained by honorable industry a great
blessing,--and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving
friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is
the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian."
"We are born and we live so unhappily that the accomplishment of a
desire appears to us a falsehood, the realization of hope a deception,
as if our sad experience had taught us the bitter lesson that in the
world nothing is true but sorrow." "Who ordered toil," says Thackeray,
"as the condition of life, ordered weariness, ordered sickness, ordered
poverty, failure, success,--to this man a foremost place, to the other a
nameless struggle with the crowd; to that a shameful fall, or paralyzed
limb, or sudden accident; to each some work upon the ground he stands
on, until he is laid beneath it." "Nature," says Pliny, "makes us buy
her presents at the price of so many sufferings, that it is dubious
whether she deserves most the name of a parent or a step-mother."
"Solomon and Job judged the best and spake the truest," thought Pascal,
"of human misery; the former the most happy, the latter the most
unfortunate of mankind; the one acquainted by long experience with the
vanity of pleasure, the other with the reality of affliction and pain."
"We must patiently suffer," says Montaigne, "the laws of our condition;
we are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, in spite of all
physic. 'Tis the first lesson the Mexicans teach their children; so soon
as ever they are born, they thus salute them: 'Child, thou art come
into the world to endure, suffer, and say nothing.'" "Half the miseries
of human life," thought Hazlitt, "proceed from our not perceiving the
incompatibility of different attainments, and consequently aiming at too
much. We make ourselves wretched in vainly aspiring after advantages we
are deprived of; and do not consider that if we had these advantages it
would be quite impossible for us to retain those which we actually do
possess, and which, after all, if it were put to the question, we would
not consent to part with for the sake of any others." "Men of true
wisdom and goodness," says Fielding, "are contented to take persons and
things as they are, without complaining of their imperfections, or
attempting to amend them; they can see a fault in a friend, or relation,
or an acquaintance, without ever mentioning it to the parties themselves
or to any others; and this often without lessening their affection:
indeed, unless great discernment be tempered with this overlooking
disposition, we ought never to contract friendships but with a degree of
folly which we can deceive; for I hope my friends will pardon me when I
declare, I know none of them without a fault; and I should be sorry if I
could imagine I had any friends who could not see mine. Forgiveness of
this kind we give and demand in turn: it is an exercise of friendship,
and perhaps none of the least pleasant, and this forgiveness we must
bestow without desire of amendment. There is, perhaps, no surer mark of
folly, than an attempt to correct the natural infirmities of those we
love: the finest composition of human nature, as well as the finest
china, may have a flaw in it; and this, I am afraid, in either case, is
equally incurable, though nevertheless the pattern may remain of the
highest value." "In short," says Bulwer, "I suspect that every really
skilled man of the world--as the world exists for its citizens in this
nineteenth century--who, at the ripe age of forty, looks from the window
of his club on the every-day mortals whom Fourier has hitherto failed
to reform, has convinced him that, considering all the mistakes in our
education and rearing,--all the temptations to which flesh and blood are
exposed--all the trials which poverty inflicts on the poor--all the
seductions which wealth whispers to the rich,--men, on the whole, are
rather good than otherwise, and women, on the whole, are rather better
than the men."
"Let a man examine his own thoughts," says Pascal, "and he will always
find them employed about the time past or to come. We scarce bestow a
glance upon the present; or, if we do, 'tis only to borrow light from
hence to manage and direct the future. The present is never the mark of
our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments,
but the future only as our object and aim. Thus we never live, but we
ever hope to live; and under this continual disposition and preparation
to happiness, 'tis certain we can never be actually happy, if our hopes
are terminated with the scene of this life."
The Thracians, according to Pliny, estimated their lives mathematically,
making careful study and count of each day before any event of it was
forgotten. "Every day they put into an urn either a black or a white
pebble, to denote the good or bad fortune of that day; at last they
separated these pebbles, and upon comparing the two numbers together,
they formed their judgment of the whole of their lives." But time, past
or present,--time, what is it? "Who can readily and briefly explain
this?" inquired St. Augustine. "Who can even in thought comprehend it,
so as to utter a word about it? But what in discourse do we mention more
familiarly and knowingly, than time? And we understand, when we speak of
it; we understand, also, when we hear it spoken of by another. What then
is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I explain it to one that asketh,
I know not; yet I say boldly, that I know that if nothing passed away,
time passed were not; and if nothing were coming, a time to come were
not; and if nothing were, time present were not. Those two times then,
past and to come, how are they, seeing the past now is not, and that to
come is not yet? But the present, should it always be present, and never
pass into time past, verily it should not be time, but eternity. If,
therefore, time present, in order to be time at all, comes into
existence only because it passes into time past, how can we say that
that is in existence, whose cause of being is that it shall not be? How
is it that we cannot truly say that time is, but because it is tending
not to be?" Comprehend this, and you see how easy a thing it was for the
Thracians to "form a judgment of the whole of their lives"--to strike a
nice balance between their happiness and their misery.
But happiness is as illusive as time, and is proved as perspicuously to
be but a thing of memory, by the same venerable saint. "Where, then, and
when," he says in his famous Confessions, "did I experience my happy
life, that I should remember and love and long for it? Nor is it I
alone, or some few besides, but we all would fain be happy; which,
unless by some certain knowledge we knew, we should not with so certain
a will desire. But how is this, that if two men be asked whether they
would go to the wars, one, perchance, would answer that he would, the
other that he would not; but if they were asked whether they would be
happy, both would instantly, without any doubting, say they would; and
for no other reason would the one go to the wars, and the other not, but
to be happy. Is it, perchance, that as one looks for his joy in this
thing, another in that, all agree in their desire of being happy, as
they would agree, if they were asked, that they wished to have joy, and
this joy they call a happy life? Although, then, one obtains the joy by
one means, another by another, all have one end, which they strive to
attain, namely, joy. Which being a thing which all must say they have
experienced, it is, therefore, found in the memory, and recognized
whenever the name of a happy life is mentioned." Now do you know,
perhaps, what happiness is.
Coming down from Augustine to Helps,--"The wonder is that we live on
from day to day learning so little the art of life. We are constantly
victims of every sort of worry and petty misery, which it would seem a
little bit of reflection and sensible conduct would remove. We
constantly hang together when association only produces unhappiness. We
know it, but do not remedy it.... We have no right to expect to meet
many sympathetic people in the course of our lives. ["To get human
beings together who ought to be together," said Sydney Smith, "is a
dream." "If," said De Tocqueville, "to console you for having been born,
you must meet with men whose most secret motives are always actuated by
fine and elevated feelings, you need not wait, you may go and drown
yourself immediately. But if you would be satisfied with a few men,
whose actions are in general governed by those motives, and a large
majority, who from time to time are influenced by them, you need not
make such faces at the human race. Man with his vices, his weaknesses,
and his virtues, strange combination though he be of good and evil, of
grandeur and of baseness, is still, on the whole, the object most worthy
of study, interest, pity, attachment, and admiration in the world; and
since we have no angels, we cannot attach ourselves, or devote ourselves
to anything greater or nobler than our fellow-creatures.... It is when
estimating better one's fellow-men, one reckons them not by number but
by worth; and this makes the world appear small. Then, without regard to
distance, one seeks everywhere for the rare qualities which one has
learned to appreciate."] The pleasant man to you is the man you can rely
upon; who is tolerant, forbearing, and faithful.... Again, the habit of
over-criticism is another hinderance to pleasantness. We are not fond of
living always with our judges; and daily life will not bear the
unwholesome scrutiny of an over-critical person." The petty annoyances
and wanton bitternesses of life make us, in our impatience, sometimes
wish to fly from all companionship; and contributed, no doubt,--he
himself could not tell how much,--to make the author of the Genius of
Solitude exclaim, with so much feeling, "Happy is he who, free from the
iron visages that hurt him as they pass in the street, free from the
vapid smiles and sneers of frivolous people, draws his sufficingness
from inexhaustible sources always at his command when he is alone! Blest
is he who, when disappointed, can turn from the affectations of an empty
world and find solace in the generous sincerity of a full heart. To roam
apart by the tinkling rill, to crouch in the grass where the crocus
grows, to lie amid the clover where the honey-bee hums, gaze off into
the still deeps of summer blue, and feel that your harmless life is
gliding over the field of time as noiselessly as the shadow of a cloud;
or, snuggled in furs, to trudge through the drifts amidst the unspotted
scenery of winter, when Storm unfurls his dark banner in the sky, and
Snow has camped on the hills and clad every stone and twig with his
ermine, is pleasure surpassing any to be won in shallowly consorting
with mobs of men."
"The longer I live," said Maurice de Guerin, "and the clearer I discern
between true and false in society, the more does the inclination to
live, not as a savage or a misanthrope, but as a solitary man on the
frontiers of society, on the outskirts of the world, gain strength and
grow in me. The birds come and go, and make nests around our
habitations; they are fellow-citizens of our farms and hamlets with us:
but they take their flight in a heaven which is boundless; the hand of
God alone gives and measures to them their daily food; they build their
nests in the heart of the thick bushes, and hang them in the height of
the trees. So would I, too, live, hovering round society, and having
always at my back a field of liberty vast as the sky."