“Tous les genres sont permis, hors le genre ennuyeux.”
“WANT and ennui,” says Schopenhauer, “are the two poles of human life.”
The further we escape from one evil, the nearer we inevitably draw to
the other. As soon as the first rude pressure of necessity is relieved,
and man has leisure to think of something beyond his unsatisfied craving
for food and shelter, then ennui steps in and claims him for her own. It
is the price he pays, not merely for luxury, but for comfort. Time, the
inexorable taskmaster of poor humanity, drives us hard with whip and
spur when we are struggling under the heavy burden of work; but stays
his hand, and prolongs the creeping hours, when we are delivered over to
that weariness of spirit which weights each moment with lead. Time is,
in fact, either our open oppressor or our false friend. He is that agent
by which, at every instant, “all things in our hands become as nothing,
and lose any real value they possess.”
Here is a doctrine distinctly discouraging, and stated with that
relentless candor which compels our reluctant consideration. There can
be no doubt that to Schopenhauer’s mind ennui was an evil every whit as
palpable as want. He hated and feared them both with the painful
susceptibility of a self-centred man; and he strove resolutely from his
youth to protect himself against these twin disasters of life. The
determined fashion in which he guarded his patrimony from loss resembled
the determined fashion in which he strove—with less success—to guard
himself from boredom. The vapid talk, the little wearisome iterations,
which most of us bear resignedly enough because custom has taught us
patience, were to him intolerable afflictions. He retaliated by an
ungracious dismissal of society as something pitiably and uniformly
contemptible. His advice has not the grave and simple wisdom of Sir
Thomas Browne, “Be able to be alone,” but is founded rather on
Voltaire’s disdainful maxim, “The world is full of people who are not
worth speaking to,” and implies an almost savage rejection of one’s
fellow-beings. “Every fool is pathetically social,” says Schopenhauer,
and the advantage of solitude consists less in the possession of
ourselves than in the escape from others. With whimsical eagerness he
built barrier after barrier between himself and the dreaded enemy,
ennui, only to see his citadel repeatedly stormed, and to find himself
at the mercy of his foe. There is but one method, after all, by which
the invader can be even partially disarmed, and this method was foreign
to Schopenhauer’s nature. It was practiced habitually by Sir Walter
Scott, who, in addition to his sustained and splendid work, threw
himself with such unselfish, unswerving ardor into the interests of his
brother men that he never gave them a thorough chance to bore him. They
did their part stoutly enough, and were doubtless as tiresome as they
knew how to be; but his invincible sweet temper triumphed over their
malignity, and enabled him to say, in the evening of his life, that he
had suffered little at their hands, and had seldom found any one from
whom he could not extract either amusement or edification.
Perhaps his journal tells a different tale, a tale of heavy moments
stretching into hours, and borne with cheerful patience out of simple
consideration for others. Men and women, friends and strangers, took
forcible possession of his golden leisure, and he yielded it to them
without a murmur. That which was well-nigh maddening to Carlyle’s
irritable nerves and selfish petulance, and which strained even Charles
Lamb’s forbearance to the snapping-point, Sir Walter endured smilingly,
as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. Mr. Lang is right
when he says Scott did not preach socialism, he practiced it; that is,
he never permitted himself to assign to his own comfort or convenience a
very important place in existence; he never supposed his own
satisfaction to be the predestined purpose of the universe. But his love
for genial life, his keen enjoyment of social pleasures, made him
singularly sensitive to ennui. He was able, indeed, like Sir Thomas
Browne, to be alone,—when the charity of his fellow-creatures suffered
it,—and he delighted in diverting companionship, whether of peers or
hinds; but the weariness of daily intercourse with stupid people told as
heavily upon him as upon less patient victims. Little notes scattered
throughout his journal reveal his misery, and awaken sympathetic echoes
in every long-tried soul. “Of all bores,” he writes, “the greatest is to
hear a dull and bashful man sing a facetious song.” And again, with
humorous intensity: “Miss Ayton’s father is a bore, after the fashion of
all fathers, mothers, aunts, and other chaperons of pretty actresses.”
And again, this time in a hasty scrawl to Ballantyne:—
“Oh, James! oh, James! two Irish dames
Oppress me very sore:
I groaning send one sheet I’ve penned,
For, hang them! there’s no more.”
That Sir Walter forgot his sufferings as soon as they were over is
proof, not of callousness, but of magnanimity. He forgave his tormentors
the instant they ceased to torment him, and then found time to deplore
his previous irritation. “I might at least have asked him to dinner,” he
was heard murmuring self-reproachfully, when an unscrupulous intruder
had at last departed from Abbotsford; and on another occasion, when some
impatient lads refused to emulate his forbearance, he recalled them with
prompt insistence to their forgotten sense of propriety. “Come, come,
young gentlemen,” he expostulated. “It requires no small ability, I
assure you, to be a decided bore. You must endeavor to show a little
more respect.”
The self-inflicted pangs of ennui are less salutary and infinitely more
onerous than those we suffer at the hands of others. It is natural that
our just resentment when people weary us should result in a temporary
taste for solitude, a temporary exaltation of our own society. Like most
sentiments erected on an airy trestle-work of vanity, this is an
agreeable delusion while it lasts; but it seldom does last after we are
bold enough to put it to the test. The inevitable and rational
discontent which lies at the bottom of our hearts is not a thing to be
banished by noise, or lulled to sleep by silence. We are not sufficient
for ourselves, and companionship is not sufficient for us. “Venez,
monsieur,” said Louis XIII. to a listless courtier; “allons nous ennuyer
ensemble.” We fancy it is the detail of life, its small grievances, its
apparent monotony, its fretful cares, its hours alternately lagging and
feverish, that wear out the joy of existence. This is not so. Were each
day differently filled, the result would be much the same. Young Maurice
de Guérin, struggling with a depression he too clearly understands,
strikes at the very root of the matter in one dejected sentence: “Mon
Dieu, que je souffre de la vie! Non dans ses accidents, un peu de
philosophie y suffit; mais dans elle-même, dans sa substance, à part
tout phénomène.” To which the steadfast optimist opposes an admirable
retort: “It is a pity that M. de Guérin should have permitted himself
this relentless analysis of a misery which is never bettered by
contemplation.” Happiness may not be, as we are sometimes told, the
legacy of the barbarian, but neither is it a final outcome of
civilization. Men can weary, and do weary, of every stage that
represents a step in the world’s progress, and the ennui of mental
starvation is equaled only by the ennui of mental satiety.
It is curious how much of this temper is reflected in the somewhat
dispiriting literature which attains popularity to-day. Mr.
Hamlin Garland, whose leaden-hued sketches called—I think
unfairly—“Main-Travelled Roads” have deprived most of us of some
cheerful hours, paints with an unfaltering hand a life in which ennui
sits enthroned. It is not the poverty of his Western farmers that
oppresses us. Real biting poverty, which withers lesser evils with its
deadly breath, is not known to these people at all. They have roofs,
fire, food, and clothing. It is not the ceaseless labor, the rough fare,
the gray skies, the muddy barnyards, which stand for the trouble in
their lives. It is the dreadful weariness of living. It is the burden of
a dull existence, clogged at every pore, and the hopeless melancholy of
which they have sufficient intelligence to understand. Theirs is the
ennui of emptiness, and the implied reproach on every page is that a
portion, and only a portion, of mankind is doomed to walk along these
shaded paths; while happier mortals who abide in New York, or perhaps in
Paris, spend their days in a pleasant tumult of intellectual and
artistic excitation. The clearest denial of this fallacy may be found in
that matchless and desolate sketch of Mr. Pater’s called “Sebastian van
Storck,” where we have painted for us with penetrating distinctness
man’s deliberate rejection of those crowded accessories which, to the
empty-handed, represent the joys of life. Never has the undying essence
of ennui been revealed to our unwilling gaze as in this merciless
picture. Never has it been so portrayed in its awful nakedness, amid a
plenty which it cannot be persuaded to share. We see the rich, warm,
highly colored surroundings, the vehement intensity of work and pastime,
the artistic completeness of every detail, the solicitations of love,
the delicate and alluring touches which give to every day its separate
delight, its individual value; and, amid all these things, the impatient
soul striving vainly to adjust itself to a life which seems so worth the
living. Here, indeed, is one of “Fortune’s favorites,” whom she decks
with garlands like a sacrificial heifer, and at whom, unseen, she points
her mocking finger. Encompassed from childhood by the “thriving genius”
of the Dutch, by the restless activity which made dry land and populous
towns where nature had willed the sea, and by the admirable art which
added each year to the heaped-up treasures of Holland, Sebastian van
Storck has but one vital impulse which shapes itself to an end,—escape;
escape from an existence made unendurable by its stifling fullness, its
vivid and marvelous accomplishment.
It is an interesting question to determine, or to endeavor to determine,
how far animals share man’s melancholy capacity for ennui. Schopenhauer,
who, like Hartmann and all other professional pessimists, steadfastly
maintains that beasts are happier than men, is disposed to believe that
in their natural state they never suffer from this malady, and that,
even when domesticated, only the most intelligent give any indication of
its presence. But how does Schopenhauer know that which he so
confidently affirms? The bird, impelled by an instinct she is powerless
to resist, sits patiently on her eggs until they are hatched; but who
can say she is not weary of the pastime? What loneliness and discontent
may find expression in the lion’s dreadful roar, which is said to be as
mournful as it is terrible! We are naturally tempted, in moments of
fretfulness and dejection, to seek relief—not unmixed with envy—in
contemplating with Sir Thomas Browne “the happiness of inferior
creatures who in tranquillity possess their constitutions.” But freedom
from care, and from the apprehension that is worse than care, does not
necessarily imply freedom from all disagreeable sensations; and the
surest claim of the brute to satisfaction, its absolute adequacy to the
place it is designed to fill, is destroyed by our interference in its
behalf. As a result, domestic pets reveal plainly to every close
observer how frequently they suffer from ennui. They pay, in smaller
coin, the same price that man pays for comfortable living. Mr. Ruskin
has written with ready sympathy of the house dog, who bears resignedly
long hours of dull inaction, and only shows by his frantic delight what
a relief it is to be taken out for the mild dissipation of a stroll. I
have myself watched and pitied the too evident ennui of my cat, poor
little beast of prey, deprived in a mouse-less home of the supreme
pleasures of the hunt; fed until dinner ceases to be a coveted
enjoyment; housed, cushioned, combed, caressed, and forced to bear upon
her pretty shoulders the burden of a wearisome opulence,—or what
represents opulence to a pussy. I have seen Agrippina listlessly moving
from chair to chair, and from sofa to sofa, in a vain attempt to nap;
looking for a few languid minutes out of the window with the air of a
great lady sadly bored at the play; and then turning dejectedly back
into the room whose attractions she had long since exhausted. Her
expressive eyes lifted to mine betrayed her discontent; the lassitude of
an irksome luxury unnerved her graceful limbs; if she could have spoken,
it would have been to complain with Charles Lamb of that “dumb,
soporifical good-for-nothingness” which clogs the wheels of life.
It is a pleasant fancy, baseless and proofless, which makes us imagine
the existence of fishes to be peculiarly tranquil and unmolested. The
element in which they live appears to shelter them from so many evils;
noises especially, and the sharpness of sudden change, scorching heats,
and the inclement skies of winter. A delightful mystery wraps them
round, and the smooth apathy with which they glide through the water
suggests content approaching to complacency. That old-fashioned poem
beginning
“Deep in the wave is a coral grove,
Where the purple mullet and goldfish rove,”
filled my childish heart with a profound envy of these happy creatures,
which was greatly increased by reading a curious story of Father
Faber’s, called “The Melancholy Heart.” In this tale, a little
shipwrecked girl is carried to the depths of the ocean, and sees the
green sea swinging to and fro because it is so full of joy, and the
fishes waving their glistening fins in silent satisfaction, and the
oysters opening and shutting their shells in lazy raptures of delight.
Afterwards she visits the birds and beasts and insects, and finds
amongst them intelligence, industry, patience, ingenuity,—a whole host
of admirable qualities,—but nowhere else the sweet contentment of that
dumb watery life. So universal is this fallible sentiment that even
Leopardi, while assigning to all created things their full share of
pain, reluctantly admits that the passive serenity of the less vivacious
creatures of the sea—starfish and their numerous brothers and sisters—is
the nearest possible approach to an utterly impossible happiness. And
indeed it is difficult to look at a sea-urchin slowly moving its
countless spines in the clear shallow water without thinking that here,
at least, is an existence equally free from excitability and from ennui;
here is a state of being sufficient for itself, and embracing all the
enjoyment it can hold. The other side of the story is presented when we
discover the little prickly cup lying empty and dry on the peak of a
neighboring rock, and know that a crow’s sharp beak has relentlessly dug
the poor urchin from its comfortable cradle, and ended its slumbrous
felicity. Yet the sudden cessation of life has nothing whatever to do
with its reasonable contentment. The question is, not how soon is it
over, or how does it come to an end, but is it worth living while it
lasts? Moreover, the chances of death make the sweetness of
self-preservation; and this is precisely the sentiment which Leigh Hunt
has so admirably embodied in those lines—the finest, I think, he ever
wrote—where the fish pleads for its own pleasant and satisfactory
existence:—
“A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
Quickened with touches of transporting fear.”
Here, as elsewhere, fear is the best antidote for ennui. The early
settlers of America, surrounded by hostile Indians, and doubtful each
morning whether the coming nightfall would not see their rude homes
given to the flames, probably suffered but little from the dullness
which seems so oppressive to the peaceful agriculturist of to-day. The
mediæval women, who were content to pass their time in weaving endless
tapestries, had less chance to complain of the monotony of life than
their artistic, scientific, literary, and philanthropic sisters of our
age; for at any hour, breaking in upon their tranquil labors, might be
heard the trumpet’s blast; at any hour might come the tidings, good or
bad, which meant a few more years of security, or the horrors of siege
and pillage.
It is pleasant to turn our consideration from the ennui which is
inevitable, and consequently tragic, to the ennui which is accidental,
and consequently diverting. The first is part of ourselves, from which
there is no escape; the second is, as a rule, the contribution of our
neighbors, and may be eluded if fortune and our own wits favor us. Lord
Byron, for example, finding himself hard beset by Madame de Staël, whom
he abhorred, had the dexterity to entrap poor little “Monk” Lewis into
the conversation, and then slipped away from both, leaving them the
dismally congenial task of wearying each other without mercy. “A bore,”
says Bishop Selwyn, “is a man who will persist in talking about himself
when you want to talk about yourself;” and this simple explanation
offers a satisfactory solution of much of the ennui suffered in society.
People with theories of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their
kind, for no time or place is sacred from their devastating
elucidations. A theoretic socialist—not the practical working kind, like
Sir Walter—is adamant to the fatigue of his listeners. “Eloquence,” says
Mr. Lowell feelingly, “has no bowels for its victims;” and one of the
most pathetic figures in the history of literature is poor Heine,
awakened from his sweet morning nap by Ludwig Börne, who sat
relentlessly on the edge of the bed and talked patriotism. I hardly
think that even this wanton injury justified Heine in his cruel attack
upon Börne, when the latter was dead and could offer no defense; yet who
knows how many drops of concentrated bitterness were stored up in those
dreary moments of boredom! The only other instance of ennui which seems
as grievous and as cruel is the picture of the Baron Fouqué’s brilliant
wife condemned to play loto every evening with the officers of the
victorious French army; an illustration equally novel and malign of the
devastating inhumanity of war.
In fact, amusements which do not amuse are among the most depressing of
earthly evils. When Sir George Cornwall Lewis candidly confessed that
life would be tolerable were it not for its pleasures, he had little
notion that he was uttering a witticism fated to enjoy a melancholy
immortality. His protest was purely personal, and society, prompt to
recognize a grievance when it is presented, has gone on ever since
peevishly and monotonously echoing his lament. We crave diversion so
eagerly, we need it so sorely, that our disappointment in its
elusiveness is fed by the flickerings of perpetual hope. Ennui has been
defined as a desire for activity without the capacity for action, as a
state of inertia quickened by discontent. But it is rather a desire for
amusement than for activity; it is a rational instinct warped by the
irony of circumstances, and by our own selfish limitations. It was not
activity that Schopenhauer lacked. He worked hard all his life, and with
the concentrated industry of a man who knew exactly what he wanted to
do. It was the common need of enjoyment, which he shared with the rest
of mankind, and his own singular incapacity for enjoying himself, which
chafed him into bitterness, and made him so unreasonably angry with the
world. “In human existence,” says Leopardi, “the intervals between
pleasure and pain are occupied by ennui. And since all pleasures are
like cobwebs, exceedingly fragile, thin, and transparent, ennui
penetrates their tissue and saturates them, just as air penetrates the
webs. It is, indeed, nothing but a yearning for happiness, without the
illusion of pleasure or the reality of pain. This yearning is never
satisfied, since true happiness does not exist. So that life is
interwoven with weariness and suffering, and one of these evils
disappears only to give place to the other. Such is the destiny of man.”
Now, to endure pain resolutely, courage is required; to endure ennui,
one must be bred to the task. The restraints of a purely artificial
society are sufferable to those only whom custom has rendered docile,
and who have been trained to subordinate their own impulses and desires.
The more elaborate the social conditions, the more relentless this need
of adjustment, which makes a harmonious whole at the cost of individual
development. We all know how, when poor Frances Burney was lifted
suddenly from the cheerful freedom of middle-class life to the wearisome
etiquette of a court, she drooped and fretted under the burden of an
honor which brought her nothing but vexation. Macaulay, who champions
her cause with burning zeal, is pleased to represent the monotony of
court as simple slavery with no extenuating circumstances. He likens Dr.
Burney conducting his daughter to the palace to a Circassian father
selling his own child into bondage. The sight of the authoress of
“Evelina” assisting at the queen’s toilet, or chatting sleepily with the
ladies in waiting, thrills him with indignation; the thought of her
playing cards night after night with Madame Schwellenberg reduces him to
despair. And indeed, card-playing, if you have not the grace to like it,
is the most unprofitable form of social martyrdom; you suffer horribly
yourself, and you add very little to the pleasure of your neighbor. The
Baroness Fouqué may have conquered the infantine imbecilities of loto
with no great mental exhaustion. If she were painfully bored, her
patience alone was taxed. The Frenchmen probably thought her a pleased
and animated companion. But Miss Burney, delicate, sleepy, fatigued,
loathing cards, and inwardly rebellious at her fate, must have made the
game drag sadly before bedtime. It was a dreary waste of moments for
her; but a less intolerant partisan than Macaulay would have some
sympathy to spare for poor Madame Schwellenberg, who, like most women of
rank, adored the popular pastime, and who doubtless found the
distinguished young novelist a very unsatisfactory associate.
It is salutary to turn from Miss Burney and her wrathful historian to
the letters of Charlotte Elizabeth, mother of the Regent d’Orléans, and
see how the oppressive monotony of the French court was cheerfully
endured for fifty years by a woman exiled from home and kindred, whose
pleasures were few, whose annoyances were manifold. Madame would have
enjoyed nothing better than a bowl of beer, soup, or a dish of sausages
eaten in congenial company. She lunched daily alone, on hated French
messes, stared at by twenty footmen, from whose supercilious eyes she
was glad to escape with hunger still unsatisfied. Madame detested
sermons. She listened to them endlessly without complaint, and was
grateful for the occasional privilege of a nap. Madame liked cards. She
was not permitted to play, nor even to show herself at the lansquenet
table. She never gambled,—in fact, she had no money,—and it was a fancy
of her husband’s that she brought him ill luck by hovering near. Neither
was she allowed to retire. “All the old women who do not play have to be
entertained by me,” she writes with surpassing good humor. “This goes on
from seven to ten, and makes me yawn frightfully.” Supper was eaten at
the royal table, where the guests often waited three quarters of an hour
for the king to appear, and where nobody spoke a word during the meal.
“I live as though I were quite alone in the world,” confesses this
friendless exile to her favorite correspondent, the Raugravine Louise.
“But I am resigned to such a state of things, and I meddle in nothing.”
Here was a woman trained to the endurance of ennui. The theatre and the
chase were her sole amusements; letter-writing was her only occupation.
Her healthy German nature had in it no trace of languor, no bitterness
born of useless rebellion against fate. She knew how to accept the
inevitable, and how to enjoy the accidental; and this double philosophy
afforded her something closely resembling content. Napoleon, it is said,
once desired some comedians to play at court, and M. de Talleyrand
gravely announced to the audience waiting to hear them, “Gentlemen, the
emperor earnestly requests you to be amused.” Had Charlotte
Elizabeth—long before laid to sleep in St. Denis—been one of that
patient group, she would have literally obeyed the royal commands. She
would have responded with prompt docility to any offered entertainment.
This is not an easy task. “Amuse me, if you can find out how to do it,”
was the melancholy direction of Richelieu to Boisrobert, when the pains
of ennui grew unbearable, and even kittens ceased to be diverting.
Amuse! amuse! amuse! is the plea of a weariness as wide as the world,
and as old as humanity. Amuse me for a little while, that I may think I
have escaped from myself.
It is curious that England should have to borrow from France the word
“ennui,” while the French are unanimous in their opinion that the thing
itself is emphatically of English growth. The old rhyme,
“Jean Rosbif écuyer,
Qui pendit soi-même pour se désennuyer,”
has never lost its application, though the present generation of
English-speaking men are able to digest a great deal of dullness without
seeking such violent forms of relief. In fact, Mr. Oscar Wilde, prompt
to offer an unwelcome criticism, explains the amazing popularity of the
psychological and religiously irreligious novel on the ground that the
_genre ennuyeux_, which no Frenchman can bring himself to pardon, is the
one form of literature which his countrymen thoroughly enjoy. They have
a kindly tolerance for stupid people as well, and the ill-natured term
“bore” has only forced itself of late years upon an urbane and
long-suffering public. Johnson’s dictionary is innocent of the word,
though Johnson himself was well acquainted with the article. As late as
1822, a reviewer in “Colburn’s Magazine” entreats his readers to use the
word “bore;” to write it, if they please; to print it, even, if
necessary. Why shrink from the expression, when the creature itself is
so common, and “daily gaining ground in the country”?
Before this date, however, one English writer had given to literature
some priceless illustrations of the species. “Could we but study our
bores as Miss Austen must have studied hers in her country village,”
says Mrs. Ritchie, “what a delightful world this might be!” But I
seriously doubt whether any real enjoyment could be extracted from Miss
Bates, or Mr. Rushworth, or Sir William Lucas, in the flesh. If we knew
them, we should probably feel precisely as did Emma Woodhouse, and Maria
Bertram, and Elizabeth Bennet,—vastly weary of their company. In fact,
only their brief appearances make the two gentlemen bores so diverting,
even in fiction; and Miss Bates, I must confess, taxes my patience
sorely. She is so tiresome that she tires, and I am invariably tempted
to do what her less fortunate townspeople would have gladly done,—run
away from her to more congenial society. Surely comedy ceases, and
tragedy begins, when poor Jane Fairfax escapes from the strawberry party
at Donwell, and seeks, under the burning noonday sun, the blessed relief
of solitude. “We all know at times what it is to be wearied in spirits.
Mine, I admit, are exhausted,” is the confession wrung from the silent
lips of a girl who has borne all that human nature can bear from Miss
Bates’s affectionate solicitude. Perhaps the best word ever spoken upon
the creation of such characters in novels comes from Cardinal Newman.
“It is very difficult,” he says, “to delineate a bore in a narrative,
for the simple reason that he is a bore. A tale must aim at
condensation, but a bore acts in solution. It is only in the long run
that he is ascertained.” And when he _is_ ascertained, and his identity
established beyond reach of doubt, what profit have we in his desolating
perfections? Miss Austen was far from enjoying the dull people whom she
knew in life. We have the testimony of her letters to this effect. Has
not Mrs. Stent, otherwise lost to fame, been crowned with direful
immortality as the woman who bored Jane Austen? “We may come to be Mrs.
Stents ourselves,” she writes, with facile self-reproach at her
impatience, “unequal to anything, and unwelcome to anybody;” an
apprehension manifestly manufactured out of nothingness to strengthen
some wavering purpose of amendment. Stupidity is acknowledged to be the
one natural gift which cannot be cultivated, and Miss Austen well knew
it lay beyond her grasp. With as much sincerity could Emma Woodhouse
have said, “I may come in time to be a second Miss Bates.”
There is a small, compact, and enviable minority among us, who, through
no merit of their own, are incapable of being bored, and consequently
escape the endless pangs of ennui. They are so clearly recognized as a
body that a great deal of the world’s work is prepared especially for
their entertainment and instruction. Books are written for them, sermons
are preached to them, lectures are given to them, papers are read to
them, societies and clubs are organized for them, discussions after the
order of Melchizedek are carried on monotonously in their behalf. A
brand new school of fiction has been invented for their exclusive
diversion; and several complicated systems of religion have been put
together for their recent edification. It is hardly a matter of surprise
that, fed on such meats, they should wax scornful, and deride their
hungry fellow-creatures. It is even less amazing that these
fellow-creatures should weary from time to time of the crumbs that fall
from their table. It is told of Pliny the younger that, being invited to
a dinner, he consented to come on the express condition that the
conversation should abound in Socratic discourses. Here was a man
equally insensible to ennui and to the sufferings of others. The guests
at that ill-starred banquet appear to have been sacrificed as ruthlessly
as the fish and game they ate. They had not even the loophole of escape
which Mr. Bagehot contemplates so admiringly in Paradise Lost. Whenever
Adam’s remarks expand too obviously into a sermon, Eve, in the most
discreet and wife-like manner, steps softly away, and refreshes herself
with slumber. Indeed, when we come to think of it, conversation between
these two must have been difficult at times, because they had nobody to
talk about. If we exiled our neighbors permanently from our discussions,
we should soon be reduced to silence; and if we confined ourselves even
to laudatory remarks, we should probably say but little. Miss Frances
Power Cobbe, who is uncompromisingly hostile to the feeble vices of
society, insists that it is the duty of every woman to look bored when
she hears a piece of scandal; but this mandate is hardly in accord with
Miss Cobbe’s other requisite for true womanhood, absolute and
undeviating sincerity. How can she look bored when she does not feel
bored, unless she plays the hypocrite? And while many women are shocked
and repelled by scandal, few, alas! are wont to find it tiresome. I have
not even observed any exceeding weariness in men when subjected to a
similar ordeal. In that pitiless dialogue of Landor’s between Catherine
of Russia and Princess Dashkov, we find some opinions on this subject
stated with appalling candor. “Believe me,” says the empress, “there is
nothing so delightful in life as to find a liar in a person of repute.
Have you never heard good folks rejoicing at it? Or rather, can you
mention to me any one who has not been in raptures when he could
communicate such glad tidings? The goutiest man would go on foot to tell
his friend of it at midnight; and would cross the Neva for the purpose,
when he doubted whether the ice would bear him.” Here, indeed, is the
very soul and essence of ennui; not the virtuous sentiment which revolts
at the disclosure of another’s faults, but that deep and deadly ennui of
life which welcomes evil as a distraction. The same selfish lassitude
which made the gladiatorial combats a pleasant sight for the jaded eyes
which witnessed them finds relief for its tediousness to-day in the
swift destruction of confidence and reputation.
There is a curious and melancholy fable of Leopardi’s in which he seeks
to explain what always puzzled him sorely, the continued endurance of
life. In the beginning, he says, the gods gave to men an existence
without care, and an earth without evil. The world was small, and easily
traversed. No seas divided it, no mountains rose frowning from its
bosom, no extremes of heat or cold afflicted its inhabitants. Their
wants were supplied, their pleasures provided; their happiness, Jove
thought, assured. For a time all things went well; but as the human race
outgrew its infancy, it tired of this smooth perfection, and little by
little there dawned upon men the inherent worthlessness of life. Every
day they sounded its depths more clearly, and every day they wearied
afresh of all they knew and were. Illusions vanished, and the
insupportable pains of ennui forced them to cast aside a gift in which
they found no value. They desired death, and sought it at their own
hands.
Then Jove, half in wrath and half in pity, devised a means by which his
rebellious creatures might be preserved. He enlarged the earth, moulded
the mountains, and poured into mighty hollows the restless and pitiless
seas. Burning heat and icy cold he sent, diseases and dangers of every
kind, craving desires that could never be satisfied, vain ambitions, a
babble of many tongues, and the deep-rooted animosities of nations. Gone
was the old tranquillity, vanished the old ennui. A new race, struggling
amid terrible hardships, fought bravely and bitterly for the
preservation of an existence they had formerly despised. Man found his
life filled with toil, sweetened by peril, checked by manifold
disasters, and was deluded into cherishing at any cost that which was so
painful to sustain. The greater the difficulties and dangers, the more
he opposed to them his own indomitable purpose, the more determined he
was to live. The zest of perpetual effort, the keenness of contention,
the brief, sweet triumph over adversity,—these left him neither the time
nor the disposition to question the value of all that he wrung from
fate.
It is a cheerless philosophy, but not without value to the sanguine
socialist of to-day, who dreams of preparing for all of us a lifetime of
unbroken ennui.
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