us than to yield ourselves up to those illusions which mingle
pleasures with our sufferings. I knew a worthy, but unfortunate
man, who passed twenty months in prison. He informed me that,
every night, he had a dream, in which he imagined that his wife
and children visited him and restored him to liberty. This dream
left a remembrance so profound, an emotion so delightful, that
he determined to attempt to renew it by day. When evening came,
exciting his imagination to its most vigorous action, he endeavored
to persuade himself that the moment of the reunion was come. He
represented to himself the transport of his wife and the caresses
of his children; and he allowed no thought but these delightful
visions to occupy his mind until the moment when sleep once
more wrapped him in forgetfulness. The habit of concentrating
his imagination for this result, he assured me, finally rendered
these illusions incredibly vivid and real. He expected night with
impatience; and the certainty that the close of day would bring
some happy moments, threw over the tedious hours an emotion which
mitigated his sufferings.
These charming illusions, in misfortune, resemble those brilliant
boreal lights which, in the midst of a night that lasts for weeks,
present the image of dawn during the dreary winters of the polar
circle. An excitable and vivid faculty, which deceives misfortune,
ought to embellish happiness. To the pleasant things we possess,
it adds those we desire. By its magic, we renew the hours of which
the memory is dear. We taste the pleasures which a distant future
promises; and see, at least, the fleeting shadow of those which are
passing away.
A gloomy philosopher has told us, that such illusions are the
effect of a transient insanity. It seems to me that insane thoughts
are those which create ennui; and that reasonable ideas are those
which throw innocent charms over life. If you reject these views,
be persuaded, at least, not to adopt a false and gloomy wisdom.
You ought rather to prefer the conviction that everything below
is folly.[50] But still, I can distinguish gay follies, frightful
follies, and amiable follies; and I easily discover that there is a
choice among them.
Why should the morose being who perceives only bad people on the
earth, and only miseries in the future, blame him who cradles
flattering hopes, always springing up anew, for allowing himself
to be beguiled by the illusions of his imagination? Both deceive
themselves. But the one cherishes a mistake which brings hatred and
suffering, and the other lives on gaily in his illusions.
Wisdom does not disdain a faculty merely for being brilliant; and,
to taste all the pleasures of imagination, it is indispensable that
reason should be much exercised.
Imagination resembles the magician of an oriental romance who
transports his favorite hero to scenes of enchantment, to try him
with pleasures; and then delivers him over to a hostile magician,
who multiplies peril and misery around him. This creative faculty,
in its perversion, is as fertile to invent torments as, in its
more propitious moods, to bring forth pleasures. If once we resign
ourselves to its gloomy caprices, it conjures up the terror of a
thousand unreal evils. Reason cannot always follow its meteor path;
but ought, at least, to point out the course in which happiness
invites it to walk.
The aid of reason is still more necessary at the moment when the
chimeras of imagination disappear. It is an afflicting moment.
Reason should prepare us to meet it. Every man, with an elevated
mind and a good heart, has delighted to imagine himself far away
from the stupid and wicked; in a smiling country, separated from
the rest of the world, and alone with a few friends. Suppose
this dream realized; I am aware that, tomorrow, the peaceful
exile might be indulging regrets for the place he had left; and
forming plans to escape from the ennui of the new country. Since
we change our destiny in these respects, without altering our
instinctive desire of change, let us study the art of softening
the pains of our actual condition; and let us learn to extract all
possible advantages from it by imparting to it, if nothing more,
the embellishment created by the happy anticipations of a fertile
imagination.
Ought we to indulge regrets because these paintings of the
imagination so rapidly disappear. I have seen the rich and the
great stripped, in a moment, of their fortune and power; and shall
I afflict myself because my dream has vanished? These unfortunate
people lost all that was dear to them, forever. For me, I can renew
these pleasures of imagination at my will.
Far from sacrificing any of our faculties, let us exercise them
all; and let them mutually conduce to our happiness. As we advance
in life, our reason should grow to the calm of mature age. But let
the imagination and the heart still preserve scintillations of the
fire of youth.
LETTER XXI.
MELANCHOLY.
There is no pleasure of earth but, as soon as it becomes vivid,
has a tendency to tinge itself with melancholy. The birth of an
infant, the convalescence of a father, the return of a friend who
has been long absent, fill the eyes with tears. Nature has thus
chosen to mingle the colors of joy and sadness. Having destined us
to experience each of the emotions in turn, she has ordained that
the shades of transition should melt into each other.[51]
The dearest remembrances are those which are accompanied by
tenderness of heart. The sports of infancy, the first loves, the
perils we have forever escaped, and the faults we have learned to
repair, are of the number. Whoever will recollect the happiest
moments of his life, will find them to have produced this emotion.
But there are two kinds of melancholy; or rather, we must not
confound melancholy with gloom. Will the slight tenderness of
sorrow which imparts a new charm to the fugitive pleasures of
existence be inspired by those gloomy books which this age has
attempted to bring into fashion; by those terrific and wild
dreams in which hideous personages enact revolting scenes? Modern
imagination has painted melancholy a tall and unearthly spectre
enveloped in a winding sheet. The real traits of her countenance
are those of innocence occupied in pleasant revery; and at the same
time that tears are in her eyes, a smile dwells on her lips.
It is the resort of a sterile imagination and a cold heart, to
invest even the tomb with borrowed ideas of darkness; to wait for
night in which to visit it; and to torment the fancy to people it
with sinister phantoms. Real sensibility would not require such an
effort to be awakened. It fills my mind with a pleasing sadness to
wander in the church-yard, under the melancholy radiance of the
moon, among monuments of white marble, and hear the night breeze
sigh among the weeping willows. I am deeply affected with, here
and there, a touching inscription.[52] I remember one in which a
father says, that he has had five children, and that here sleeps
the last that remained to him for consolation. In another, a father
and mother announce that their daughter died at seventeen, a victim
of their weak indulgence, and of the extravagant modes of the
time. This sojourn of repose, these words written in the abodes
of silence, which inspire tenderness for those that are no more,
and those whose treasured affection still remembers them, always
penetrate the soul with an emotion not without its charms. In the
view of tombs, we immediately direct our thoughts to an internal
survey of ourselves. I mark out my place among the peaceful
mansions. I imagine the vernal grass and flowers reviving over my
place of rest. My imagination transports me to the days which I
shall not see, and sounds for me the soothing dirge of the adieus
of friendship pronounced over the spot where I am laid.[53]
I generally carry from my sojourn in these our last mansions,
one painful sentiment. I remark that many tombs are raised by
parents for their children; by husbands for their wives; by widows
for their husbands. I observe that there are but few erected by
children for their fathers. Perhaps it is right that love should
ascend in that scale, rather than descend in the other.
Occasional visits to ruins and tombs inspire salutary melancholy.
But the habit of frequently contemplating these lugubrious objects
is dangerous. It blunts sensibility and creates the necessity of
always requiring strong emotions. It nourishes in the soul sombre
ideas which do not associate with happiness. Without doubt, there
are those who are so unhappy as to long for the repose of the
grave; who find solace in these gloomy spectacles. Young, after
having lost his only daughter, after having in vain solicited a
little consecrated earth to cover the remains of the youthful
victim; after being reduced to the necessity of interring the loved
one with his own hands, might be tempted to fly his kind and love
only night, solitude and tombs. There have been men, condemned by
the award of nature, to such reverses as nourish an incurable and
perpetual melancholy. Their frigid imitators, without their reason
and profound feeling, in wishing to render themselves singular,
become tiresome and ridiculous in their melancholy.
Writers of the most splendid genius of the age have consecrated
their talents to celebrate melancholy; not that melancholy which
has a smile of profound sensibility, but that which has been
cradled in tombs and which holds out to us the full draught
of sadness. There is something in these heart-rending scenes,
these lugubrious spectacles, which the age seeks with avidity.
A writer whose talent tends to render his errors seducing, has
taken pleasure in viewing the christian religion as opening an
inexhaustible source of melancholy. It seems to exalt his mind,
most of all, when it presents itself to him under a funereal aspect.
He paints religion as born in the forests of Horeb and Sinai,
forever surrounded with a formidable gloom; and offering to our
adorations a God who died for men. He describes the invasion of
the barbarians, the persecutions of the first believers, cloisters
arising from deep and dark groves, and melancholy continually
receiving new accessions from the austere rules imposed upon the
pious inmates.
‘There,’ said he, ‘the tenants of these religious seclusions
dug their own tombs, by the light of the moon, in the cemeteries
of their own cloisters. Their couch was a coffin. Some of them
occasionally wandered away to sojourn among the ruins of Memphis
and Babylon, striking the chords of the harp of David, surrounded
by beasts of prey. Some condemned themselves to perpetual silence.
Others sung a continual hymn, echoing the sighs of Job, the
lamentations of Jeremiah, or the penitential songs of the prophet
king. Their monasteries were built on sites the most savage, on the
summits of Lebanon, in the deep forests of Gaul, or on the crags of
the British shores. How sad the knell of the religious bells, heard
at the noon of night, must have sounded when calling the vestals
to their vigils and prayers! The sounds, as they swelled and died
away, mingled the last strains of the hymns with the distant
dashing of the waves. How profound must have been the meditations
of the solitary who, from his grated window, indulged in revery, as
his eye wandered over the illimitable sea, perhaps agitated with
a tempest! What a contrast between the fury of the waves and the
calm of his retreat! The expiring cries of men are heard as they
dash upon the rocks at the foot of the asylum of peace. Infinity
stretches out on one side of their cell; and on the other the
slab of a tomb alone separates between eternity and life. All the
different forms of misfortune, remembrance, manners, and the scenes
of nature concurred to render the christian religion the genius of
melancholy.’[53a]
Can it be thought, for a moment, possible that sighs without
end, the love of deserts and the hope of the tomb are all the
consolations that this divine religion is calculated to bring to
the heart of man? Such an error could only have had its origin in
an unregulated imagination. The christian religion, though pensive
and serious, is not sad. Less brilliant, less imaginative than
paganism, less friendly to pleasure, she is far more favorable to
happiness.
My opinion in regard to the legitimate tendency of religion, is not
only different but directly opposite. A pure religion must produce
tranquillity, confidence and joy. It is departure from religious
views which are true and just, that is followed by a vague sadness,
gloom and despondency.
These funereal and yet eloquent paintings, traced with the
enthusiasm of melancholy, must have had the effect to increase
the number of men of atrabilious temperament, weary of the
world, and tired of themselves. Were it true that the christian
religion inspired an insatiate craving for funereal reveries,
far from considering it as I do, divine, I should estimate it
anti-social.--The true friends of the christian religion always
paint it as it is, more powerful than even human misery; giving
clothing to the naked, bread to the hungry, an asylum to the sick,
a peaceful home to the returning prodigal, and a mother to the
orphan; wiping away the tears of innocence with a celestial hand,
and filling the eyes of the culpable and contrite with tears of
consolation. Let pious thankfulness and a calm courage, which even
death cannot shake, environ its modest heroes. Let its martyrs be
those of charity and toleration;--the protestant opening an asylum
to catholic, falling under the fanatical fury of his brethren; and
when bloody and impious mandates order the massacre of protestants,
the catholic sheltering them in his mansion. Such was the spirit
of Erasmus; such, of the divine Fenelon; such, of William Penn, and
a few tolerant lights that have gleamed through ages of persecution
and darkness. Such are the men whose disciples we desire to
multiply. Let us cease to incorporate melancholy errors and gloomy
follies with the religion of peace, confidence and hope. Eloquence
was imparted for a nobler use.
LETTER XXII.
RELIGIOUS SENTIMENTS.
The philosophy of happiness must find its ultimate requisite in the
hopes of religion. Man must be persuaded that his present life has
relation to a never ending future, and that an eternal providence
watches over the universe, before he will abandon himself with a
tranquil confidence to those irresistible laws by which he is borne
along. He then marches towards the future, as he would confidently
follow a guide of tried prudence and fidelity in a dark path.[54]
In the fever and tumult of worldly pleasures and pursuits, the
voice of wisdom has little chance to be heard, and it seems
necessary that misfortune should have forced the mind in upon
itself, before we become inclined to find resources in religion.
Then we invoke this sublime and consoling power, and like the
friend that avoids our prosperity and our festivals, but returns
to cheer our misfortunes, this celestial friend is at hand to
offer her sustaining succor. We may class all those pleasures as
noxious, which will not associate with this august visitant. Even
in our periods of happiness, if we pause for the reflection of
a moment, we find the need of immortality. All the generous and
tender affections acquire a new charm in alliance with religious
ideas, in the same manner as objects beautiful in themselves,
receive a new lustre when a pure light is thrown upon them. Filial
piety becomes more touching in those children who pray with
fervor for the preservation of the life of a mother. Let a pious
courage guide the sister of charity, and she becomes the angel
of consolation, as she visits the abodes of misery. Even virtue
itself does not receive its celestial impress, except in alliance
with religious sentiments. A few of the higher philosophers among
the great ancients, and Fenelon, Newton, Milton and a few other
men of immortal name, saw the divinity as He is, and contemplated
the perfect model of his infinite perfections. Their efforts
tended to coöperate with the divine views of order and harmony, in
constantly directing human actions and thoughts towards good. The
beautiful system of the gospel has the same simplicity of object;
and its tendency to honor and meliorate humanity is directed by
the highest wisdom. Sentiments which give to all our faculties a
direction, fertilize genius as well as virtue. High models, in any
walk of mind, will never be produced in a world whose inhabitants
believe in nothing but matter, fortuitous combinations, and the
annihilation of our being. Apostles of atheism! your dreary creed
throws an impenetrable gloom upon the universe, and dries the
source of all high thoughts. The advocates of these views vaunt
the necessity of proclaiming the truth. I, too, am the fearless
advocate of the truth, and have no dread of its results. But could
I be persuaded, that religious hopes were unfounded, I should be
tempted to renounce my confidence in truth itself; and no longer
to inculcate the necessity of loving and seeking to propagate it.
It is by the light of this divine torch, that real sages have
desired to investigate religion. Were it possible that the elevated
and consoling ideas, which religion offers, could be baseless and
absurd chimeras, error and truth would be so confounded, that
there would no longer remain any discriminating sign by which to
distinguish the one from the other. Atheists boast that they are
the only frank and hardy antagonists of superstition. They are its
most effectual allies. The superstitious have brought forth the
atheists, and the atheists have re-produced the superstitious;
as, in revolutions, resistance produces fury, and that multiplies
resistance.
I have known excellent men, apparently earnest and docile inquirers
for truth, who have desired in vain to establish in their mind
these consoling convictions.--Their understanding refused to
respond to the wish of their hearts.
Why can I not impart this happy conviction to their understanding?
My subject precludes reasoning, and I only know arguments that
are very simple; but I think with Bacon, that it needs quite as
much credulity to adopt the opinion of atheists, as to yield
faith to all the reveries of the Talmud or the Koran. The more
profoundly I attempt to investigate the doctrines of infidelity,
and consider everything that surrounds me, as resulting from the
combinations of chance, the play of atoms, the efforts of brute
matter, the more my inquiries are involved in darkness. I strive
in vain to give to any hypothesis of atheism the honest semblance
of probability. Matter cannot reflect upon the order which its
different parts require. Neither can those parts interchange reason
and discussion. Neither an atom, nor a globe can say to others of
their class, ‘such are the courses in which we must move.’ Let us
simplify difficulties, as much as possible, and admit that matter
has always existed; let us even suppose motion essential to it; a
supreme intelligence is none the less necessary to the harmony of
the universe. Without a governor of worlds, I can only conceive of
nihility or chaos.
From the sublimest of all thoughts, there is a God, flow all
the truths which my heart desires. The beautiful superstructure
of Christianity results, as a corollary, or ultimate inference,
from this consoling axiom. The system which rejects the soul’s
immortality, is equally absurd with that of atheism. Of the
different arguments against the being of a God, the most striking
one is that which is drawn from the evils which prevail on the
earth. The first thought of every man of sensibility, is, that
had he the power to make a world, he would banish misery from it,
and so arrange the order of things, as that existence should be,
to all conscious beings, a succession of moments, each marked by
happiness. But infirmities, vices, misery, sorrow and death pursue
us. How reconcile the misery of the creation with the power and
beneficence of the Creator? How resolve this strange problem? How
explain this revolting contradiction? Immortality is the only
solution of the enigma of life.[55]
A whimsical combination of deism and materialism forms, at present,
the most widely diffused system among the unbelieving. They have
imagined a God possessing only physical power, and contemplating
the movement of his innumerable worlds, alike indifferent to crime
and virtue. He beholds with the same carelessness the generations
that pass, and those that succeed; and sees deliverers and tyrants
alike confounded in their fall.--Admit the truth of such dogmas,
and the conceptions of a religious man would possess more expansion
and sublimity than the views of the Eternal. Socrates, without
the illumination of the gospel, could have taught them better.
Surrounded by his weeping disciples, he points them beyond the tomb
to the places where the sage at last respires freely; and where the
misfortunes and inequalities of earth are redressed. In painting
these illusions of hope, if they are vain, the sage has conceived
in his dreams an equity superior to that of the infinite Being. Let
us dare to maintain that the feeble children of clay have a right
to entertain ideas of order and desert, more just than those of the
Creator, or admit that the heart, made capable of the desire of
another life, is destined to enjoy it.
The destiny of all the inferior orders that surround us, appears
to terminate upon the earth. Ours alone is evidently not
accomplished here. The animals, exempt from vice, incapable of
virtue, experience, in ceasing to live, neither hopes nor regrets.
They die without the foresight of death. Man, in the course of an
agitated life, degrades himself by follies and vices, or honors
himself by generous and useful actions. Remembrances, loves, ties,
in countless forms, twine about his heart. He is torn, in agony,
from beings for whom he has commenced an affection that he feels
might be eternal. Persecuted for his virtue, proscribed for his
wisdom and courage, calumniated for his most conscientious acts, he
turns to heaven a fixed look of confidence and hope. Has he nothing
to perform beyond death? Has the author of nature forgotten his
justice, only in completing his most perfect work?
Our immortality is a necessary consequence of the existence of
God. Let us not wander astray in vain discussions, which, with
our present faculties, we can never master--such as relate to the
nature of the soul. My hopes, my convictions, rest not upon a
cloudy, metaphysical argument. Neither can the proud treatise of
a sophist weaken, nor the puerile dialectics of a pedant increase
it. It is enough for me that there is a God. Virtue in misfortune
must have hopes which do not terminate with the tomb. The sublime
inculcation of Socrates was, ‘preserve confidence in death.’ But
recompense in another existence supposes merit; and merit requires
liberty.