2 Yorke omits the description "from motives of personal
delicacy." The case was that of young Johnson, a wealthy
devotee of Paine in London, who had followed him to Paris
and lived in the same house with him. Hearing that Marat had
resolved on Paine's death, Johnson wrote a will bequeathing
his property to Paine, then stabbed himself, but recovered.
Paine was examined about this incident at Marat's trial.
(Moniteur, April 24, 1793.) See my "Life of Paine," vol.
ii., p. 48 seq.--_Editor._.
*****
He recovered, and being anxious to get out of France, a passage was
obtained for him and Mr. Choppin: they received it late in the evening,
and set off the next morning for Basle before four, from which place I
had a letter from them, highly pleased with their escape from France,
into which they had entered with an enthusiasm of patriotic devotion.
Ah, France! thou hast ruined the character of a Revolution virtuously
begun, and destroyed those who produced it. I might almost say like
Job's servant, "and I only am escaped."
Two days after they were gone I heard a rapping at the gate, and looking
out of the window of the bed room I saw the landlord going with the
candle to the gate, which he opened, and a guard with musquets and fixed
bayonets entered. I went to bed again, and made up my mind for prison,
for I was then the only lodger. It was a guard to take up [Johnson and
Choppin], but, I thank God, they were out of their reach.
The guard came about a month after in the night, and took away the
landlord Georgeit; and the scene in the house finished with the
arrestation of myself. This was soon after you called on me, and sorry
I was it was not in my power to render to [Sir Robert Smyth] the service
that you asked.
I have now fulfilled my engagement, and I hope your expectation, in
relating the case of [Johnson], landed back on the shore of life, by
the mistake of the pilot who was conducting him out; and preserved
afterwards from prison, perhaps a worse fate, without knowing it
himself.
You say a story cannot be too melancholy for you. This is interesting
and affecting, but not melancholy. It may raise in your mind a
sympathetic sentiment in reading it; and though it may start a tear of
pity, you will not have a tear of sorrow to drop on the page.
*****
Here, my contemplative correspondent, let us stop and look back upon the
scene. The matters here related being all facts, are strongly pictured
in my mind, and in this sense Forgetfulness does not apply. But facts
and feelings are distinct things, and it is against feelings that the
opium wand of Forgetfulness draws us into ease. Look back on any scene
or subject that once gave you distress, for all of us have felt some,
and you will find, that though the remembrance of the fact is not
extinct in your memory, the feeling is extinct in your mind. You can
remember when you had felt distress, but you cannot feel that distress
again, and perhaps will wonder you felt it then. It is like a shadow
that loses itself by light.
It is often difficult to know what is a misfortune: that which we feel
as a great one today, may be the means of turning aside our steps into
some new path that leads to happiness yet unknown. In tracing the scenes
of my own life, I can discover that the condition I now enjoy, which is
sweet to me, and will be more so when I get to America, except by the
loss of your society, has been produced, in the first instance, in my
being disappointed in former projects. Under that impenetrable veil,
futurity, we know not what is concealed, and the day to arrive is hidden
from us. Turning then our thoughts to those cases of despair that lead
to suicide, when, "the mind," as you say, "neither sees nor hears, and
holds counsel only with itself; when the very idea of consolation would
add to the torture, and self-destruction is its only aim," what, it may
be asked, is the best advice, what the best relief? I answer, seek it
not in reason, for the mind is at war with reason, and to reason against
feelings is as vain as to reason against fire: it serves only to torture
the torture, by adding reproach to horror. All reasoning with ourselves
in such cases acts upon us like the reason of another person, which,
however kindly done, serves but to insult the misery we suffer. If
reason could remove the pain, reason would have prevented it. If she
could not do the one, how is she to perform the other? In all such cases
we must look upon Reason as dispossessed of her empire, by a revolt
of the mind. She retires herself to a distance to weep, and the ebony
sceptre of Despair rules alone. All that Reason can do is to suggest,
to hint a thought, to signify a wish, to cast now and then a kind
of bewailing look, to hold up, when she can catch the eye, the
miniature-shaded portrait of Hope; and though dethroned, and can dictate
no more, to wait upon us in the humble station of a handmaid.