THE DISCONTENT OF RASSELAS IN THE HAPPY VALLEY
Here the sons and daughters of Abyssinia lived only to know the soft
vicissitudes of pleasure and repose, attended by all that were skilful
to delight, and gratified with whatever the senses can enjoy. They
wandered in gardens of fragrance, and slept in the fortresses of
security. Every art was practised to make them pleased with their own
condition. The sages who instructed them told them of nothing but the
miseries of public life, and described all beyond the mountains as
regions of calamity, where discord was always raging, and where man
preyed upon man.
To heighten their opinion of their own felicity, they were daily
entertained with songs, the subject of which was the Happy Valley. Their
appetites were excited by frequent enumerations of different enjoyments;
and revelry and merriment was the business of every hour, from the dawn
of morning to the close of even.
These methods were generally successful: few of the princes had ever
wished to enlarge their bounds, but passed their lives in full
conviction that they had all within their reach that art or nature could
bestow, and pitied those whom fate had excluded from this seat of
tranquillity, as the sport of chance and the slaves of misery.
Thus they rose in the morning and lay down at night, pleased with each
other and with themselves, all but Rasselas, who, in the twenty-sixth
year of his age, began to withdraw himself from their pastimes and
assemblies, and to delight in solitary walks and silent meditation. He
often sat before tables covered with luxury, and forgot to taste the
dainties that were placed before him; he rose abruptly in the midst of
the song, and hastily retired beyond the sound of music. His attendants
observed the change, and endeavoured to renew his love of pleasure; he
neglected their officiousness, repulsed their invitations, and spent day
after day on the banks of rivulets sheltered with trees, where he
sometimes listened to the birds in the branches, sometimes observed the
fish playing in the stream, and anon cast his eyes upon the pastures and
mountains filled with animals, of which some were biting the herbage,
and some sleeping among the bushes.
This singularity of his humour made him much observed. One of the sages,
in whose conversation he had formerly delighted, followed him secretly,
in hope of discovering the cause of his disquiet. Rasselas, who knew not
that any one was near him, having for some time fixed his eyes upon the
goats that were browsing among the rocks, began to compare their
condition with his own.
"What," said he, "makes the difference between man and all the rest of
the animal creation? Every beast that strays beside me has the same
corporal necessities with myself: he is hungry and crops the grass, he
is thirsty and drinks the stream; his thirst and hunger are appeased, he
is satisfied and sleeps; he rises again and is hungry; he is again fed
and is at rest. I am hungry and thirsty like him, but when thirst and
hunger cease I am not at rest; I am like him pained with want, but am
not like him satisfied with fullness. The intermediate hours are tedious
and gloomy; I long again to be hungry, that I may again quicken my
attention. The birds peck the berries or the corn, and fly away to the
groves, where they sit in seeming happiness on the branches, and waste
their lives in tuning one unvaried series of sounds. I likewise can call
the lutanist and the singer; but the sounds that pleased me yesterday
weary me to-day, and will grow yet more wearisome to-morrow. I can
discover within me no power of perception which is not glutted with its
proper pleasure; yet I do not feel myself delighted. Man surely has some
latent sense for which this place affords no gratification; or he has
some desires distinct from sense, which must be satisfied before he can
be happy."
After this he lifted up his head, and seeing the moon rising, walked
towards the palace. As he passed through the fields, and saw the
animals around him, "Ye," said he, "are happy, and need not envy me that
walk thus among you, burdened with myself; nor do I, ye gentle beings,
envy your felicity, for it is not the felicity of man. I have many
distresses from which ye are free; I fear pain when I do not feel it; I
sometimes shrink at evils recollected, and sometimes start at evils
anticipated: surely the equity of providence has balanced peculiar
sufferings with peculiar enjoyments."
With observations like these the prince amused himself as he returned,
uttering them with a plaintive voice, yet with a look that discovered
him to feel some complacence in his own perspicacity, and to receive
some solace of the miseries of life, from consciousness of the delicacy
with which he felt, and the eloquence with which he bewailed them. He
mingled cheerfully in the diversions of the evening, and all rejoiced to
find that his heart was lightened.