THE PRINCE FINDS A WISE AND HAPPY MAN
As he was one day walking in the street, he saw a spacious building,
which all were, by the open doors, invited to enter. He followed the
stream of people, and found it a hall or school of declamation, in which
professors read lectures to their auditory. He fixed his eye upon a sage
raised above the rest, who discoursed with great energy on the
government of the passions. His look was venerable, his action graceful,
his pronunciation clear, and his diction elegant. He showed, with great
strength of sentiment and variety of illustration, that human nature is
degraded and debased when the lower faculties predominate over the
higher; that when fancy, the parent of passion, usurps the dominion of
the mind, nothing ensues but the natural effect of unlawful government,
perturbation and confusion; that she betrays the fortresses of the
intellect to rebels, and excites her children to sedition against
reason, their lawful sovereign. He compared reason to the sun, of which
the light is constant, uniform, and lasting; and fancy to a meteor, of
bright but transitory lustre, irregular in its motion, and delusive in
its direction.
He then communicated the various precepts given from time to time for
the conquest of passion, and displayed the happiness of those who had
obtained the important victory, after which man is no longer the slave
of fear, nor the fool of hope; is no more emaciated by envy, inflamed by
anger, emasculated by tenderness, or depressed by grief; but walks on
calmly through the tumults or privacies of life, as the sun pursues
alike his course through the calm or the stormy sky.
He enumerated many examples of heroes immovable by pain or pleasure, who
looked with indifference on those modes or accidents to which the vulgar
give the names of good and evil. He exhorted his hearers to lay aside
their prejudices, and arm themselves against the shafts of malice or
misfortune by invulnerable patience; concluding, that this state only
was happiness, and that this happiness was in every one's power.
Rasselas listened to him with the veneration due to the instructions of
a superior being, and waiting for him at the door, humbly implored the
liberty of visiting so great a master of true wisdom. The lecturer
hesitated a moment, when Rasselas put a purse of gold into his hand,
which he received with a mixture of joy and wonder.
"I have found," said the prince at his return to Imlac, "a man who can
teach all that is necessary to be known, who, from the unshaken throne
of rational fortitude, looks down on the scenes of life changing beneath
him. He speaks, and attention watches his lips; he reasons, and
conviction closes his periods. This man shall be my future guide: I will
learn his doctrines, and imitate his life."
"Be not too hasty," said Imlac, "to trust or to admire the teachers of
morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men."
Rasselas, who could not conceive how any man could reason so forcibly
without feeling the cogency of his own arguments, paid his visit in a
few days, and was denied admission. He had now learned the power of
money, and made his way by a piece of gold to the inner apartment, where
he found the philosopher, in a room half darkened, with his eyes misty,
and his face pale. "Sir," said he, "you are come at a time when all
human friendship is useless: what I suffer cannot be remedied; what I
have lost cannot be supplied. My daughter, my only daughter, from whose
tenderness I expected all the comforts of my age, died last night of a
fever. My views, my purposes, my hopes are at an end: I am now a lonely
being disunited from society."
"Sir," said the prince, "mortality is an event by which a wise man can
never be surprised: we know that death is always near, and it should
therefore always be expected."
"Young man," answered the philosopher, "you speak like one that has
never felt the pangs of separation." "Have you then forgot the
precepts," said Rasselas, "which you so powerfully enforced? Has wisdom
no strength to arm the heart against calamity? Consider that external
things are naturally variable, but truth and reason are always the
same." "What comfort," said the mourner, "can truth and reason afford
me? Of what effect are they now, but to tell me that my daughter will
not be restored?"
The prince, whose humanity would not suffer him to insult misery with
reproof, went away convinced of the emptiness of rhetorical sound, and
the inefficacy of polished periods and studied sentences.