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 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 sounds, and
the inefficacy of polished periods and studied sentences.