DISQUISITION UPON GREATNESS.
THE conversation had a short pause. The Prince, having considered his
sister’s observation, told her that she had surveyed life with prejudice
and supposed misery where she did not find it. “Your narrative,” says
he, “throws yet a darker gloom upon the prospects of futurity. The
predictions of Imlac were but faint sketches of the evils painted by
Nekayah. I have been lately convinced that quiet is not the daughter of
grandeur or of power; that her presence is not to be bought by wealth nor
enforced by conquest. It is evident that as any man acts in a wider
compass he must be more exposed to opposition from enmity or miscarriage
from chance. Whoever has many to please or to govern must use the
ministry of many agents, some of whom will be wicked and some ignorant,
by some he will be misled and by others betrayed. If he gratifies one he
will offend another; those that are not favoured will think themselves
injured, and since favours can be conferred but upon few the greater
number will be always discontented.”
“The discontent,” said the Princess, “which is thus unreasonable, I hope
that I shall always have spirit to despise and you power to repress.”
“Discontent,” answered Rasselas, “will not always be without reason under
the most just and vigilant administration of public affairs. None,
however attentive, can always discover that merit which indigence or
faction may happen to obscure, and none, however powerful, can always
reward it. Yet he that sees inferior desert advanced above him will
naturally impute that preference to partiality or caprice, and indeed it
can scarcely be hoped that any man, however magnanimous by Nature or
exalted by condition, will be able to persist for ever in fixed and
inexorable justice of distribution; he will sometimes indulge his own
affections and sometimes those of his favourites; he will permit some to
please him who can never serve him; he will discover in those whom he
loves qualities which in reality they do not possess, and to those from
whom he receives pleasure he will in his turn endeavour to give it. Thus
will recommendations sometimes prevail which were purchased by money or
by the more destructive bribery of flattery and servility.
“He that hath much to do will do something wrong, and of that wrong must
suffer the consequences, and if it were possible that he should always
act rightly, yet, when such numbers are to judge of his conduct, the bad
will censure and obstruct him by malevolence and the good sometimes by
mistake.
“The highest stations cannot therefore hope to be the abodes of
happiness, which I would willingly believe to have fled from thrones and
palaces to seats of humble privacy and placid obscurity. For what can
hinder the satisfaction or intercept the expectations of him whose
abilities are adequate to his employments, who sees with his own eyes the
whole circuit of his influence, who chooses by his own knowledge all whom
he trusts, and whom none are tempted to deceive by hope or fear? Surely
he has nothing to do but to love and to be loved; to be virtuous and to
be happy.”
“Whether perfect happiness would be procured by perfect goodness,” said
Nekayah, “this world will never afford an opportunity of deciding. But
this, at least, may be maintained, that we do not always find visible
happiness in proportion to visible virtue. All natural and almost all
political evils are incident alike to the bad and good; they are
confounded in the misery of a famine, and not much distinguished in the
fury of a faction; they sink together in a tempest and are driven
together from their country by invaders. All that virtue can afford is
quietness of conscience and a steady prospect of a happier state; this
may enable us to endure calamity with patience, but remember that
patience must oppose pain.”