Raphael to Julius.
Julius, happiness such as ours, if unbroken, would be too much for human
lot. This thought often haunted me even in the full enjoyment of our
friendship. This thought, then darkening our happiness, was a salutary
foretaste, intended to mitigate the pain of my present position.
Hardened in the stern school of resignation, I am still more susceptible
of the comfort of seeing in our separation a slight sacrifice whose merit
may win from fate the reward of our future reunion. You did not yet know
what privation was. You suffer for the first time.
And yet it is perhaps an advantage for you that I have been torn from you
exactly at this time. You have to endure a malady, from which you can
only perfectly recover by your own energy, so as not to suffer a relapse.
The more deserted you feel, the more you will stir up all healing power
in yourself, and in proportion as you derive little or no benefit from
temporary and deceptive palliatives, the more certainly will you succeed
in eradicating the evil fundamentally.
I do not repent that I roused you from your dream, though your present
position is painful. I have done nothing more than hasten a crisis,
which every soul like yours has sooner or later to pass through, and
where the essential thing is, at what time of life it is endured. There
are times and seasons when it is terrible to doubt truth and virtue. Woe
to the man who has to fight through the quibbles of a self-sufficient
reason while he is immersed in the storms of the passions. I have felt
in its fulness all that is expressed by this, and, to preserve you from
similar troubles I could devise no means but to ward off the pestilence
by timely inoculation.
Nor could I, my dear Julius, choose a more propitious time? I met you in
the full and glorious bloom of youthful intelligence and bodily vigor,
before you had been oppressed by care or enchained by passion; fully
prepared, in your freedom and strength, to stand the great fight, of
which a sublime tranquillity, produced by conviction, is the prize.
Truth and error had not yet been interwoven with your interests. Your
enjoyments and virtues were independent of both. You required no images
of terror to tear you from low dissipation. The feeling for nobler joys
had made these odious to you. You were good from instinct and from
unconsecrated moral grace. I had nothing to fear for your morality, if a
building crumbled down on which it was not founded. Nor do your
anxieties alarm me, though you may conjure up many dark anticipations in
your melancholy mood. I know you better, Julius!
You are ungrateful, too! You despise the reason, and forget what joys it
has procured you. Though you might have escaped the dangers of doubt all
your life, still it was my duty not to deprive you of the pleasures which
you were capable of enjoying. The height at which you were was not
worthy of you. The way up which you climbed gave you compensation for
all of which I deprived you. I still recall the delight--with what
delight you blessed the moment when the bandage dropped from your eyes!
The warmth with which you grasped the truth possibly may have led your
all-devouring imagination to an abyss at sight of which you draw back
shuddering.
I must follow the course of your inquiries to discover the sources of
your complaints. You have written down the results of your thoughts:
send me these papers and then I will answer you.