Imaginary Conversations and Poems Part 28

Abstinence from low pleasures is the only means of meriting or of obtaining the higher.

Kindness in ourselves is the honey that blunts the sting of unkindness in another.

_Leontion._ Explain to me, then, O Epicurus, why we suffer so much from ingrat.i.tude.

_Epicurus._ We fancy we suffer from ingrat.i.tude, while in reality we suffer from self-love. Pa.s.sion weeps while she says, 'I did not deserve this from him'; Reason, while she says it, smoothens her brow at the clear fountain of the heart. Permit me also, like Theophrastus, to borrow a few words from a poet.

_Ternissa._ Borrow as many such as any one will entrust to you, and may Hermes prosper your commerce! Leontion may go to the theatre then; for she loves it.

_Epicurus._ Girls! be the bosom friends of Antigone and Ismene; and you shall enter the wood of the Eumenides without shuddering, and leave it without the trace of a tear. Never did you appear so graceful to me, O Ternissa--no, not even after this walk do you--as when I saw you blow a fly from the forehead of Philoctetes in the propylea. The wing, with which Sophocles and the statuary represent him, to drive away the summer insects in his agony, had wearied his flaccid arm, hanging down beside him.

_Ternissa._ Do you imagine, then, I thought him a living man?

_Epicurus._ The sentiment was both more delicate and more august from being indistinct. You would have done it, even if he _had_ been a living man; even if he could have clasped you in his arms, imploring the deities to resemble you in gentleness, you would have done it.

_Ternissa._ He looked so abandoned by all, and so heroic, yet so feeble and so helpless! I did not think of turning around to see if any one was near me; or else, perhaps----

_Epicurus._ If you could have thought of looking around, you would no longer have been Ternissa. The G.o.ds would have transformed you for it into some tree.

_Leontion._ And Epicurus had been walking under it this day, perhaps.

_Epicurus._ With Leontion, the partner of his sentiments. But the walk would have been earlier or later than the present hour; since the middle of the day, like the middle of certain fruits, is good for nothing.

_Leontion._ For dinner, surely?

_Epicurus._ Dinner is a less gratification to me than to many: I dine alone.

_Ternissa._ Why?

_Epicurus._ To avoid the noise, the heat, and the intermixture both of odours and of occupations. I cannot bear the indecency of speaking with a mouth in which there is food. I careen my body (since it is always in want of repair) in as un.o.bstructed a s.p.a.ce as I can, and I lie down and sleep awhile when the work is over.

_Leontion._ Epicurus! although it would be very interesting, no doubt, to hear more of what you do after dinner--[_Aside to him._] now don't smile: I shall never forgive you if you say a single word--yet I would rather hear a little about the theatre, and whether you think at last that women should frequent it; for you have often said the contrary.

_Epicurus._ I think they should visit it rarely; not because it excites their affections, but because it deadens them. To me nothing is so odious as to be at once among the rabble and among the heroes, and, while I am receiving into my heart the most exquisite of human sensations, to feel upon my shoulder the hand of some inattentive and insensible young officer.

_Leontion._ Oh, very bad indeed! horrible!

_Ternissa._ You quite fire at the idea.

_Leontion._ Not I: I don't care about it.

_Ternissa._ Not about what is very bad indeed? quite horrible?

_Leontion._ I seldom go thither.

_Epicurus._ The theatre is delightful when we erect it in our own house or arbour, and when there is but one spectator.

_Leontion._ You must lose the illusion in great part, if you only read the tragedy, which I fancy to be your meaning.

_Epicurus._ I lose the less of it. Do not imagine that the illusion is, or can be, or ought to be, complete. If it were possible, no Phalaris or Perillus could devise a crueller torture. Here are two imitations: first, the poet's of the sufferer; secondly, the actor's of both: poetry is superinduced. No man in pain ever uttered the better part of the language used by Sophocles. We admit it, and willingly, and are at least as much illuded by it as by anything else we hear or see upon the stage. Poets and statuaries and painters give us an adorned imitation of the object, so skilfully treated that we receive it for a correct one. This is the only illusion they aim at: this is the perfection of their arts.

_Leontion._ Do you derive no pleasure from the representation of a consummate actor?

_Epicurus._ High pleasure; but liable to be overturned in an instant: pleasure at the mercy of any one who sits beside me.

_Leontion._ In my treatise I have only defended your tenets against Theophrastus.

_Epicurus._ I am certain you have done it with spirit and eloquence, dear Leontion; and there are but two words in it I would wish you to erase.

_Leontion._ Which are they?

_Epicurus._ Theophrastus and Epicurus. If you love me, you will do nothing that may make you uneasy when you grow older; nothing that may allow my adversary to say, 'Leontion soon forgot her Epicurus.' My maxim is, never to defend my systems or paradoxes; if you undertake it, the Athenians will insist that I impelled you secretly, or that my philosophy and my friends.h.i.+p were ineffectual on you.

_Leontion._ They shall never say that.

_Epicurus._ I am not unmoved by the kindness of your intentions. Most people, and philosophers, too, among the rest, when their own conduct or opinions are questioned, are admirably prompt and dexterous in the science of defence; but when another's are a.s.sailed, they parry with as ill a grace and faltering a hand as if they never had taken a lesson in it at home. Seldom will they see what they profess to look for; and, finding it, they pick up with it a thorn under the nail.

They canter over the solid turf, and complain that there is no corn upon it; they canter over the corn, and curse the ridges and furrows.

All schools of philosophy, and almost all authors, are rather to be frequented for exercise than for freight; but this exercise ought to acquire us health and strength, spirits and good-humour. There is none of them that does not supply some truth useful to every man, and some untruth equally so to the few that are able to wrestle with it. If there were no falsehood in the world, there would be no doubt; if there were no doubt, there would be no inquiry; if no inquiry, no wisdom, no knowledge, no genius: and Fancy herself would lie m.u.f.fled up in her robe, inactive, pale, and bloated. I wish we could demonstrate the existence of utility in some other evils as easily as in this.

_Leontion._ My remarks on the conduct and on the style of Theophrastus are not confined to him solely. I have taken at last a general view of our literature, and traced as far as I am able its deviation and decline. In ancient works we sometimes see the mark of the chisel; in modern we might almost suppose that no chisel was employed at all, and that everything was done by grinding and rubbing. There is an ordinariness, an indistinctness, a generalization, not even to be found in a flock of sheep. As most reduce what is sand into dust, the few that avoid it run to a contrary extreme, and would force us to believe that what is original must be unpolished and uncouth.

_Epicurus._ There have been in all ages, and in all there will be, sharp and slender heads made purposely and peculiarly for creeping into the crevices of our nature. While we contemplate the magnificence of the universe, and mensurate the fitness and adaptation of one part to another, the small philosopher hangs upon a hair or creeps within a wrinkle, and cries out shrilly from his elevation that we are blind and superficial. He discovers a wart, he pries into a pore; and he calls it knowledge of man. Poetry and criticism, and all the fine arts, have generated such living things, which not only will be co-existent with them but will (I fear) survive them. Hence history takes alternately the form of reproval and of panegyric; and science in its pulverized state, in its shapeless and colourless atoms, a.s.sumes the name of metaphysics. We find no longer the rich succulence of Herodotus, no longer the strong filament of Thucydides, but thoughts fit only for the slave, and language for the rustic and the robber. These writings can never reach posterity, nor serve better authors near us; for who would receive as doc.u.ments the perversions of venality and party? Alexander we know was intemperate, and Philip both intemperate and perfidious: we require not a volume of dissertation on the thread of history, to demonstrate that one or other left a tailor's bill unpaid, and the immorality of doing so; nor a supplement to ascertain on the best authorities which of the two it was. History should explain to us how nations rose and fell, what nurtured them in their growth, what sustained them in their maturity; not which orator ran swiftest through the crowd from the right hand to the left, which a.s.sa.s.sin was too strong for manacles, or which felon too opulent for crucifixion.

_Leontion._ It is better, I own it, that such writers should amuse our idleness than excite our spleen.

_Ternissa._ What is spleen?

_Epicurus._ Do not ask her; she cannot tell you. The spleen, Ternissa, is to the heart what Arimanes is to Oromazes.

_Ternissa._ I am little the wiser yet. Does he ever use such hard words with you?

_Leontion._ He means the evil Genius and the good Genius, in the theogony of the Persians: and would perhaps tell you, as he hath told me, that the heart in itself is free from evil, but very capable of receiving and too tenacious of holding it.

_Epicurus._ In our moral system, the spleen hangs about the heart and renders it sad and sorrowful, unless we continually keep it in exercise by kind offices, or in its proper place by serious investigation and solitary questionings. Otherwise, it is apt to adhere and to acc.u.mulate, until it deadens the principles of sound action, and obscures the sight.

_Ternissa._ It must make us very ugly when we grow old.

_Leontion._ In youth it makes us uglier, as not appertaining to it: a little more or less ugliness in decrepitude is hardly worth considering, there being quite enough of it from other quarters: I would stop it here, however.

_Ternissa._ Oh, what a thing is age!

_Leontion._ Death without death's quiet.

_Ternissa._ Leontion said that even bad writers may amuse our idle hours: alas! even good ones do not much amuse mine, unless they record an action of love or generosity. As for the graver, why cannot they come among us and teach us, just as you do?

_Epicurus._ Would you wish it?