Part 16

Fewer the gifts that gnarled Age presents To elegantly-handed Infancy, Than elegantly-handed Infancy Presents to gnarled Age. From both they drop; The middle course of life receives them all, Save the light few that laughing Youth runs off with, Unvalued as a mistress or a flower.

Leontion. Since, in obedience to your institutions, O Epicurus, I must not say I am angry, I am offended at least with Theophrastus for having so misrepresented your opinions, on the necessity of keeping the mind composed and tranquil, and remote from every object and every sentiment by which a painful sympathy may be excited. In order to display his elegance of language, he runs wherever he can lay a censure on you, whether he believes in its equity or not.

Epicurus. This is the case with all eloquent men, and all disputants. Truth neither warms nor elevates them, neither obtains for them profit nor applause.

Ternissa. I have heard wise remarks very often and very warmly praised.

Epicurus. Not for the truth in them, but for the grace, or because they touched the spring of some preconception or some passion. Man is a hater of truth, a lover of fiction.

Theophrastus is a writer of many acquirements and some shrewdness, usually judicious, often somewhat witty, always elegant; his thoughts are never confused, his sentences are never incomprehensible. If Aristoteles thought more highly of him than his due, surely you ought not to censure Theophrastus with severity on the supposition of his rating me below mine; unless you argue that a slight error in a short sum is less pardonable than in a longer. Had Aristoteles been living, and had he given the same opinion of me, your friendship and perhaps my self-love might have been wounded; for, if on one occasion he spoke too favourably, he never spoke unfavourably but with justice. This is among the indications of orderly and elevated minds; and here stands the barrier that separates them from the common and the waste. Is a man to be angry because an infant is fretful? Is a philosopher to unpack and throw away his philosophy, because an idiot has tried to overturn it on the road, and has pursued it with gibes and ribaldry?

Leontion. Theophrastus would persuade us that, according to your system, we not only should decline the succour of the wretched, but avoid the sympathies that poets and historians would awaken in us. Probably for the sake of introducing some idle verses, written by a friend of his, he says that, following the guidance of Epicurus, we should altogether shun the theatre; and not only when Prometheus and Oedipus and Philoctetes are introduced, but even when generous and kindly sentiments are predominant, if they partake of that tenderness which belongs to pity. I know not what Thracian lord recovers his daughter from her ravisher; such are among the words they exchange:

Father.

Insects that dwell in rotten reeds, inert Upon the surface of a stream or pool, Then rush into the air on meshy vans, Are not so different in their varying lives As we are.—Oh! what father on this earth, Holding his child's cool cheek within his palms And kissing his fair front, would wish him man?— Inheritor of wants and jealousies, Of labour, of ambition, of distress, And, cruellest of all the passions, lust. Who that behold me, persecuted, scorned, A wanderer, e'er could think what friends were mine, How numerous, how devoted? with what glee Smiled my old house, with what acclaim my courts Rang from without whene'er my war-horse neighed?

Daughter.

Thy fortieth birthday is not shouted yet By the young peasantry, with rural gifts And nightly fires along the pointed hills, Yet do thy temples glitter with grey hair Scattered not thinly: ah, what sudden change! Only thy voice and heart remain the same: No! that voice trembles, and that heart (I feel), While it would comfort and console me, breaks.

Epicurus. I would never close my bosom against the feelings of humanity; but I would calmly and well consider by what conduct of life they may enter it with the least importunity and violence. A consciousness that we have promoted the happiness of others, to the uttermost of our power, is certain not only to meet them at the threshold, but to bring them along with us, and to render them accurate and faithful prompters, when we bend perplexedly over the problem of evil figured by the tragedians. If there were more of pain than of pleasure in the exhibitions of the dramatist, no man in his senses would attend them twice. All the imitative arts have delight for the principal object: the first of these is poetry; the highest of poetry is tragic.

Leontion. The epic has been called so.

Epicurus. Improperly; for the epic has much more in it of what is prosaic. Its magnitude is no argument. An Egyptian pyramid contains more materials than an Ionic temple, but requires less contrivance, and exhibits less beauty of design. My simile is yet a defective one; for a tragedy must be carried on with an unbroken interest, and, undecorated by loose foliage or fantastic branches, it must rise, like the palm-tree, with a lofty unity. On these matters I am unable to argue at large, or perhaps correctly; on those, however, which I have studied and treated, my terms are so explicit and clear, that Theophrastus can never have misunderstood them. Let me recall to your attention but two axioms.

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 ingratitude.

Epicurus. We fancy we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love. Passion 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 gods 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 unobstructed a space 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 friendship 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 assailed, 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 muffled 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, assumes 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 documents 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 assassin 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 accumulate, 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?

Ternissa. No, no! I do not want them: only I was imagining how pleasant it is to converse as we are doing, and how sorry I should be to pore over a book instead of it. Books always make me sigh, and think about other things. Why do you laugh, Leontion?

Epicurus. She was mistaken in saying bad authors may amuse our idleness. Leontion knows not then how sweet and sacred idleness is.

Leontion. To render it sweet and sacred, the heart must have a little garden of its own, with its umbrage and fountains and perennial flowers—a careless company! Sleep is called sacred as well as sweet by Homer; and idleness is but a step from it. The idleness of the wise and virtuous should be both, it being the repose and refreshment necessary for past exertions and for future; it punishes the bad man, it rewards the good; the deities enjoy it, and Epicurus praises it. I was indeed wrong in my remark; for we should never seek amusement in the foibles of another, never in coarse language, never in low thoughts. When the mind loses its feeling for elegance, it grows corrupt and grovelling, and seeks in the crowd what ought to be found at home.

Epicurus. Aspasia believed so, and bequeathed to Leontion, with every other gift that Nature had bestowed upon her, the power of delivering her oracles from diviner lips.

Leontion. Fie! Epicurus! It is well you hide my face for me with your hand. Now take it away; we cannot walk in this manner.

Epicurus. No word could ever fall from you without its weight; no breath from you ought to lose itself in the common air.

Leontion. For shame! What would you have?

Ternissa. He knows not what he would have nor what he would say. I must sit down again. I declare I scarcely understand a single syllable. Well, he is very good, to tease you no longer. Epicurus has an excellent heart; he would give pain to no one; least of all to you.

Leontion, I have pained him by this foolish book, and he would only assure me that he does not for a moment bear me malice. Take the volume; take it, Epicurus! tear it in pieces.

Epicurus. No, Leontion! I shall often look with pleasure on this trophy of brave humanity; let me kiss the hand that raises it!

Ternissa. I am tired of sitting: I am quite stiff: when shall we walk homeward?

Epicurus. Take my arm, Ternissa!

Ternissa. Oh! I had forgotten that I proposed to myself a trip as far up as the pinasters, to look at the precipice of Oreithyia. Come along! come along! how alert does the sea air make us! I seem to feel growing at my feet and shoulders the wings of Zethes or Calaeis.

Epicurus. Leontion walks the nimblest to-day.

Ternissa. To display her activity and strength, she runs before us. Sweet Leontion, how good she is! but she should have stayed for us: it would be in vain to try to overtake her.

No, Epicurus! Mind! take care! you are crushing these little oleanders—and now the strawberry plants—the whole heap. Not I, indeed. What would my mother say, if she knew it? And Leontion! she will certainly look back.

Epicurus. The fairest of the Eudaimones never look back: such are the Hours and Love, Opportunity and Leontion.

Ternissa. How could you dare to treat me in this manner? I did not say again I hated anything.

Epicurus. Forgive me!

Ternissa. Violent creature!

Epicurus. If tenderness is violence. Forgive me; and say you love me.

Ternissa. All at once? could you endure such boldness?

Epicurus. Pronounce it! whisper it.

Ternissa. Go, go. Would it be proper?

Epicurus. Is that sweet voice asking its heart or me? let the worthier give the answer.

Ternissa. O Epicurus! you are very, very dear to me; and are the last in the world that would ever tell you were called so.

FOOTNOTES:

The Attic month of Puanepsion had its commencement in the latter days of October; its name is derived from +puana+, the legumes which were offered in sacrifice to Apollo at that season.