“The celebrated passions of the world have generally been? those of poetic people,” said Diana, “and the most celebrated poems have either been inspired by love, or treat of love.”
“That is quite logical,” said Heine. “For since love dominates us all, it follows that, in its highest form it must be the most interesting subject to everybody, and everybody will be anxious to read about it in the books where it is best described. Everybody likes to feel by proxy what it is to be the hero or heroine of a thrilling love story, and there are not many ordinary people who at one time or another have not tried to invest their humdrum little affections with an air of romance. The schoolboy likes to fancy himself scaling heights and creeping along giddy cornices to the window of some lovely lady. The grown man delights in asking himself whether he would be willing to lose the world for a woman, and generally decides that he would not — until he has been a quarter of an hour in the moonlight with the woman he loves; after which the world may go to any one who cares for it, and is willing to take the responsibility.”
“Man is like the needle of a compass,” said Augustus, “and woman is the magnet. When she is away his attention never swerves from his selfish interests, as the needle points to the north. But if woman comes near he whirls round like a feather in a storm.”
“It is desirable that the woman should place herself in the same line as his interests,” answered Heine.
“No one,” said Cæsar, “has ever been able at one time to serve his passion and his interests. Clear your reason from what darkens it and you will be strong; if passion takes possession of your intelligence and dominates it, you will be weak.”
“Sir,” said Johnson, who immediately recognised Cæsar’s quotation from his own speech, “when you used those words you referred to the passion of anger and not to the passion of love.”
“For that matter,” replied Cæsar, suavely, “I used the word in both senses. You may remember that scarcely half an hour later a note was brought me from a lady, which the fathers supposed to be from one of the conspirators. I was exceedingly anxious about that note at the very time when I was speaking, and I daresay that if my mind had been less influenced by anxiety I should have spoken better. As it was, the incident had a bad effect and contributed to my failure on that occasion.”
“That is true,” admitted the doctor. “But I believe the note was not from your wife, sir, as it should have been, but from another lady.”
“That is also true,” replied Cæsar, with a light laugh.
“Then I may say that you were not under the influence of the best kind of passion,” continued Johnson. “In general, I would not advise a man to engage in great affairs at the time when he is courting a pretty woman; but when he has married her and the anxiety concerning the result of his courtship has terminated in a natural and satisfactory manner, I say that the constant sympathy and affection of a refined and faithful woman do not hinder a man in the accomplishment of great enterprises, but, on the contrary, they produce serenity in his temper, they inspiré courage in his heart and they add new confidence and vigour to his judgment.”
“Yes — but is that passion?” asked Lady Brenda.
“It is love, madam, and love is a passion. When the flood-gates of a huge dock are opened for the first time the sea rushes in tumultuously, with great violence, so that it is dangerous to oppose it; but when the sea has filled the basin constructed for it, the tumult is soon succeeded by calm, great ships float safely in, and the very water which a short time before was a dangerous whirlpool, becomes instead a haven of safety, where the great operations of commerce can ever afterwards be conducted with security and profit.”
“It seems to me,” said Augustus, “that the only point which remains to be shown is that the recollections most men have of love are among the pleasantest which men have at all. That was my original proposition.”
“It is useless to deny it,” replied Dr. Johnson. “Men generally desire to experience love, and most men do in one degree or another. I believe that in the vast majority of cases the workingman, the gentleman, the soldier, and the scholar would all say that their affection for their wives has given them much lasting happiness; and those classes compose the greater part both of civilised society and of barbarous nations. For, although we regard the increasing harmony of life in the lower classes as an assurance that civilisation is advancing, we must not forget that many barbarians treat their wives with kindness and affection. Especially it is important to remember that in all ages men have fought in defence of their women, when they could not have been roused to fight for anything else, and it is reasonable to suppose that men love best that for which they will most readily give their blood. What men love best, must be what is most pleasant to them; and that which is most pleasant will also afford the most delightful recollections. Your proposition is proved, sir, and there is nothing more to be said about it.”
And with that the doctor struck the end of his oak stick violently into the ground and looked from one to another as though to challenge contradiction.
“Can a recollection be sad and pleasant at the same time?” asked Heine, with a sigh, but as though not expecting an answer.
“I think so,” said Bayard, who had been silent for a long time. “I am sure that one may rejoice and yet shed bitter tears over the same event. If I love a true and glorious lady, and if she die, my heart is full of a grand gladness because she is in heaven, but my eyes are filled with tears because she has passed away. My joy is for her, my weeping is for myself — both are earnest.”
“You mean when she has loved you in return?” asked Heine.
“It is the same,” replied the chevalier. “If she died before she loved me, I would always believe that if she had lived she would have loved me in the end. We were willing to wait long for love when I was alive.”
“Speak in your own name, my irreproachable captain!” exclaimed Francis, gaily. “For my part I never could understand waiting.”
“It has been said that your majesty inaugurated a new social era,” answered Bayard, with a quiet smile.
“But,” persisted Heine, “suppose that instead of dying you believed that she loved you, and that she then married some one else. Could your recollections of her be at once sad and pleasant?”
“If she had deceived me, I would try not to remember her,” replied Bayard. “If I had deceived myself, I still might be glad that she was happily married, for her sake, and yet be sorry for my own.”
“But if she had deceived you, and you could not forget her?” asked Heine.
“Then I would look for consolation elsewhere.”
“With another woman?”
“No. In a holy life,” said Bayard, simply.
Heine sighed and turned away. Cæsar looked curiously at the man who had been the bravest of his day as well as the purest, and Francis wore a puzzled expression.
“You would do well, sir,” said Johnson. “When a man has made a mistake and is unhappy, it is better that he should occupy himself in relieving the distress of others, than that he should manifest his own disappointment in a piece of verse.”
“There would certainly be a decrease in the production of poetry in that case,” said Heine, smiling in spite of his melancholy mood.
“If a man is really a poet,” remarked Gwendoline, “neither happiness nor unhappiness will prevent him from doing beautiful things — only real poets are scarce, the sham poet flourishes like a green bay-tree.”
“The difference is that the real poet is always a poet,” said Augustus; “the sham bard is only poetic when the fit is upon him, and drivels vulgarly when he is in his normal frame of mind.”
“The fit being frequently brought on by a paltry love affair,” said Heine. “I do not call that sort of thing love at all. It does not even come under our discussion, for it dominates nobody, any more than a cold in the head does.”
“How many times can a man be seriously in love?” asked Lady Brenda, gl
ancing at Francis.
“Once,” said Heine, “and that is too much.”
“If I were alive, madam,” said the king, “I would never be weary of loving.”
“Man,” said Johnson, “comes into the world with a certain capability for love. If the capability be great and is wholly employed in a strong affection for one woman, the result is a passion which may attain sublimity; but if, on the other hand, the whole force of love is squandered in contemptible driblets upon unworthy objects, the petty results cannot be dignified by the name of passion nor honoured by the name of love. It may indeed happen that one man may, at different periods of his life, love two women with great devotion, but I doubt whether he can love three, and I know that he cannot love twenty. The mere fact that to love twenty women in a lifetime, or even ten, strikes the meanest intelligence as a monstrous absurdity, sufficiently proves the existence of a limit. We cannot in all cases name the figure by which that limit is represented; but our common sense tells us that in the great majority of instances it lies between two and three, and with this approximation we must rest satisfied. The human mind is not capable of experiencing frequently very remarkable sensations without becoming so much accustomed to them as to regard them with indifference, for when they become frequent they must soon cease to excite remark. Love is to the human part of man what religion is to the soul; and as we conceive the Christian man who believes fervently in one God to be better than the heathen who divides his belief among many idols and endeavours to distribute his faith in a fair proportion to each, so we shall not greatly err if we assume that a man is a better lover when he loves one woman than when he has loved several.”
“The mistake I made was that I loved too few,” said Francis, with a laugh. “Had I loved a dozen more, love would have ceased to influence me or my doings. Cæsar had the advantage of me there. He wore out his affections when he was young and consequently found his intellect untrammelled when he was in the prime of life.”
“His majesty is very frank,” said Cæsar to Gwendoline, with a quiet smile. But he took no further notice of the thrust.
Indeed there was a singular harmony among the dead men. They occasionally said things to each other which among the living might be expected to cause pain; but the sharpest thrust produced little or no effect. When we know that words can never by any possibility be translated into deeds, directly or indirectly, we grow indifferent to sharp speeches and soon learn that we are beyond their reach. The vanity of Francis was not diminished by the accident of death, and he loved to draw parallels between himself and Cæsar; but the conqueror smiled always, in his gentle and courteous way, willing that Francis should say what he pleased. A bitter jest might be spoken sometimes, but the moment the words were uttered the bitterness was gone from it. The dead men knew that if they did not forget at once they would surely forget to-morrow, and in the gloomy prospect of eternal disagreement they had soon learned to forget at once. So true is it that man only harbours resentment so long as he dreams of revenge. Posthumous man is beyond the law of retaliation in kind; it is no longer possible to injure him, and he no longer desires to inflict injury in -return.
CHAPTER X.
IT WAS NIGHT and the party sat upon the terrace in the darkness; the light from within fell upon the white tiles in broad squares and a little of it was reflected upon the faces of the dead and of the living. Of the former, Cæsar and Heine had come together, and had brought with them a third man, on whom all eyes were now turned, as he sat in his straight-backed chair, talking in a gentle voice, and looking quietly from one to the other of his companions while he spoke. He was a thin man, rather dark than fair, with a broad white forehead and soft brown eyes that were full of light; delicate features, young but marked with lines and wrinkles that showed thought and suffering. He wore knee-breeches and shoes with plain buckles, a loose dark coat, with a broad white shirt collar, and a short wide cloak hung from his shoulders and was gathered round him on one side. His thin brown hair fell in natural locks upon his neck. The impression was that produced by a man whose head is too large for his body, whose mind has worn out his physical strength. He was the man of whom Dr. Johnson had spoken on the previous day — Blaise Pascal.
“It is not because I devoted the last fifteen years of my short life to religious meditation that I say religion is all-important,” he was saying. “There is no lack of reasons by which the proposition can be proved.”
“The advantages of it,” said Heine, “are amply shown by the absence of religion in most men.”
“Not most men,” answered Cæsar. “Most men are religious by nature, until they become so bad that they give up religion rather than abandon their vices.”
“Of course,” said Lady Brenda. “Everybody believes in something.”
“It is precisely because everybody believes in something that it is fair to assume that there is something in which everybody must believe,” replied Pascal. “We dead men are past the necessity of making assumptions. But it seems that the living are as anxious to be original and as little capable of originality as they were more than two hundred years ago.”
“Yes,” said Heine. “The human mind, just at present, has turned itself inside out, like a bag. It will not hold any more than it did before, but it shows a different surface, and talks pompously of being very full, or even of being quite a new bag. But somebody will come along, one fine day, and turn it again.”
“That is very certain,” answered Cæsar. “Nothing repeats itself so surely as the human intellect. If similar chains of events recur in the world, it is not so much because the circumstances which produce them are the same, as because all humanity argues essentially in the same way about everything.”
“About everything except religion,” said Pascal. “Perhaps one ought to say, about everything tangible or manifest. The reasoning of Newton did not differ from the reasoning of Euclid on the same class of questions, any more than the later vagaries of Comte differed very much from those of Pythagoras; or the political economy of Stuart Mill from that of Confucius. One might multiply instances to any extent.”
“Yes,” said Augustus. “I have read that you yourself discovered the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid alone, without knowing that they existed already and without even knowing the names of the line, the circle or the angle. It has often amazed me, but it shows that the human mind in all ages argues essentially in the same way about tangible and manifest things.”
“Yes,” answered Pascal, quietly, “I never thought of my own case. But the interesting point to be discovered is not where human minds commonly agree, but where they have occasionally differed.”
“I am not interesting at all,” remarked Heine. “But I differed from everybody.”
“I see you do,” said Diana, laughing. “Even in regard to your being interesting.”
“That is one of the points about which men take the longest time to agree,” observed Pascal. “I mean in regard to the reputation of poets and writers.”
“Because there are so many of them, that there are always plenty to lead an opposition,” answered Heine, rather scornfully.
“No — I think not,” objected Pascal. “I think it is because men do not argue alike in regard to the opinions of writers, because opinions and artistic conceptions expressed in words are not tangible nor manifest. There is not much difference of judgment about the very greatest sculptors or painters. There is a vast difference in regard to literature, and if possible a still greater variety of estimation in regard to religion.”
“Primarily,” said Cæsar, “most civilised men have generally agreed about the principal laws necessary to make civilised life possible, probably because the results of those laws are always manifest. But men have quarrelled from time immemorial about the origin of those laws themselves, generally attributing the conception of them to their national deities, which of course were essentially intangible. Religion, with us Romans, meant reverence for the gods long before it came
to mean respect for the laws which we were taught in some measure to believe were framed by them.”
“What is religion?” asked Gwendoline. “Does it not mean both?”
“In one sense, yes,” answered Pascal, “but not in the more restricted modern use. The laws of God are essentially contained in the ten commandments, but a great part of these has been so incorporated with the laws of nations, that we do not generally connect the commandments, ‘Thou shalt do no murder, thou shalt not steal’ and many others, with any religious idea, because disobedience to those laws involves civil penalties. It was virtue to abstain from killing an enemy when one was not liable to be hanged for it, or punished in any way. At present it is not a virtue, but a necessity. But there is a class of divine laws which cannot reasonably be enforced by any government, which represent the contract between God and man and not between man and his neighbour. The Puritans attempted to enforce those precepts by means of civil penalties, and they failed egregiously.”
“The times have changed,” said Heine, “since a man was considered virtuous because he abstained from cutting other men’s throats. I doubt whether people are better than they were, but they are certainly different. It is the story of the bag again. The virtue side is turned out, and the vice side is turned in.”
“The whole mass of mankind is better, but the upper class is worse than it used to be,” said Cæsar, musing. “The morality of the working classes has improved, by the abolition of slavery and the spreading of a religion of which morality itself is the basis. When any great population believes in something good, the result must be improvement of some kind. With us the great body of working men consisted of slaves. Their ideas, their habits and their morality were base, and they could not help it. A man who can own no property, who cannot call his children his own, and who is precluded from engaging in any kind of competition, must sooner or later become degraded, and it is not just to expect much from him.”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 311