Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  “We do not even know which are our noblest passions,” laughed Heine. “The nobler they become the fewer people possess them. Probably there exist very noble passions which nobody possesses, and of which we have no idea.”

  “Then, sir, they do not concern us,” said Johnson. “But I do not think there are any noble passions of which we have no idea.”

  “I will give you an example,” answered Heine. “Do you think ambition a noble passion or not?”

  “Ambition to shine by conferring great benefits upon the human race is a noble passion,” replied Dr. Johnson.

  “Well then, do you think that in a village community of Italian labourers, for instance, you are likely to find one man who conceives of an ambition to shine by conferring great benefits upon the human race? Do you not think that a community might be found where there should be no such man?”

  “It might be found, sir,” assented Johnson. “It is conceivable that it might be found.”

  “Then the conception of noble passion depends upon enlightenment,” pursued Heine. “The more enlightened people are, the better will be their chance of forming noble conceptions.”

  “Undoubtedly,” replied the sage.

  “Have men reached the highest possible state of enlightenment?” asked the poet. “Do you believe that the most intelligent and cultured man now living knows as much as can ever ultimately be known by one man?”

  “No, sir, men will know more some day.”

  “Then is it conceivable that if men some day know more than they know now, they may some day form a higher idea of nobility of conduct than they now possess? Or is it not conceivable?”

  “It is conceivable,” answered Dr. Johnson. “It is even probable.”

  “Then our present idea of happiness is relative, and must be so,” concluded Heine. “No one will venture to deny Caesar’s definition, I presume. A state where all our noblest feelings shall have full play and be constantly satisfied without ever being wearied, and where ignoble feelings shall not exist at all, must be a state of perfect happiness. But since we do not know everything, we do not know what we may some day feel. Consequently when we speak of our noblest feelings we do not know what our noblest feelings may ultimately turn out to be. Therefore we can only guess at what perfect happiness might be, by what men feel at present.”

  “Evidently,” said Cæsar. “There are very noble feelings in men to-day which were wholly unknown in my time. The Romans of my day could not have imagined a man sacrificing his life in order to convert the Japanese to Christianity. They would have been amazed at the courage of the man and would have called him a madman. Now, his courage excites the same astonishment as ever, but the man is called a martyr. The list of noble feelings is longer now than it was then.”

  “But it would be impossible, in a state of perfect happiness, to be constantly satisfying the noble desire to be a martyr,” remarked Gwendoline.

  “The desire to be a martyr only proceeds from a strong religious feeling, which is the really noble feeling at the bottom of the action,” answered Cæsar. “That feeling may be supposed to remain and to be fully satisfied without satiety, when the necessity for converting barbarians has quite ceased. There have always been men willing and anxious to-sacrifice their lives for glory — that was a noble feeling, in its way. Men have now been found who will do the same thing for religion, for a purely transcendental set of ideas. It is not impossible that men may be found hereafter who shall be animated by great and noble aims of which we know nothing. A man is happy who thinks he is happy, because his desires are satisfied. But no two men ever seem able to be happy in precisely the same way. The way to be happy is to find out what is best in ourselves, and to try and satisfy the longings of the best part of us.”

  “That sounds very simple,” remarked Lady Brenda.

  “Yes,” said Heine. “But there is a bitter irony in the word ‘best.’”

  “For Heaven’s sake,” cried Lady Brenda, “do not let us relapse into definitions and meanings of words! My brain reels.”

  “In the case of goodness, definition fails,” answered the poet. “Indeed, it is quite useless. To know what goodness is we need only imagine the opposite of what we are; just as what we want is always the opposite of what we have.”

  “I prefer to think that I have something good in me,” said Augustus. “I do not expect any one else to agree with me, of course. The only way to judge of a man is to find out what has been the happiest hour in his life, and then to judge of the circumstances which made up his momentary happiness. What was your happiest moment like, Herr Heine?”

  “The happiest moments of my life?” repeated Heine. “I think they were spent in a sail-boat, tacking about the little island of Nordeney. I used to watch the clouds, and listen to the sea-tales of the sailors, and make verses about the ocean. My noblest aim was to lie on my back and think how I would surprise the Germans with descriptions of the sea.”

  “There was nothing very bad about that,” answered Augustus. “A man who could delight in such innocent things for a long time could not be a bad man.”

  “Badness shows itself much more in unhappiness,” said Heine. “It is absurdly easy to be good when one is happy, as a man feels sympathy with the cook when the dinner is particularly to his taste. But the language a man uses when the dinner is bad shows his real nature. I used a great deal of surprisingly bad language in my time.”

  “You are the procurator diaboli against yourself,” laughed Augustus. “No man is bound to prevent his own canonisation.”

  “What is that?” inquired Lady Brenda.

  “When a person has been dead some time,” said Dr. Johnson, “and is considered to have led so virtuous a life as to deserve the title of saint, an ecclesiastical trial takes place before the honour is conferred. Then a cunning lawyer is chosen, who is called the devil’s advocate, whose business it is to show good cause why the deceased person should not be canonised. If he can show such cause, the proposal is rejected; but if not, the devil loses the suit and the saintship of the dead person is proclaimed. When the devil proves his case, madam, there is no appeal, and the matter ends.”

  “I will not play the devil any longer in that case,” observed Heine.

  “Sir,” said Johnson, “no man was ever canonised for making puns.”

  “No,” retorted the poet. “But patience displayed in listening to those made by others might deserve saintship.”

  “Sir, it is a form of martyrdom to which no saint was ever condemned, nor sinner neither. An English clergyman once said that the most dreadful death he could imagine would be to be preached to death by wild curates. To be punned to death, sir, would be equally horrible, though perhaps less exciting. Puns are like the prematurely withered leaves of a fine tree which, being separated from the branches by a breath, fall ineffectually rustling to the ground, a presage of approaching winter or a warning that the tree itself is about to perish and decay. The green leaves above rustled pleasantly yesterday, there is music in them to-day, and to-morrow the summer breeze will make them laugh together; but the withered leaf rustles but once, and poorly then, when it falls to the ground dead, like a pun, never to chime softly again with its fellows in the belfries of the woods. A punster, sir, should have a good memory, like a liar, or he will repeat himself; and a large wit, or he will pare it o’ both sides and leave none i’ the middle like King Lear.”

  “I think you are rather severe,” observed Augustus. “I believe you more than once made puns yourself.”

  “Yes, sir, but they escaped from me by accident, as wise words sometimes fall from the lips of fools.”

  “And pray, what was the happiest moment of your life?” inquired Heine, who did not seem in the least annoyed by Johnson’s attack.

  “The day I was married, sir,” returned the sage, without a moment’s hesitation. “And the saddest day of my life was that on which my wife died. Success and failure are insignificant compared with the life and death of
the one we love best.”

  “But may not the whole sum of a life’s success, taken together, be more important than the sum of a life’s affections?” asked Diana.

  “To others, not to oneself,” said Heine, sadly. “Wait till you are married,” laughed Augustus, looking at his sister.

  “A man’s success may depend to a great extent upon his affections,” answered Johnson, quietly. “But it can never be foreseen whether the satisfaction of the affections will increase a man’s activity, by implanting in him the desire to be successful in order to please the woman he loves, or whether, in the luxurious indolence of a happy and prosperous home, those qualities may not grow effeminate and unserviceable, which might have produced greatness under the pressure of a sterner necessity.”

  “Few poor men who have married rich wives have ever accomplished much afterwards,” said Augustus. “The position is contemptible, in most cases, and a man ends by despising himself.”

  “Instead of despising himself from the beginning, as most men have good cause to do,” remarked Heine, rather bitterly. “But I suppose that when one is in pursuit of happiness, one objects to sneering at oneself.”

  Just then King Francis appeared upon the narrow path that led down to the little beach, and striding forward paused, saluted the ladies with a courteous gesture and sat down beside Cæsar.

  “Why should a man ever sneer at himself?” asked the king, with a smile on his bold face. “A man who despises himself will always be despised by others.”

  “Yes,” said Cæsar. “Self-contempt is the result of all this morbid modern philosophy.”

  “It must be,” answered the king. “In my time no one despised himself unless he ran away. Any man who would stand and fight was respected, and knew it. Life was simple then, and often pleasant. But the king risked it alike with the common spearman. War was a grand thing then. There was something in our existence that was like that of the Greek heroes. We fought hand to hand, we broke lances in single combat, we rode to battle instead of going into the enemy’s country in railway carriages. We plundered and pillaged the towns that opposed us, and when we came home victorious, we feasted and hunted and enjoyed life the more for having exposed it lightly. Those were royal times, when the king was king and the churl was churl, and nobody questioned the fact. One day was as happy as another, and yet no two days were ever the same.”

  “Your warfare was not warfare, it was chivalry,” said Cæsar. “I should not even call your happiness happiness at all.”

  “And why?” asked Francis in deep tones.

  “Because I cannot understand it. It was happiness to you to skirmish away your life, and to feast riotously between the skirmishes, but it would not have been happiness to me. I never was happy unless I felt that I had done something which must endure, whether men wished it to endure or not. I never was satisfied unless I had directed circumstances and events into a new groove from which they could not escape. You did that to some extent by developing your absolute authority and laying the foundation of an absolute monarchy. But you do not refer to that as having contributed to your happiness. What, in your whole life, do you remember with the greatest pleasure?”

  “Many things,” replied the king. “I hardly know. One was the victory of Marignano, where I beat the Swiss and made Bayard give me knighthood on the field of battle. Another was when I tripped Henry of England and threw him in our wrestling match on the field of the cloth of gold. Then, when I pardoned the people of Rochelle, after frightening them soundly for their behaviour — that was a happy day. I had many happy days, and I was a happy man during most of my life. Happiness means getting what one wants, and I generally did that. I wanted to be the first knight of France, and I fancied that I was. I never could understand Charles Quint, who lived on broth mixed with milk and vinegar, drank iced beer and plotted destruction over his prayers, like a cat that pretends to be asleep until the sparrow hops within reach. I was very happy when I used to visit Lionardo in the short time he was with me before he died; for I loved art, and beautiful things, and people who could make them.”

  “It was fortunate that you were a king,” said Heine. “In any other condition of life you would have had difficulty in satisfying your tastes — not to say your aims, if one may speak of satisfying aims—”

  “The aim is satisfied when the mark has been hit,” remarked Dr. Johnson.

  “I remember that you once illustrated your meaning upon a publisher,” replied Heine, with a laugh. “I suppose that if one has any aims one ought to make an effort to attain them. The way to be happy is not to have any wishes which cannot be satisfied — the simplest plan is to have no wishes at all. Man is only happy when he thinks he is happy, because happiness is a purely personal sentiment, resulting from a purely personal impression of satisfaction. The more ideas a man has, the less chance he has of being happy, because ideas mean wishes which must be fulfilled to obtain peace of mind. Poets, who have more ideas than other men, are proverbially unhappy. Oysters, on the contrary, are thought to be very happy indeed — every one says ‘as happy as an oyster.’ Unfortunately we cannot all be oysters, nor conquerors, nor even poets.”

  “Fortunately, I should say,” said the king. “Fortunately, that sort of equality is a myth. Everybody has an equal right to try and be happy, I suppose, but there is a deal of difference in regard to the capacity for happiness.”

  “It is a strange thing,” remarked Cæsar, “that there should always be a class of men in the world who think and maintain that the body of the world is sick. They call themselves philosophers, and they propose an immediate cure for creation by applying themselves to the world as a plaster, a universal panacea. In three thousand years philosophers have not learned to understand that nobody cares what they think nor will ever toy their remedies. Men are not philosophers, though oysters may be. No one will ever govern man by a set of theories — the thing is not possible. You cannot civilise man by the head, because all the ratiocination of man’s intellect inevitably leads to conclusions closely connected with individual advantage. The beginning of all great modern changes for the better is to be found in sentiments, but the origin of most changes for the worse in the lives of nations has lain in the miscalculation of the national interest.”

  “That is a delightful theory!” exclaimed Heine.

  “It is not a theory, it is a fact,” answered Cæsar. “The Puritans who practically founded the American Republic were inspired by sentiment and not by interest. The people who nearly overthrew that same Republic a few years ago were largely inspired by interest. The French Revolution began in a sentiment which soon became a means of satisfying a desire for vengeance; its most powerful effects were felt under the rule of one man, so long as he himself was inspired by a desire to make his country great, and the crash came when that man’s personal ambition began to outweigh his patriotism. England reached the zenith of her power about thirty years ago, after having adopted a number of highly sentimental measures, such as the union of Ireland, the emancipation of Catholics, and free trade. But the sentiment of those things has worn itself out and the place where it was is now the battle-field of party interests. The result is that England is rapidly losing influence and importance in Europe. You can make people enthusiastic, you can make them move, for the sake of a sentiment, but not for the sake of a theory. Men feel first, and then invent theories to explain their feelings. It is a fatal error to confuse people who feel nothing by teaching them theories about what ought to be felt.”

  “It is a mistake to suppose that every one who has five senses has sense,” said Heine. “If everybody were alike one might make theories, but it is unsatisfactory to attempt to theorise about a thousand million individuals, each of whom is quite different from all the rest. Nobody has ever got any further than making theories about himself. The little burgher has the best of it after all. To live cleanly, so as to preserve the affection of his family and the friendship of his neighbours; to live moderately, so as t
o increase his property by saving money, and to maintain enough religion to inculcate those principles in his children — the burgher has no other aims, and I do not see why any one should want a more comfortable, moral, utterly dull and well-fed philosophy. There is very little else that is of any real importance to mankind, in spite of philosophers — because mankind itself is not quite as important as it likes to fancy itself. But in these puny days it is most abominably unfashionable to be simple, or to talk of anything but the solemnity of the aims of man. There is a complication nowadays in the little aims of this little world which is enough to make one’s hair stand up on end. The little man of to-day is easily bored — even if compared with the man of the last century, and everybody knows that only bores are ever bored. The little burgher is right. Nothing really succeeds but property and keeping quiet — nothing — not even Mr. Herbert Spencer or the French Commune.”

  “If every man,” remarked Johnson, “had a wife and a little property and the quality of holding his tongue, the world would be a very peaceable place. But, sir, those things are not easily got, and those who do not get them are very likely to turn anarchists, for the sake of stealing what belongs to others.”

  “What is Mr. Herbert Spencer?” asked King Francis.

  “The American woman of the future,” answered Heine, without hesitation.

  “Imperfectly disguised as the Englishman of today,” added Augustus.

  “What an extraordinary pair of definitions!” exclaimed Lady Brenda.

  “Do you think so?” asked Heine. “Mr. Spencer’s books seem to me to be all about what we should do if we knew everything. Evidently American women are the only human beings who stand any chance of illustrating his theories.”

  “There were no American women in my day,” remarked the king, “but I have seen something of them since, without being able to understand them. They are not very like women. I mean that their idea of what a woman should be differs from mine.”