is soothed to a delicious complacency in the midst of ruins, of combats, and of death itself, in contemplating an undescribable eternal existence; it pursues, in all it's appetites, the attributes of Deity, infinity, extension, duration, power, grandeur, and glory; it mingles the ardent desires of these with all our passions; it thus communicates to them a certain sublime impulse; and, by subduing our reason, itself becomes the most noble, and the most delicious instinct of human life. Sentiment demonstrates to us, much better than reason, the spirituality of the soul, for reason frequently proposes to us as an end the gratification of our grossest passions,* whereas sentiment is ever pure in it's propensities. Besides, a great many natural effects which escape the one, are under the controul of the other; such is, as has been observed, evidence itself, which is merely a matter of feeling, and over which reflection exercises no constraint; such too is our own existence. The proof of it is not in the province of reason; for why is it that I exist? where is the reason of it? But I feel that I exist, and this sentiment is sufficient to produce conviction. This being laid down, I proceed to demonstrate that there are two powerst in Man, the one animal, and Listen to the voice of reason, is the incessant admonition of our moral Philosophers. But do they not perceive that they are putting us into the hand of our greatest enemy? Has not every passion a reason at command? -† It is from want of attention to those two powers, that so many celebrated performances, on the subject of Man present a false colouring. Their Authors sometimes represent him to us as a metaphysical object. You would be tempted to think that the physical wants, which stagger and the other intellectual, both of an opposite nature, and which by their union constitute human life; just as the harmony of every thing on Earth is composed of two contraries. is that of command. Certain philosophers have taken pleasure in painting Man as a god. His attitude they tell us But in order to his having the air of command it is necessary that others should have that of submission, without which he would find an enemy in every one of his equals. The natural empire of Man extends only to animals; even the Saints, are only feeble accessories of human life. They compose it merely of monads, of abstractions, and of moralities. Others discern nothing in man but an animal, and distinguish in him only the coarsest grossness of sense. They never study him without the dissecting knife in their hand, and when he is dead, that is to say, when he is man no longer. Others know him only as a political individual: they perceive him only through the medium of the correspondencies of ambition. It is not man that interests them; it is a Frenchman, an Englishman, a Prelate, a Gentleman. Homer is the only Writer with whom I am acquainted who has painted Man complete: all others, the best not excepted, present nothing but a skeleton of him. The Iliad of Homer, if I may be allowed tojudge, is the painting of every Man, and it is that of all nature. All the passions are there, with their contrasts and their shades, the most intellectually refined, and the most sensually gross. Achilles sings the praises of the Gods to the sound of his lyre, and tends the cookery of a leg of mutton in a kettle. This last trait has given grievous offence to our theatrical writers, who deal in the composition of artificial heroes, namely, such as disguise and conceal their first wants, as their authors themselves disguise their own to Society. All the passions of the human breast are to be found in the Iliad: farious wrath in Achilles, haughty ambition in Agamemnon, patriotic valour in Hector; in Nestor unimpassioned wisdom; in Ulysses, crafty prudence; calumny in Thersites; voluptuousness in Paris, faithless love in Helen; conjugal love in Andromache; paternal affection in Priam; friendship in Patroclus; and so on: and besides this, a multitude of intermediate shades of all these passious, such as the inconsiderate courage of Diomedes, and that of Ajar, who dared mals; and in the wars which he wages with them, or in the care which he exercises over them, he is frequently constrained to drop his attitude of emperor, and to assume that of a slave.. Others represent Man as the perpetual object of vengeance to angry Heaven, and have accumulated on his existence, all the miseries which can render it odious to him. This is not painting Man. He is not formed of a simple nature like other animals, each species of which invariably preserves it's pro per dared to challenge the Gods themselves to the combat: then the opposi tions of situation and of fortune which detach those characters; such as a wedding, and a country festival, depicted on the formidable buckler of Achilles; the remorse of Helen, and the restless solicitude of Andromache; the flight of Hector, on the point of perishing under the walls of bis native city, in the sight of his people, whose only defender he was; and the peaceful objects presented to him at that tremendous moment, such as the grove of trees, and the fountain to which the Trojan young women were accustomed to resort to wash their robes, and where they loved to assemble in happier days. This divine Genius having appropriated to his heroes a leading passion of the human heart, and having put it in action in the most remarkable phrases of human life, has allotted in like manner the attributes of GoD to a variety of Divinities, and has assigned to them the different kingdoms of Nature; to Neptune, the Ocean; to Pluto, the infernal regions; to Juno, the air; to Vulcan, the fire; to Diana, the forests; to Pan, the flocks: in a word, the Nymphs, the Naïads, nay the very Hours, have all a certain department on the Earth. There is not a single flower but what is committed to the superintendance of some Deity. It is thus that he has contrived to render the habitation of Man celestial. His Work is the most sublime of Encyclopedias. All the characters of it arc so exactly in the human heart, and in Nature, that the names by which he has designed them have become immortal. Add to the majesty of his plans a truth of expression which is not to be ascribed alone to the beauty of his language, as certain Grammarians pretend, but to the vast extent of his observation of Nature. It is thus, for example, that he calls the sea impurpled, at the moment that the Sun is setting: because that then the reflexes of the Sun in the horizon render it of that colour, as I myself have frequently remarked. Virgil, who has imitated him close per character; but of two opposite natures, each of which is itself farther subdivided into several passions, which form a contrast. In virtue of one of these natures he unites in himself all the wants and all the passions of animals; and in virtue of the other, the ineffable sentiments of the Deity. It is to this last instinct, much more than to his reflective powers, that he is indebted for the conviction which he has of the existence of GOD; for I suppose that having by means of his reason, the faculty of perceiving the correspondencies which exist between the objects of Nature, he found out the relations which subsist between an island and a tree, a tree and a fruit, a fruit and his own wants; he would readily feel himself determined, on seeing an island, to look for food upon it: but his reason, in shewing him the links of four natural harmonies, would not refer the cause of them to an invisible Author, unless he had the sentiment of it deeply impressed on his heart. It would stop short at the point where his perceptions stopped, and where those of animals terminate. A wolf which should swim over a river in order to reach an island on ly, abounds in these beauties of observation, to which Commentators pay very little, if any attention. In the Georgics, for instance, Virgil gives to the Spring the epithet of blushing; vere rubenti, says hẹ. As his translators and Commentators have taken no pains to convey this, any more. than a multitude of similar touches, I was long impressed with the belief that this epithet was introduced merely to fill up the measure of the verse; but having remarked that early in Spring, the shoots and buds of most trees assumed a ruddy appearance previously to throwing out their leaves, I thence was enabled to comprehend what was the precise moment of the season which the Poet intended to describe by vere rubenti. which which he perceived grass growing, in the hope of there finding sheep likewise, has an equal conception of the links which connect the four natural relations of the island, the grass, the sheep, and his own appetite; but he falls not down prostrate before the intelligent Being who has established them. Considering man as an animal, I know of no one to be compared with him in respect of wretchedness. First of all he is naked, exposed to insects, to the wind, to the rain, to the heat, to the cold, and laid under the necessity, in all countries, of finding himself clothing. If his skin acquires in time sufficient hardness to resist the attacks of the elements, it is not till after cruel experiments which sometimes flay him from top to toe. He knows nothing naturally as other animals do. If he wants to cross a river, he must learn to swim; nay, he must in his infancy be taught to walk and to speak. There is no country so happily situated in which he is not obliged to prepare his food with considerable care and trouble. The banana and the bread-fruit tree give him between the Tropics provisions all the year round; but then he must plant those trees, he must inclose them within thorny fences to preserve them from the beasts; he must dry part of the fruits for a supply during the hurricane season; and must build repositories in which to lay them up. Besides those useful vegetables are reserved for certain privileged islands alone; for over The very name of infant is derived from the Latin word infuns, that is to say, one who cannot speak. |