Is not a fiction, which teaches new and interesting truths, a fine thing? Do you not admire the Arabian story of the sultan who would not believe that a little time could appear long, and who disputed with his dervish on the nature of duration? The latter to convince him of it, begged him only to plunge his head for a moment into the basin in which he was washing. Immediately the sultan finds himself transported into a frightful desert; he is obliged to labor to get a livelihood; he marries, and has children who grow up and ill treat him; finally he returns to his country and his palace and he there finds the dervish who has caused him to suffer so many evils for five and twenty years. He is about to kill him, and is only appeased when he is assured that all passed in the moment in which, with his eyes shut, he put his head into the water.
You still more admire the fiction of the loves of Dido and Æneas, which caused the mortal hatred between Carthage and Rome, as also that which exhibits in Elysium the destinies of the great men of the Roman Empire.
You also like that of Alcina, in Ariosto, who possesses the dignity of Minerva with the beauty of Venus, who is so charming to the eyes of her lovers, who intoxicates them with voluptuous delights, and unites all the loves and graces, but who, when she is at last reduced to her true self and the enchantment has passed away, is nothing more than a little shrivelled, disgusting, old woman.
As to fictions which represent nothing, teach nothing, and from which nothing results, are they anything more than falsities? And if they are incoherent and heaped together without choice, are they anything better than dreams?
You will possibly tell me that there are ancient fictions which are very incoherent, without ingenuity, and even absurd, which are still admired; but is it not rather owing to the fine images which are scattered over these fictions than to the inventions which introduce them? I will not dispute the point, but if you would be hissed at by all Europe, and afterwards forgotten forever, write fictions similar to those which you admire.
Fierté is one of those expressions, which, having been originally employed in an offensive sense, are afterwards used in a favorable one. It is censure when this word signifies high-flown, proud, haughty, and disdainful. It is almost praise when it means the loftiness of a noble mind.
It is a just eulogium on a general who marches towards the enemy withfierté. Writers have praised thefiertéof the gait of Louis XIV.; they should have contented themselves with remarking its nobleness.
Fierté, without dignity, is a merit incompatible with modesty. It is onlyfiertéin air and manners which offends; it then displeases, even in kings.
Fiertéof manner in society is the expression of pride;fiertéof soul is greatness. The distinctions are so nice that a proud spirit is deemed blamable, while a proud soul is a theme of praise. By the former is understood one who thinks advantageously of himself while the latter denotes one who entertains elevated sentiments.
Fierté, announced by the exterior, is so great a fault that the weak, who abjectly praise it in the great are obliged to soften it, or rather to extol it, by speaking of "this noblefierté." It is not simply vanity, which consists in setting a value upon little things; it is not presumption, which believes itself capable of great ones; it is not disdain, which adds contempt of others to a great opinion of self; but it is intimately allied to all these faults.
This word is used in romances, poetry, and above all, in operas, to express the severity of female modesty. We meet with vainfierté, vigorousfierté, etc. Poets are, perhaps, more in the right than they imagine. Thefiertéof a woman is not only rigid modesty and love of duty, but the high value which she sets upon her beauty. Thefiertéof the pencil is sometimes spoken of to signify free and fearless touches.
Every one desirous of instruction should read with attention all the articles in the "Dictionnaire Encyclopédique," under the head "Figure," viz.:
"Figure of the Earth," by M. d'Alembert—a work both clear and profound, in which we find all that can be known on the subject.
"Figure of Rhetoric," by César Dumarsais—a piece of instruction which teaches at once to think and to write; and, like many other articles, make us regret that young people in general have not a convenient opportunity of reading things so useful.
"Human Figure," as relating to painting and sculpture—an excellent lesson given to every artist, by M. Watelet.
"Figure," in physiology—a very ingenious article, by M. de Caberoles.
"Figure," in arithmetic and in algebra—by M. Mallet.
"Figure," in logic, in metaphysics, and in polite literature, by M. le Chevalier de Jaucourt—a man superior to the philosophers of antiquity, inasmuch as he has preferred retirement, real philosophy, and indefatigable labor, to all the advantages that his birth might have procured him, in a country where birth is set above all beside, excepting money.
Figure or Form of the Earth.
Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Posidonius, and all the geometricians of Asia, of Egypt, and of Greece, having acknowledged the sphericity of our globe, how did it happen that we, for so long a time, imagined that the earth was a third longer than it was broad, and thence derived the terms "longitude" and "latitude," which continually bear testimony to our ancient ignorance?
The reverence due to the "Bible," which teaches us so many truths more necessary and more sublime, was the cause of this, our almost universal error. It had been found, in Psalm ciii, that God had stretched the heavens over the earth like a skin; and as a skin is commonly longer than it is wide, the same was concluded of the earth.
St. Athanasius expresses himself as warmly against good astronomers as against the partisans of Arius and Eusebius. "Let us," says he, "stop the mouths of those barbarians, who, speaking without proof, dare to assert that the heavens also extend under the earth." The fathers considered the earth as a great ship, surrounded by water, with the prow to the east, and the stern to the west. We still find, in "Cosmos," a work of the fourth century, a sort of geographical chart, in which the earth has this figure.
Tortato, bishop of Avila, near the close of the fifteenth century, declares in his commentary on Genesis, that the Christian faith is shaken, if the earth is believed to be round. Columbus, Vespucius, and Magellan, not having the fear of excommunication by this learned bishop before their eyes, the earth resumed its rotundity in spite of him.
Then man went from one extreme to the other, and the earth was regarded as a perfect sphere. But the error of the perfect sphere was the mistake of philosophers, while that of a long, flat earth was the blunder of idiots.
When once it began to be clearly known that our globe revolves on its own axis every twenty-four hours, it might have been inferred from that alone that its form could not be absolutely round. Not only does the centrifugal zone considerably raise the waters in the region of the equator, by the motion of the diurnal rotation, but they are moreover elevated about twenty-five feet, twice a day, by the tides; the lands about the equator must then be perfectly inundated. But they are not so; therefore the region of the equator is much more elevated, in proportion, than the rest of the earth: then the earth is a spheroid elevated at the equator, and cannot be a perfect sphere. This proof, simple as it is, had escaped the greatest geniuses: because a universal prejudice rarely permits investigation.
We know that, in 1762, in a voyage to Cayenne, near the line, undertaken by order of Louis XIV., under the auspices of Colbert, the patron of all the arts, Richer, among many other observations, found that the oscillations or vibrations of his timepiece did not continue so frequent as in the latitude of Paris, and that it was absolutely necessary to shorten the pendulum one line and something more than a quarter. Physics and geometry were at that time not nearly so much cultivated as they now are; what man would have believed that an observation so trivial in appearance, a line more or less, could lead to the knowledge of the greatest physical truths? It was first of all discovered that the weight must necessarily be less on the equator than in our latitudes, since weight alone causes the oscillation of a pendulum. Consequently, the weight of bodies being the less the farther they are from the centre of the earth, it was inferred that the region of the equator must be much more elevated than our own—much more remote from the centre; so the earth could not be an exact sphere.
Many philosophers acted, on the occasion of these discoveries, as all men act when an opinion is to be changed—they disputed on Richer's experiment; they pretended that our pendulums made their vibrations more slowly about the equator only because the metal was lengthened by the heat; but it was seen that the heat of the most burning summer lengthens it but one line in thirty feet; and here was an elongation of a line and a quarter, a line and a half, or even two lines, in an iron rod, only three feet and eight lines long.
Some years after MM. Varin, Deshayes, Feuillée, and Couplet, repeated the same experiment on the pendulum, near the equator; and it was always found necessary to shorten it, although the heat was very often less on the line than fifteen or twenty degrees from it. This experiment was again confirmed by the academicians whom Louis XV. sent to Peru; and who were obliged, on the mountains about Quito, where it froze, to shorten the second pendulum about two lines.
About the same time, the academicians who went to measure an arc of the meridian in the north, found that at Pello, within the Polar circle, it was necessary to lengthen the pendulum, in order to have the same oscillations as at Paris: consequently weight is greater at the polar circle than in the latitude of France, as it is greater in our latitude than at the equator. Weight being greater in the north, the north was therefore nearer the centre of the earth than the equator; therefore the earth was flattened at the poles.
Never did reasoning and experiment so fully concur to establish a truth. The celebrated Huygens, by calculating centrifugal forces, had proved that the consequent diminution of weight on the surface of a sphere was not great enough to explain the phenomena, and that therefore the earth must be a spheroid flattened at the poles. Newton, by the principles of attraction, had found nearly the same relations: only it must be observed, that Huygens believed this force inherent in bodies determining them towards the centre of the globe, to be everywhere the same. He had not yet seen the discoveries of Newton; so that he considered the diminution of weight by the theory of centrifugal forces only. The effect of centrifugal forces diminishes the primitive gravity on the equator. The smaller the circles in which this centrifugal force is exercised become, the more it yields to the force of gravity; thus, at the pole itself the centrifugal force being null, must leave the primitive gravity in full action. But this principle of a gravity always equal, falls to nothing before the discovery made by Newton, that a body transported, for instance, to the distance of ten diameters from the centre of the earth, would weigh one hundred times less than at the distance of one diameter.
It is then by the laws of gravitation, combined with those of the centrifugal force, that the real form of the earth must be shown. Newton and Gregory had such confidence in this theory that they did not hesitate to advance that experiments on weight were a surer means of knowing the form of the earth than any geographical measurement.
Louis XIV. had signalized his reign by that meridian which was drawn through France: the illustrious Dominico Cassini had begun it with his son; and had, in 1701, drawn from the feet of the Pyrenees to the observatory a line as straight as it could be drawn, considering the almost insurmountable obstacles which the height of mountains, the changes of refraction in the air, and the altering of instruments were constantly opposing to the execution of so vast and delicate an undertaking; he had, in 1701, measured six degrees eighteen minutes of that meridian. But, from whatever cause the error might proceed, he had found the degrees towards Paris, that is towards the north, shorter than those towards the Pyrenees and the south. This measurement gave the lie both to the theory of Norwood and to the new theory of the earth flattened at the poles. Yet this new theory was beginning to be so generally received that the academy's secretary did not hesitate, in his history of 1701, to say that the new measurements made in France proved the earth to be a spheroid flattened at the poles. The truth was, that Dominico Cassini's measurement led to a conclusion directly opposite; but, as the figure of the earth had not yet become a question in France, no one at that time was at the trouble of combating this false conclusion. The degrees of the meridian from Collioure to Paris were believed to be exactly measured; and the pole, which from that measurement must necessarily be elongated, was believed to be flattened.
An engineer, named M. de Roubais, astonished at this conclusion, demonstrated that, by the measurements taken in France, the earth must be an oblate spheroid, of which the meridian passing through the poles must be longer than the equator, the poles being elongated. But of all the natural philosophers to whom he addressed his dissertation, not one would have it printed; because it seemed that the academy had pronounced it as too bold in an individual to raise his voice. Some time after the error of 1701 was acknowledged, that which had been said was unsaid; and the earth was lengthened by a just conclusion drawn from a false principle. The meridian was continued in the same principle from Paris to Dunkirk; and the degrees were still found to grow shorter as they approached the north. People were still mistaken respecting the figure of the earth, as they had been concerning the nature of light. About the same time, some mathematicians who were performing the same operations in China were astonished to find a difference among their degrees, which they had expected to find alike; and to discover, after many verifications, that they were shorter towards the north than towards the south. This accordance of the mathematicians of France with those of China was another powerful reason for believing in the oblate spheroid. In France they did still more; they measured parallels to the equator. It is easily understood that on an oblate spheroid our degrees of longitude must be shorter than on a sphere. M. de Cassini found the parallel which passes through St. Malo to be shorter by one thousand and thirty-seven toises than it would have been on a spherical earth.
All these measurements proved that the degrees had been found as it was wished to find them. They overturned, for a time, in France, the demonstrations of Newton and Huygens; and it was no longer doubted that the poles were of a form precisely contrary to that which had at first been attributed to them. In short, nothing at all was known about the matter.
At length, other academicians, who had visited the polar circle in 1736, having found, by new measurements, that the degree was longer there than in France, people doubted between them and the Cassinis. But these doubts were soon after removed: for these same astronomers, returning from the pole, examined afresh the degree to the north of Paris, measured by Picard, in 1677, and found it to be a hundred and twenty-three toises longer than it was according to Picard's measurement. If, then, Picard, with all his precautions, had made his degree one hundred and twenty-three toises too short, it was not at all unlikely that the degrees towards the south had in like manner been found too long. Thus the first error of Picard, having furnished the foundations for the measurements of the meridian, also furnished an excuse for the almost inevitable errors which very good astronomers might have committed in the course of these operations.
Unfortunately, other men of science found that, at the Cape of Good Hope, the degrees of the meridian did not agree with ours. Other measurements, taken in Italy, likewise contradicted those of France, and all were falsified by those of China. People again began to doubt, and to suspect, in my opinion quite reasonably, that the earth had protuberances. As for the English, though they are fond of travelling, they spared themselves the fatigue, and held fast their theory.
The difference between one diameter and the other is not more than five or six of our leagues—a difference immense in the eyes of a disputant, but almost imperceptible to those who consider the measurement of the globe only in reference to the purposes of utility which it may serve. A geographer could scarcely make this difference perceptible on a map; nor would a pilot be able to discover whether he was steering on a spheroid or on a sphere. Yet there have been men bold enough to assert that the lives of navigators depended on this question. Oh quackery! will you spare no degrees—not even those of the meridian?
We say, a truth "figured" by a fable, by a parable; the church "figured" by the young spouse in Solomon's Song; ancient Rome "figured" by Babylon. A figurative style is constituted by metaphorical expressions, figuring the things spoken of—and disfiguring them when the metaphors are not correct.
Ardent imagination, passion, desire—frequently deceived—produce the figurative style. We do not admit it into history, for too many metaphors are hurtful, not only to perspicuity, but also to truth, by saying more or less than the thing itself.
In didactic works, this style should be rejected. It is much more out of place in a sermon than in a funeral oration, because the sermon is a piece of instruction in which the truth is to be announced; while the funeral oration is a declaration in which it is to be exaggerated.
The poetry of enthusiasm, as the epopee and the ode, is that to which this style is best adapted. It is less admissible in tragedy, where the dialogue should be natural as well as elevated; and still less in comedy, where the style must be more simple.
The limits to be set to the figurative style, in each kind, are determined by taste. Baltasar Gracian says, that "our thoughts depart from the vast shores of memory, embark on the sea of imagination, arrive in the harbor of intelligence, and are entered at the custom house of the understanding."
This is precisely the style of Harlequin. He says to his master, "The ball of your commands has rebounded from the racquet of my obedience." Must it not be owned that such is frequently that oriental style which people try to admire? Another fault of the figurative style is the accumulating of incoherent figures. A poet, speaking of some philosophers, has called them:
D'ambitieux pygméesQui sur leurs pieds vainement redressésEt sur des monts d'argumens entassésDe jour en jour superbes Encelades,Vont redoublant leurs folles escalades.
When philosophers are to be written against, it should be done better. How do ambitious pygmies, reared on their hind legs on mountains of arguments, continue escalades? What a false and ridiculous image! What elaborate dulness!
In an allegory by the same author, entitled the "Liturgy of Cytherea," we find these lines:
De toutes parts, autour de l'inconnue,Ils vont tomber comme grêle menue,Moissons des cœurs sur la terre jonchés,Et des Dieux même à son char attachés.De par Venus nous venons cette affaireSi s'en retourne aux cieux dans son sérail,En ruminant comment il pourra fairePour ramener la brebis au bercail.
Here we have harvests of hearts thrown on the ground like small hail; and among these hearts palpitating on the ground, are gods bound to the car of the unknown; while love, sent by Venus, ruminates in his seraglio in heaven, what he shall do to bring back to the fold this lost mutton surrounded by scattered hearts. All this forms a figure at once so false, so puerile, and so incoherent—so disgusting, so extravagant, so stupidly expressed, that we are astonished that a man, who made good verses of another kind, and was not devoid of taste, could write anything so miserably bad.
Figures, metaphors, are not necessary in an allegory; what has been invented with imagination may be told with simplicity. Plato has more allegories than figures; he often expresses them elegantly and without ostentation.
Nearly all the maxims of the ancient orientals and of the Greeks were in the figurative style. All those sentences are metaphors, or short allegories; and in them the figurative style has great effect in rousing the imagination and impressing the memory.
We know that Pythagoras said, "In the tempest adore the echo," that is, during civil broils retire to the country; and "Stir not the fire with the sword," meaning, do not irritate minds already inflamed. In every language, there are many common proverbs which are in the figurative style.
It is quite certain, and is agreed by the most pious men, that figures and allegories have been carried too far. Some of the fathers of the church regard the piece of red cloth, placed by the courtesan Rahab at her window, for a signal to Joshua's spies, as a figure of the blood of Jesus Christ. This is an error of an order of mind which would find mystery in everything.
Nor can it be denied that St. Ambrose made very bad use of his taste for allegory, when he says, in his book of "Noah and the Ark," that the back door of the ark was a figure of our hinder parts.
All men of sense have asked how it can be proved that these Hebrew words, "maher, salas-has-has," (take quick the spoils) are a figure of Jesus Christ? How is Judah, tying his ass to a vine, and washing his cloak in the wine, also a figure of Him. How can Ruth, slipping into bed to Boaz, figure the church, how are Sarah and Rachel the church, and Hagar and Leah the synagogue? How, do the kisses of the Shunamite typify the marriage of the church? A volume might be made of these enigmas, which, to the best theologians of later times, have appeared to be rather far-fetched than edifying.
The danger of this abuse is fully admitted by Abbé Fleury, the author of the "Ecclesiastical History." It is a vestige of rabbinism; a fault into which the learned St. Jerome never fell. It is like oneiromancy, or the explanation of dreams. If a girl sees muddy water, when dreaming, she will be ill-married; if she sees clear water, she will have a good husband; a spider denotes money, etc. In short, will enlightened posterity believe it? The understanding of dreams has, for more than four thousand years, been made a serious study.
Symbolical Figures.
All nations have made use of them, as we have said in the article "emblem." But who began? Was it the Egyptians? It is not likely. We think we have already more than once proved that Egypt is a country quite new, and that many ages were requisite to save the country from inundations, and render it habitable. It is impossible that the Egyptians should have invented the signs of the zodiac, since the figures denoting our seed-time and harvest cannot coincide with theirs. When we cut our corn, their land is covered with water; and when we sow, their reaping time is approaching. Thus the bull of our zodiac and the girl bearing ears of corn cannot have come from Egypt.
Here is also an evident proof of the falsity of the new paradox, that the Chinese are an Egyptian colony. The characters are not the same. The Chinese mark the course of the sun by twenty-eight constellations and the Egyptians, after the Chaldæans, reckoned only twelve, like ourselves.
The figures that denote the planets are in China and in India all different from those of Egypt and of Europe; so are the signs of the metals; so is the method of guiding the hand in writing. Nothing could have been more chimerical than to send the Egyptians to people China.
All these fabulous foundations, laid in fabulous times, have caused an irreparable loss of time to a prodigious multitude of the learned, who have all been bewildered in their laborious researches, which might have been serviceable to mankind if directed to arts of real utility.
Pluche, in his History, or rather his fable, of the Heavens, assures us that Ham, son of Noah, went and reigned in Egypt, where there was nobody to reign over; that his son Menes was the greatest of legislators, and that Thoth was his prime minister.
According to him and his authorities, this Thoth, or somebody else, instituted feasts in honor of the deluge; and the joyful cry of "Io Bacche," so famous among the Greeks, was, among the Egyptians, a lamentation. "Bacche" came from the Hebrew "beke" signifyingsobs, and that at a time when the Hebrew people did not exist. According to this explanation, "joy" means "sorrow," and "to sing" signifies "to weep."
The Iroquois have more sense. They do not take the trouble to inquire what passed on the shores of Lake Ontario some thousand years ago: instead of making systems, they go hunting.
The same authors affirm that the sphinxes, with which Egypt was adorned, signified superabundance, because some interpreters have asserted that the Hebrew word "spang" meant an "excess"; as if the Egyptians had taken lessons from the Hebrew tongue, which is, in great part, derived from the Phœnician: besides, what relation has a sphinx to an abundance of water? Future schoolmen will maintain, with greater appearance of reason, that the masks which decorate the keystones of our windows are emblems of our masquerades; and that these fantastic ornaments announced that balls were given in every house to which they were affixed.
Figure, Figurative, Allegorical, Mystical, Topological, Typical, etc.
This is often the art of finding in books everything but what they really contain. For instance, Romulus killing his brother Remus shall signify the death of the duke of Berry, brother of Louis XI.; Regulus, imprisoned at Carthage, shall typify St. Louis captive at Mansurah.
It is very justly remarked in the "Encyclopædia," that many fathers of the church have, perhaps, carried this taste for allegorical figures a little too far; but they are to be reverenced, even in their wanderings. If the holy fathers used and then abused this method, their little excesses of imagination may be pardoned, in consideration of their holy zeal.
The antiquity of the usage may also be pleaded in justification, since it was practised by the earliest philosophers. But it is true that the symbolical figures employed by the fathers are in a different taste.
For example: When St. Augustine wishes to make it appear that the forty-two generations of the genealogy of Jesus are announced by St. Matthew, who gives only forty-one, he says that Jechonias must be counted twice, because Jechonias is a corner-stone belonging to two walls; that these two walls figure the old and the new law; and that Jechonias, being thus the corner-stone, figures Jesus Christ, who is the real corner-stone.
The same saint, in the same sermon, says that the number forty must prevail; and at once abandons Jechonias and his corner-stone, counted as two. The number forty, he says, signifies life; ten, which is perfect beatitude, being multiplied by four, which, being the number of the seasons, figures time.
Again, in the same sermon, he explains why St. Luke gives Jesus Christ seventy-seven ancestors: fifty-six up to the patriarch Abraham, and twenty-one from Abraham up to God himself. It is true that, according to the Hebrew text, there would be but seventy-six; for the Hebrew does not reckon a Cainan, who is interpolated in the Greek translation called "The Septuagint."
Thus said Augustine: "The number seventy-seven figures the abolition of all sins by baptism.... the number ten signifies justice and beatitude, resulting from, the creature, which makes seven with the Trinity, which is three: therefore it is that God's commandments are ten in number. The number eleven denotes sin, because it transgresses ten.... This number seventy-seven is the product of eleven, figuring sin, multiplied by seven, and not by ten, for seven is the symbol of the creature. Three represents the soul, which is in some sort an image of the Divinity; and four represents the body, on account of its four qualities." In these explanations, we find some trace of the cabalistic mysteries and the quaternary of Pythagoras. This taste was very long in vogue.
St. Augustine goes much further, concerning the dimensions of matter. Breadth is the dilatation of the heart, which performs good works; length is perseverance; depth is the hope of reward. He carries the allegory very far, applying it to the cross, and drawing great consequences therefrom. The use of these figures had passed from the Jews to the Christians long before St. Augustine's time. It is not for us to know within what bounds it was right to stop.
The examples of this fault are innumerable. No one who has studied to advantage will hazard the introduction of such figures, either in the pulpit or in the school. We find no such instances among the Romans or the Greeks, not even in their poets.
In Ovid's "Metamorphoses" themselves, we find only ingenious deductions drawn from fables which are given as fables. Deucalion and Pyrrha threw stones behind them between their legs, and men were produced therefrom. Ovid says:
Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.Thence we are a hardened and laborious race,Proving full well our stony origin.
Apollo loves Daphne, but Daphne does not love Apollo. This is because love has two kinds of arrows; the one golden and piercing, the other leaden and blunt. Apollo has received in his heart a golden arrow, Daphne a leaden one.
Ecce sagittifera prompsit duo tela pharetraDiversorum operum; fugat hoc, facit illud amoremQuod facit auratum est, et cuspide fulget acuta;Quod fugat obtusum est, et habet sub arundine plumbum....Two different shafts he from his quiver draws;One to repel desire, and one to cause.One shaft is pointed with refulgent gold,To bribe the love, and make the lover bold;One blunt and tipped with lead, whose base allayProvokes disdain, and drives desire away.—DRYDEN.
These figures are all ingenious, and deceive no one.
That Venus, the goddess of beauty, should not go unattended by the Graces, is a charming truth. These fables, which were in the mouths of all—these allegories, so natural and attractive—had so much sway over the minds of men, that perhaps the first Christians imitated while they opposed them.
They took up the weapons of mythology to destroy it, but they could not wield them with the same address. They did not reflect that the sacred austerity of our holy religion placed these resources out of their power, and that a Christian hand would have dealt but awkwardly with the lyre of Apollo.
However, the taste for these typical and prophetic figures was so firmly rooted that every prince, every statesman, every pope, every founder of an order, had allegories or allusions taken from the Holy Scriptures applied to him. Satire and flattery rivalled each other in drawing from this source.
When Pope Innocent III. made a bloody crusade against the court of Toulouse, he was told, "Innocens eris a maledictione." When the order of the Minimes was established, it appeared that their founder had been foretold in Genesis: "Minimus cum patre nostro."
The preacher who preached before John of Austria after the celebrated battle of Lepanto, took for his text, "Fuit homo missus a Deo, cui nomen erat Johannes;" A man sent from God, whose name was John; and this allusion was very fine, if all the rest were ridiculous. It is said to have been repeated for John Sobieski, after the deliverance of Vienna; but this latter preacher was nothing more than a plagiarist.
In short, so constant has been this custom that no preacher of the present day has ever failed to take an allegory for his text. One of the most happy instances is the text of the funeral oration over the duke of Candale, delivered before his sister, who was considered a pattern of virtue: "Die, quia soror, mea es, ut mihi bene eveniat propter, te."—"Say, I pray thee, that thou art my sister, that it may be well with me for thy sake."
It is not to be wondered at that the Cordeliers carried these figures rather too far in favor of St. Francis of Assisi, in the famous but little-known book, entitled, "Conformities of St. Francis of Assisi with Jesus Christ." We find in it sixty-four predictions of the coming of St. Francis, some in the Old Testament, others in the New; and each prediction contains three figures, which signify the founding of the Cordeliers. So that these fathers find themselves foretold in the Bible a hundred and ninety-two times.
From Adam down to St. Paul, everything prefigured the blessed Francis of Assisi. The Scriptures were given to announce to the universe the sermons of Francis to the quadrupeds, the fishes, and the birds, the sport he had with a woman of snow, his frolics with the devil, his adventures with brother Elias and brother Pacificus.
These pious reveries, which amounted even to blasphemy, have been condemned. But the Order of St. Francis has not suffered by them, having renounced these extravagancies so common to the barbarous ages.
Virgil says ("Æneid," book vi. 727):
Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet.This active mind infused, through all the spaceUnites and mingles with the mighty mass.—DRYDEN.
Virgil said well: and Benedict Spinoza, who has not the brilliancy of Virgil, nor his merit, is compelled to acknowledge an intelligence presiding over all. Had he denied this, I should have said to him: Benedict, you are a fool; you possess intelligence, and you deny it, and to whom do you deny it?
In the year 1770, there appeared a man, in some respects far superior to Spinoza, as eloquent as the Jewish Hollander is dry, less methodical, but infinitely more perspicuous; perhaps equal to him in mathematical science; but without the ridiculous affectation of applying mathematical reasonings to metaphysical and moral subjects. The man I mean is the author of the "System of Nature." He assumed the name of Mirabaud, the secretary of the French Academy. Alas! the worthy secretary was incapable of writing a single page of the book of our formidable opponent. I would recommend all you who are disposed to avail yourselves of your reason and acquire instruction, to read the following eloquent though dangerous passage from the "System of Nature." (Part II. v. 153.)
It is contended that animals furnish us with a convincing evidence that there is some powerful cause of their existence; the admirable adaptation of their different parts, mutually receiving and conferring aid towards accomplishing their functions, and maintaining in health and vigor the entire being, announce to us an artificer uniting power to wisdom. Of the power of nature, it is impossible for us to doubt; she produces all the animals that we see by the help of combinations of that matter, which is in incessant action; the adaptation of the parts of these animals is the result of the necessary laws of their nature, and of their combination. When the adaptation ceases, the animal is necessarily destroyed. What then becomes of the wisdom, the intelligence, or the goodness of that alleged cause, to which was ascribed all the honor of this boasted adaptation? Those animals of so wonderful a structure as to be pronounced the works of an immutable God, do not they undergo incessant changes; and do not they end in decay and destruction? Where is the wisdom, the goodness, the fore-sight, the immutability of an artificer, whose sole object appears to be to derange and destroy the springs of those machines which are proclaimed to be masterpieces of his power and skill? If this God cannot act otherwise than thus, he is neither free nor omnipotent. If his will changes, he is not immutable. If he permits machines, which he has endowed with sensibility, to experience pain, he is deficient in goodness. If he has been unable to render his productions solid and durable, he is deficient in skill. Perceiving as we do the decay and ruin not only of all animals, but of all the other works of deity, we cannot but inevitably conclude, either that everything performed in the course of nature is absolutely necessary—the unavoidable result of its imperative and insuperable laws, or that the artificer who impels her various operations is destitute of plan, of power, of constancy, of skill, and of goodness.
"Man, who considers himself the master-work of the Divinity, supplies us more readily and completely than any other production, with evidence of the incapacity or malignity of his pretended author. In this being, possessed of feeling, intuition, and reason, which considers itself as the perpetual object of divine partiality, and forms its God on the model of itself, we see a machine more changeable, more frail, more liable to derangement from its extraordinary complication, than that of the coarsest and grossest beings. Beasts, which are destitute of our mental powers and acquirements; plants, which merely vegetate; stones, which are unendowed with sensation, are, in many respects, beings far more favored than man. They are, at least, exempt from distress of mind, from the tortures of thought, and corrosions of care, to which the latter is a victim. Who would not prefer being a mere unintelligent animal, or a senseless stone, when his thoughts revert to the irreparable loss of an object dearly beloved? Would it not be infinitely more desirable to be an inanimate mass, than the gloomy votary and victim of superstition, trembling under the present yoke of his diabolical deity, and anticipating infinite torments in a future existence? Beings destitute of sensation, life, memory, and thought experience no affliction from the idea of what is past, present, or to come; they do not believe there is any danger of incurring eternal torture for inaccurate reasoning; which is believed, however, by many of those favored beings who maintain that the great architect of the world has created the universe for themselves.
Nature is not a work.Nature is not a work
"Let us not be told that we have no idea of a work without having that of the artificer distinguished from the work.Nature is not a work.She has always existed of herself. Every process takes place in her bosom. She is an immense manufactory, provided with materials, and she forms the instruments by which she acts; all her works are effects of her own energy, and of agents or causes which she frames, contains, and impels. Eternal, uncreated elements—elements indestructible, ever in motion, and combining in exquisite and endless diversity, originate all the beings and all the phenomena that we behold; all the effects, good or evil, that we feel; the order or disorder which we distinguish, merely by different modes in which they affect ourselves; and, in a word, all those wonders which excite our meditation and confound our reasoning. These elements, in order to effect objects thus comprehensive and important, require nothing beyond their own properties, individual or combined, and the motion essential to their very existence; and thus preclude the necessity of recurring to an unknown artificer, in order to arrange, mould, combine, preserve, and dissolve them.
"But, even admitting for a moment, that it is impossible to conceive of the universe without an artificer who formed it, and who preserves and watches over his work, where shall we place that artificer? Shall he be within or without the universe? Is he matter or motion? Or is he mere space, nothingness, vacuity? In each of these cases, he will either be nothing, or he will be comprehended in nature, and subjected to her laws. If he is in nature, I think I see in her only matter in motion, and cannot but thence conclude that the agent impelling her is corporeal and material, and that he is consequently liable to dissolution. If this agent is out of nature, then I have no idea of what place he can occupy, nor of an immaterial being, nor of the manner in which a spirit, without extension, can operate upon the matter from which it is separated. Those unknown tracts of space which imagination has placed beyond the visible world may be considered as having no existence for a being who can scarcely see to the distance of his own feet; the ideal power which inhabits them can never be represented to my mind, unless when my imagination combines at random the fantastic colors which it is always forced to employ in the world on which I am. In this case, I shall merely reproduce in idea what my senses have previously actually perceived; and that God, which I, as it were, compel myself to distinguish from nature, and to place beyond her circuit, will ever, in opposition to all my efforts, necessarily withdraw within it.
"It will be observed and insisted upon by some that if a statue or a watch were shown to a savage who had never seen them, he would inevitably acknowledge that they were the productions of some intelligent agent, more powerful and ingenious than himself; and hence it will be inferred that we are equally bound to acknowledge that the machine of the universe, that man, that the phenomena of nature, are the productions of an agent, whose intelligence and power are far superior to our own.
"I answer, in the first place, that we cannot possibly doubt either the great power or the great skill of nature; we admire her skill as often as we are surprised by the extended, varied and complicated effects which we find in those of her works that we take the pains to investigate; she is not, however, either more or less skilful in any one of her works than in the rest. We no more comprehend how she could produce a stone or a piece of metal than how she could produce a head organized like that of Newton. We call that man skilful who can perform things which we are unable to perform ourselves. Nature can perform everything; and when anything exists, it is a proof that she was able to make it. Thus, it is only in relation to ourselves that we ever judge nature to be skilful; we compare it in those cases with ourselves; and, as we possess a quality which we call intelligence, by the aid of which we produce works, in which we display our skill, we thence conclude that the works of nature, which must excite our astonishment and admiration, are not in fact hers, but the productions of an artificer, intelligent like ourselves, and whose intelligence we proportion, in our minds, to the degree of astonishment excited in us by his works; that is, in fact, to our own weakness and ignorance."
See the reply to these arguments under the articles on "Atheism" and "God," and in the following section, written long before the "System of Nature."
If a clock is not made in order to tell the time of the day, I will then admit that final causes are nothing but chimeras, and be content to go by the name of a final-cause-finder—in plain language, fool—to the end of my life.
All the parts, however, of that great machine, the world, seem made for one another. Some philosophers affect to deride final causes, which were rejected, they tell us, by Epicurus and Lucretius. But it seems to me that Epicurus and Lucretius rather merit the derision. They tell you that the eye is not made to see; but that, since it was found out that eyes were capable of being used for that purpose, to that purpose they have been applied. According to them, the mouth is not formed to speak and eat, nor the stomach to digest, nor the heart to receive the blood from the veins and impel it through the arteries, nor the feet to walk, nor the ears to hear. Yet, at the same time, these very shrewd and consistent persons admitted that tailors made garments to clothe them, and masons built houses to lodge them; and thus ventured to deny nature—the great existence, the universal intelligence—what they conceded to the most insignificant artificers employed by themselves.
The doctrine of final causes ought certainly to be preserved from being abused. We have already remarked that M. le Prieur, in the "Spectator of Nature," contends in vain that the tides were attached to the ocean to enable ships to enter more easily into their ports, and to preserve the water from corruption; he might just as probably and successfully have urged that legs were made to wear boots, and noses to bear spectacles.
In order to satisfy ourselves of the truth of a final cause, in any particular instance, it is necessary that the effect produced should be uniform and invariably in time and place. Ships have not existed in all times and upon all seas; accordingly, it cannot be said that the ocean was made for ships. It is impossible not to perceive how ridiculous it would be to maintain that nature had toiled on from the very beginning of time to adjust herself to the inventions of our fortuitous and arbitrary arts, all of which are of so late a date in their discovery; but it is perfectly clear that if noses were not made for spectacles, they were made for smelling, and there have been noses ever since there were men. In the same manner, hands, instead of being bestowed for the sake of gloves, are visibly destined for all those uses to which the metacarpus, the phalanges of the fingers, and the movements of the circular muscle of the wrist, render them applicable by us. Cicero, who doubted everything else, had no doubt about final causes.
It appears particularly difficult to suppose that those parts of the human frame by which the perpetuation of the species is conducted should not, in fact, have been intended and destined for that purpose, from their mechanism so truly admirable, and the sensation which nature has connected with it more admirable still. Epicurus would be at least obliged to admit that pleasure is divine, and that that pleasure is a final cause, in consequence of which beings, endowed with sensibility, but who could never have communicated it to themselves, have been incessantly introduced into the world as others have passed away from it.
This philosopher, Epicurus, was a great man for the age in which he lived. He saw that Descartes denied what Gassendi affirmed and what Newton demonstrated—that motion cannot exist without a vacuum. He conceived the necessity of atoms to serve as constituent parts of invariable species. These are philosophical ideas. Nothing, however, was more respectable than the morality of genuine Epicureans; it consisted in sequestration from public affairs, which are incompatible with wisdom, and in friendship, without which life is but a burden. But as to the rest of the philosophy of Epicurus, it appears not to be more admissible than the grooved or tubular matter of Descartes. It is, as it appears to me, wilfully to shut the eyes and the understanding, and to maintain that there is no design in nature; and if there is design, there is an intelligent cause—there exists a God.
Some point us to the irregularities of our globe, the volcanoes, the plains of moving sand, some small mountains swallowed up in the ocean, others raised by earthquakes, etc. But does it follow from the naves of your chariot wheel taking fire, that your chariot was not made expressly for the purpose of conveying you from one place to another?
The chains of mountains which crown both hemispheres, and more than six hundred rivers which flow from the foot of these rocks towards the sea; the various streams that swell these rivers in their courses, after fertilizing the fields through which they pass; the innumerable fountains which spring from the same source, which supply necessary refreshment, and growth, and beauty to animal and vegetable life; all this appears no more to result from a fortuitous concourse and an obliquity of atoms, than the retina which receives the rays of light, or the crystalline humor which refracts it, or the drum of the ear which admits sound, or the circulation of the blood in our veins, the systole and diastole of the heart, the regulating principle of the machine of life.
It would appear that a man must be supposed to have lost his senses before he can deny that stomachs are made for digestion, eyes to see, and ears to hear.
On the other hand, a man must have a singular partiality for final causes, to assert that stone was made for building houses, and that silkworms are produced in China that we may wear satins in Europe.
But, it is urged, if God has evidently done one thing by design, he has then done all things by design. It is ridiculous to admit Providence in the one case and to deny it in the others. Everything that is done was foreseen, was arranged. There is no arrangement without an object, no effect without a cause; all, therefore, is equally the result, the product of the final cause; it is, therefore, as correct to say that noses were made to bear spectacles, and fingers to be adorned with rings, as to say that the ears were formed to hear sounds, the eyes to receive light.
All that this objection amounts to, in my opinion, is that everything is the result, nearer or more remote, of a general final cause; that everything is the consequence of eternal laws. When the effects are invariably the same in all times and places, and when these uniform effects are independent of the beings to which they attach, then there is visibly a final cause.
All animals have eyes and see; all have ears and hear; all have mouths with which they eat; stomachs, or something similar, by which they digest their food; all have suitable means for expelling the fæces; all have the organs requisite for the continuation of their species; and these natural gifts perform their regular course and process without any application or intermixture of art. Here are final causes clearly established; and to deny a truth so universal would be a perversion of the faculty of reason.
But stones, in all times and places, do not constitute the materials of buildings. All noses do not bear spectacles; all fingers do not carry a ring; all legs are not covered with silk stockings. A silkworm, therefore, is not made to cover my legs, exactly as your mouth is made for eating, and another part of your person for the "garderobe." There are, therefore, we see, immediate effects produced from final causes, and effects of a very numerous description, which are remote productions from those causes.
Everything belonging to nature is uniform, immutable, and the immediate work of its author. It is he who has established the laws by which the moon contributes three-fourths to the cause of the flux and reflux of the ocean, and the sun the remaining fourth. It is he who has given a rotatory motion to the sun, in consequence of which that orb communicates its rays of light in the short space of seven minutes and a half to the eyes of men, crocodiles, and cats.
But if, after a course of ages, we started the inventions of shears and spits, to clip the wool of sheep with the one, and with the other to roast in order to eat them, what else can be inferred from such circumstances, but that God formed us in such a manner that, at some time or other, we could not avoid becoming ingenious and carnivorous?
Sheep, undoubtedly, were not made expressly to be roasted and eaten, since many nations abstain from such food with horror. Mankind are not created essentially to massacre one another, since the Brahmins, and the respectable primitives called Quakers, kill no one. But the clay out of which we are kneaded frequently produces massacres, as it produces calumnies, vanities, persecutions, and impertinences. It is not precisely that the formation of man is the final cause of our madnesses and follies, for a final cause is universal, and invariable in every age and place; but the horrors and absurdities of the human race are not at all the less included in the eternal order of things. When we thresh our corn, the flail is the final cause of the separation of the grain. But if that flail, while threshing my grain, crushes to death a thousand insects, that occurs not by an express and determinate act of my will, nor, on the other hand, is it by mere chance; the insects were, on this occasion, actually under my flail, and could not but be there.
It is a consequence of the nature of things that a man should be ambitious; that he should enroll and discipline a number of other men; that he should be a conqueror, or that he should be defeated; but it can never be said that the man was created by God to be killed in war.
The organs with which nature has supplied us cannot always be final causes in action. The eyes which are bestowed for seeing are not constantly open. Every sense has its season for repose. There are some senses that are even made no use of. An imbecile and wretched female, for example, shut up in a cloister at the age of fourteen years, mars one of the final causes of her existence; but the cause, nevertheless, equally exists, and whenever it is free it will operate.
Fineness either in its proper or its figurative sense does not signify either light, slender, fine, or of a rare thin texture; this word expresses something delicate and finished. Light cloth, soft linen, thin lace, or slender galloon, are not always fine.
This word has a relation to the verb "to finish," whence come the finishings of art; thus, we say, the finishings of Vanderwerff's pencil or of Mieris; we say, a fine horse, fine gold, a fine diamond. A fine horse is opposed to a clumsy one; the fine diamond to a false one; fine or refined gold to gold mixed with alloy.
Fineness is generally applied to delicate things and lightness of manufacture. Although we say a fine horse, we seldom say, "the fineness of a horse." We speak of the fineness of hair, lace, or stuff. When by this word we should express the fault or wrong use of anything, we add the adverb "too"; as—This thread is broken, it was too fine; this stuff is too fine for the season.
Fineness or finesse, in a figurative sense, applies to conduct, speech, and works of mind. In conduct, finesse always expresses, as in the arts, something delicate or subtile; it may sometimes exist without ability, but it is very rarely unaccompanied by a little deception; politics admit it, and society reproves it.
Finesse is not exactly subtlety; we draw a person into a snare with finesse; we escape from it with subtlety. We act with finesse, and we play a subtle trick. Distrust is inspired by an unsparing use of finesse; yet we almost always deceive ourselves if we too generally suspect it.
Finesse, in works of wit, as in conversation, consists in the art of not expressing a thought clearly, but leaving it so as to be easily perceived. It is an enigma to which people of sense readily find the solution.
A chancellor one day offering his protection to parliament, the first president turning towards the assembly, said: "Gentlemen, thank the chancellor; he has given us more than we demanded of him"—a very witty reproof.
Finesse, in conversation and writing, differs from delicacy; the first applies equally to piquant and agreeable things, even to blame and praise; and still more to indecencies, over which a veil is drawn, through which we cannot penetrate without a blush. Bold things may be said with finesse.
Delicacy expresses soft and agreeable sentiments and ingenious praise; thus finesse belongs more to epigram, and delicacy to madrigal. It is delicacy which enters into a lover's jealousies, and not finesse.
The praises given to Louis XIV. by Despréaux are not always equally delicate; satires are not always sufficiently ingenious in the way of finesse. When Iphigenia, in Racine, has received from her father the order never to see Achilles more, she cries: "Dieux plus doux, vous n'aviez demandé que ma vie!"—"More gentle gods, you only ask my life!" The true character of this partakes rather of delicacy than of finesse.
Is fire anything more than an element which lights, warms, and burns us? Is not light always fire, though fire is not always light? And is not Boerhaave in the right?
Is not the purest fire extracted from our combustibles, always gross, and partaking of the bodies consumed, and very different from elementary fire? How is fire distributed throughout nature, of which it is the soul?
Ignis ubique latet, naturam amplectitur omnem,Cuncta parit, renovat, dividit, unit, alit.
Why did Newton, in speaking of rays of light, always say, "De natura radiorum lucis, utrum corpora sint necne non disputamus"; without examining whether they were bodies or not?
Did he only speak geometrically? In that case, this doubt was useless. It is evident that he doubted of the nature of elementary fire, and doubted with reason.
Is elementary fire a body like others, as earth and water? If it was a body of this kind, would it not gravitate like all other matter? Would it escape from the luminous body in the right line? Would it have a uniform progression? And why does light never move out of a right line when it is unimpeded in its rapid course?
May not elementary fire have properties of matter little known to us, and properties of substance entirely so? May it not be a medium between matter and substances of another kind? And who can say that there are not a million of these substances? I do not say that there are, but I say it is not proved that there may not be.
It was very difficult to believe about a hundred years ago that bodies acted upon one another, not only without touching, and without emission, but at great distances; it is, however, found to be true, and is no longer doubted. At present, it is difficult to believe that the rays of the sun are penetrable by each other, but who knows what may happen to prove it?
However that may be, I wish, for the novelty of the thing, that this incomprehensible penetrability could be admitted. Light has something so divine that we should endeavor to make it a step to the discovery of substances still more pure.
Come to my aid, Empedocles and Democritus; come and admire the wonders of electricity; see if the sparks which traverse a thousand bodies in the twinkling of an eye are of ordinary matter; judge if elementary fire does not contract the heart, and communicate that warmth which gives life! Judge if this element is not the source of all sensation, and if sensation is not the origin of thought; though ignorant and insolent pedants have condemned the proposition, as one which should be persecuted.
Tell me, if the Supreme Being, who presides over all nature, cannot forever preserve these elementary atoms which he has so rarely endowed?"Igneus est ollis vigor et cœlestis origo."
The celebrated Le Cat calls this vivifying fluid "an amphibious being, endowed by its author with a superior refinement which links it to immaterial beings, and thereby ennobles and elevates it into that medium nature which we recognize, and which is the source of all its properties."
You are of the opinion of Le Cat? I would be so too if I could; but there are so many fools and villains that I dare not. I can only think quietly in my own way at Mount Krapak. Let others think as well as they are allowed to think, whether at Salamanca or Bergamo.
Fire, particularly in poetry, often signifies love, and is employed more elegantly in the plural than in the singular. Corneille often says "un beau feu" for a virtuous and noble love. A man has fire in his conversation; that does not mean that he has brilliant and enlightened ideas, but lively expressions animated by action.
Fire in writing does not necessarily imply lightness and beauty, but vivacity, multiplied figures, and spontaneous ideas. Fire is a merit in speech and writing only when it is well managed. It is said that poets are animated with a divine fire when they are sublime; genius cannot exist without fire, but fire may be possessed without genius.
Firmness comes from firm, and has a different signification from solidity and hardness; a squeezed cloth, a beaten negro, have firmness without being hard or solid.
It must always be remembered that modifications of the soul can only be expressed by physical images; we say firmness of soul, and of mind, which does not signify that they are harder or more solid than usual.
Firmness is the exercise of mental courage; it means a decided resolution; while obstinacy, on the contrary, signifies blindness. Those who praise the firmness of Tacitus are not so much in the wrong as P. Bouhours pretends; it is an accidental ill-chosen term, which expresses energy and strength of thought and of style. It may be said that La Bruyère has a firm style, and that many other writers have only a hard one.
I find not one monument of flattery in remote antiquity; there is no flattery in Hesiod—none in Homer. Their stories are not addressed to a Greek, elevated to some dignity, nor to his lady; as each canto of Thomson's "Seasons" is dedicated to some person of rank, or as so many forgotten epistles in verse have been dedicated, in England, to gentlemen or ladies of quality, with a brief eulogy, and the arms of the patron or patroness placed at the head of the work.
Nor is there any flattery in Demosthenes. This way of asking alms harmoniously began, if I mistake not, with Pindar. No hand can be stretched out more emphatically.
It appears to me that among the Romans great flattery is to be dated from the time of Augustus. Julius Cæsar had scarcely time to be flattered. There is not, extant, any dedicatory epistle to Sulla, Marius, or Carbo, nor to their wives, or their mistresses. I can well believe that very bad verses were presented to Lucullus and Pompey; but, thank God, we do not have them.
It is a great spectacle to behold Cicero equal in dignity to Cæsar, speaking before him as advocate for a king of Bithynia and Lesser Armenia, named Deiotarus, accused of laying ambuscades for him, and even designing to assassinate him. Cicero begins with acknowledging that he is disconcerted in his presence. He calls him the vanquisher of the world—"victorem orbis terrarum." He flatters him; but this adulation does not yet amount to baseness; some sense of shame still remains.
But with Augustus there are no longer any bounds; the senate decrees his apotheosis during his lifetime. Under the succeeding emperors this flattery becomes the ordinary tribute, and is no longer anything more than a style. It is impossible to flatter any one, when the most extravagant adulation has become the ordinary currency.
In Europe, we have had no great monuments of flattery before Louis XIV. His father, Louis XIII., had very little incense offered him. We find no mention of him, except in one or two of Malherbe's odes. There, indeed, according to custom, he is called "thou greatest of kings"—as the Spanish poets say to the king of Spain, and the English poets (laureate) to the king of England; but the better part of the poet's praises is bestowed on Cardinal Richelieu, whose soul is great and fearless; who practises so well the healing art of government, and who knows how to cure all our evils:
Dont l'âme toute grande est une âme hardîe,Qui pratique si bien l'art de nous secourir,Que, pourvu qu'il soit cru, nous n'avons maladie,Qu'il ne sache guérir.
Upon Louis XIV. flattery came in a deluge. But he was not like the man said to have been smothered by the rose leaves heaped upon him; on the contrary, he thrived the more.
Flattery, when it has some plausible pretext, may not be so pernicious as it has been thought; it sometimes encourages to great acts; but its excess is vicious, like the excess of satire. La Fontaine says, and pretends to say it after Æsop:
On ne peut trop louer trois sortes de personnes;Les dieux, sa maitresse, et son roi.Æsope le disait; j'y souscris quant à moi;Ces sont maximes toujours bonnes.Your flattery to three sorts of folks apply:—You cannot say too civil thingsTo gods, to mistresses, and kings;So honest Æsop said—and so say I.
Honest Æsop said no such thing; nor do we find that he flattered any king, or any concubine. It must not be thought that kings are in reality flattered by all the flatteries that are heaped upon them; for the greater number never reach them.
One common folly of orators is that of exhausting themselves in praising some prince who will never hear of their praises. But what is most lamentable of all is that Ovid should have praised Augustus even while he was dating "de Ponto."
The perfection of the ridiculous might be found in the compliments which preachers address to kings, when they have the happiness of exhibiting before their majesties.—"To the reverend Father Gaillard, preacher to the king." Ah! most reverend father, do you preach only for the king? Are you like the monkey at the fair, which leaps "only for the king?"