WHAT a wealth of delights has kind Nature given to those who can enjoy them. Who can count the innumerable phases they assume in different individuals, and at different periods of life! The confused remembrance of the pleasures of my boyhood sends a thrill through my heart. Shall I attempt to paint the joys of the youth whose soul glows with all the warmth of love, at an age when interest, ambition, hatred, and all the base passions that degrade and torment humanity are unknown to him, even by name?
During this age, too short, alas! the sun shines with a brightness it never displays in after-life; the air is then purer, thestreams clearer and fresher, and nature has aspects, and the woods have paths, which in our riper age we never find again. O, what perfumes those flowers breathe! How delicious are those fruits! With what colors is the morning sky adorned! Men are all good, generous, kind-hearted; and women all lovely and faithful. On all sides we meet with cordiality, frankness, and unselfishness. Nature presents to us nothing but flowers, virtues, and pleasures.
The excitement of love, and the anticipation of happiness, do they not fill our hearts to the brim with emotions no less lively and various?
The sight of nature and its contemplation, whether we regard it as a whole, or examine its details, opens to our reason an immense field of enjoyments. Soon the imagination, brooding over this sea of pleasures, increases their number and intensity. The various sensations so uniteand blend as to form new ones. Dreams of glory mingle with the palpitations of love. Benevolence moves hand in hand with self-esteem. Melancholy, from time to time, throws over us her solemn livery, and changes our tears to joy. Thus the perceptions of the mind, the feelings of the heart, the very remembrance of sensations, are inexhaustible sources of pleasure and comfort to man. No wonder, then, that the noise Joannetti made with the coffee-pot, and the unexpected appearance of a cup of cream, should have impressed me so vividly and so agreeably.
IPUT on my travelling-coat, after having examined it with a complacent eye; and forthwith resolved to write a chapterad hoc, that I might make it known to the reader.
The form and usefulness of these garments being pretty generally known, I will treat specially of their influence upon the minds of travellers.
My winter travelling-coat is made of the warmest and softest stuff I could meet with. It envelops me entirely from head to foot, and when I am in my arm-chair, with my hands in my pockets, I am very like the statue of Vishnu one sees in the pagodas of India.
You may, if you will, tax me with prejudice when I assert the influence a traveller’s costume exercises upon its wearer. At any rate I can confidently affirm with regard to this matter, that it would appear to me as ridiculous to take a single step of my journey round my room in uniform, with my sword at my side, as it would to go forth into the world in my dressing-gown. Were I to find myself in full military dress, not only should I be unable to proceed with my journey, but I really believe I should not be able to read what I have written about my travels, still less to understand it.
Does this surprise you? Do we not every day meet with people who fancy they are ill because they are unshaven, or because some one has thought they have looked poorly, and told them so? Dress has such influence upon men’s minds that there are valetudinarians who think themselves in better health than usual when they have on a new coat and well-powdered wig. They deceive the public and themselves by their nicety about dress, until one finds some fine morning they have died in full fig, and their death startles everybody.
And in the class of men among whom I live, how many there are who, finding themselves clothed in uniform, firmly believe they are officers, until the unexpected appearance of the enemy shows them their mistake. And more than this, if it be the king’s good pleasure to allow one of them to add to his coat a certain trimming, he straightway believes himself to be a general, and the whole army gives him the title without any notion of making fun of him! So great an influence has a coat upon the human imagination!
The following illustration will show still further the truth of my assertion.
It sometimes happened that they forgot to inform the Count de —— some days beforehand of the approach of his turn to mount guard. Early one morning, on the very day on which this duty fell to the Count, a corporal awoke him, and announced the disagreeable news. But the idea of getting up there and then, putting on his gaiters, and turning out without having thought about it the evening before, so disturbed him that he preferred reporting himself sick and staying at home all day. So he put on his dressing-gown, and sent away his barber. This made him look pale and ill, and frightened his wife and family. He reallydidfeel a little poorly.
He told every one he was not very well, partly for the sake of appearances, and partly because he positively believed himself to be indisposed. Gradually the influence of the dressing-gown began to work.The slops he was obliged to take upset his stomach. His relations and friends sent to ask after him. He was soon quite ill enough to take to his bed.
In the evening Dr. Ranson[11]found his pulse hard and feverish, and ordered him to be bled next day.
If the campaign had lasted a month longer, the sick man’s case would have been past cure.
Now, who can doubt about the influence of travelling-coats upon travellers, if he reflect that poor Count de —— thought more than once that he was about to perform a journey to the other world for having inopportunely donned his dressing-gown in this?
IWAS sitting near my fire after dinner, enveloped in my “habit de voyage,” and freely abandoning myself to its influence: the hour for starting was, I knew, drawing nigh; but the fumes generated by digestion rose to my brain, and so obstructed the channels along which thoughts glide on their way from the senses, that all communication between them was intercepted. And as my senses no longer transmitted any idea to my brain, the latter, in its turn, could no longer emitany of that electric fluid with which the ingenious Doctor Valli resuscitates dead frogs.
After reading this preamble, you will easily understand why my head fell on my chest, and why the muscles of the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, being no longer excited by the electric fluid, became so relaxed that a volume of the works of the Marquis Caraccioli, which I was holding tightly between these two fingers, imperceptibly eluded my grasp, and fell upon the hearth.
I had just had some callers, and my conversation with the persons who had left the room had turned upon the death of Dr. Cigna, an eminent physician then lately deceased. He was a learned and hard-working man, a good naturalist, and a famous botanist. My thoughts were occupied with the merits of this skillful man. “And yet,” I said to myself, “were itpossible for me to evoke the spirits of those whom he has, perhaps, dismissed to the other world, who knows but that his reputation might suffer some diminution?”
I travelled insensibly to a dissertation on medicine and the progress it has made since the time of Hippocrates. I asked myself whether the famous personages of antiquity who died in their beds, as Pericles, Plato, the celebrated Aspasia, and Hippocrates, died, after the manner of ordinary mortals, of some putrid or inflammatory fever; and whether they were bled, and crammed with specifics.
To say why these four personages came into my mind rather than any others, is out of my power; for who can give reasons for what he dreams? All that I can say is that my soul summoned the doctor of Cos, the doctor of Turin, and the famous statesman who did such great things, and committed such grave faults.
But as to his graceful friend, I humbly own that it was theOTHERwho beckoned her to come. Still, however, when I think of the interview, I am tempted to feel some little pride, for it is evident that in this dream the balance in favor of reason was as four to one. Pretty fair this, methinks, for a lieutenant.
However this may be, whilst giving myself up to the reflections I have described, my eyes closed, and I fell fast asleep. But upon shutting my eyes, the image of the personages of whom I had been thinking, remained painted upon that delicate canvas we call memory; and these images, mingling in my brain with the idea of the evocation of the dead, it was not long before I saw advancing in procession Hippocrates, Plato, Pericles, Aspasia, and Doctor Cigna in his bob-wig.
I saw them all seat themselves in chairs ranged around the fire. Pericles alone remained standing to read the newspapers.
“If the discoveries of which you speak were true,” said Hippocrates to the doctor, “and had they been as useful to the healing art as you affirm, I should have seen the number of those who daily descend to the gloomy realm of Pluto decrease; but the ratio of its inhabitants, according to the registers of Minos which I have myself verified, remains still the same as formerly.”
Doctor Cigna turned to me and said: “You have without doubt heard these discoveries spoken of. You know that Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; that the immortal Spallanzani explained the process of digestion, the mechanism of which is now well understood;” and he entered upon a long detail of all the discoveries connected with physic, and of the host of remedies for which we are indebted to chemistry: in short, he delivered an academical discourse in favor of modern medicine.
“But am I to believe,” I replied, “that these great men were ignorant of all you have been telling them, and that their souls, having shuffled off this mortal coil, still meet with any obscurities in nature?”
“Ah! how great is your error!” exclaimed theproto-physician[12]of the Peloponnesus. The mysteries of nature are as closely hidden from the dead as from the living. Of one thing we who linger on the banks of the Styx are certain, that He who created all things alone knows the great secret which men vainly strive to solve. “And,” added he, turning to the doctor, “do be persuaded by me to divest yourself of what still clings to you of the party-spirit you have brought with you from the sojourn of mortals. And since, seeing that Charon daily ferries over in his boat as many shades as heretofore, the labors of a thousand generations and all the discoveries men have made have not been able to prolong their existence, let us not uselessly weary ourselves in defending an art which, among the dead, cannot even profit its practitioners.”
Thus, to my great amazement, spoke the famous Hippocrates.
Doctor Cigna smiled; and as spirits can neither withstand evidence, nor silence truth, he not only agreed with Hippocrates, but, blushing after the manner of disembodied intelligences, he protested that he had himself always had his doubts.
Pericles, who had drawn near the window, heaved a deep sigh, the cause of which I divined. He was reading a number of the “Moniteur,” which announced the decadence of the arts and sciences. He saw illustrious scholars desert their sublime conceptions to invent new crimes, and shuddered at hearing a rabble herd compare themselves with the heroes ofgenerous Greece; and this, forsooth, because they put to death, without shame or remorse, venerable old men, women, and children, and coolly perpetrated the blackest and most useless crimes.
Plato, who had listened to our conversation without joining in it, and seeing it brought to a sudden and unexpected close, thus spoke: “I can readily understand that the discoveries great men have made in the various branches of natural science do not forward the art of medicine, which can never change the course of nature, except at the cost of life. But this will certainly not be so with the researches that have been made in the study of politics. Locke’s inquiries into the nature of the human understanding, the invention of printing, the accumulated observations drawn from history, the number of excellent books which have spread sound information even among the lower orders,—somany wonders must have contributed to make men better, and the happy republic I conceived, which the age in which I lived caused me to regard as an impracticable dream, no doubt now exists upon the earth?” At this question the honest doctor cast down his eyes, and only answered by tears. In wiping them with his pocket-handkerchief, he involuntarily moved his wig on one side, so that a part of his face was hidden by it. “Ye gods!” exclaimed Aspasia, with a scream, “how strange a sight! And is it a discovery of one of your great men that has led you to the idea of turning another man’s skull into a head-dress?”
Aspasia, from whom our philosophical dissertations had elicited nothing but gapes, had taken up a magazine of fashions which lay on the chimney-piece, the leaves of which she had been turning over for some time when the doctor’s wig madeher utter this exclamation. Finding the narrow, ricketty seat upon which she was sitting uncomfortable, she had, without the least ceremony, placed her two bare legs, which were adorned with bandelets, on the straw-bottomed chair between her and me, and rested her elbow upon the broad shoulders of Plato.
“It is no skull,” said the doctor, addressing her, and taking off his wig, which he threw on the fire, “it is a wig, madam; and I know not why I did not cast this ridiculous ornament into the flames of Tartarus when first I came among you. But absurdities and prejudices adhere so closely to our miserable nature that they even follow us sometimes beyond the grave.” I took singular pleasure in seeing the doctor thus abjure his physic and his wig at the same moment.
“I assure you,” said Aspasia, “that most of the head-dresses represented in thepages I have been turning over deserve the same fate as yours, so very extravagant are they.”
The fair Athenian amused herself vastly in looking over the engravings, and was very reasonably surprised by the variety and oddity of modern contrivances. One figure, especially struck her. It was that of a young lady with a really elegant head-dress which Aspasia only thought somewhat too high. But the piece of gauze that covered the neck was so very full you could scarcely see half her face. Aspasia, not knowing that these extraordinary developments were produced by starch, could not help showing a surprise which would have been redoubled (but inversely), had the gauze been transparent.
“But do explain,” she said, “why women of the present day seem to wear dresses to hide rather than to clothe them. They scarcely allow their faces to be seen,those faces by which alone their sex is to be guessed, so strangely are their bodies disfigured by the eccentric folds of their garments. Among all the figures represented in these pages, I do not find one with the neck, arms, and legs bare. How is it your young warriors are not tempted to put an end to such a fashion? It would appear,” she added, “that the virtue of the women of this age, which they parade in all their articles of dress, greatly surpasses that of my contemporaries.”
As she ended these words, Aspasia turned her eyes on me as if to ask a reply. I pretended not to notice this, and in order to give myself an absent air, took up the tongs and pushed away among the embers the shreds of the doctor’s wig which had escaped the flames. Observing presently afterwards that one of the bandelets which clasped Aspasia’s buskin had come undone,“Permit me,” said I, “charming lady,”—and eagerly stooping, stretched out my hands towards the chair on which I had fancied I saw those legs about which even great philosophers went into ecstacies.
I am persuaded that at this moment I was very near genuine somnambulism, so real was the movement of which I speak. But Rose, who happened to be sleeping in the chair, thought the movement was meant for her, and jumping nimbly into my arms, she drove back into Hades the famous shades my travelling-coat had summoned.
DELIGHTFUL realm of Imagination, which the benevolent Being has bestowed upon man to console him for the disappointments he meets with in real life.
This day, certain persons on whom I am dependent affect to restore me to liberty. As if they had ever deprived me of it! As if it were in their power to snatch it from me for a single moment, and to hinder me from traversing, at my own good pleasure, the vast space that ever lies open before me! They have forbidden me to go at large in a city, a mere speck, and have left open to me the whole universe, in which immensity and eternity obey me.
I am now free, then; or rather, I must enter again into bondage. The yoke ofoffice is again to weigh me down, and every step I take must conform with the exigencies of politeness and duty. Fortunate shall I be if some capricious goddess do not again make me forget both, and if I escape from this new and dangerous captivity.
O why did they not allow me to finish my captivity! Was it as a punishment that I was exiled to my chamber, to that delightful country in which abound all the riches and enjoyments of the world? As well might they consign a mouse to a granary.
Still, never did I more clearly perceive that I am double than I do now. Whilst I regret my imaginary joys, I feel myself consoled. I am borne along by an unseen power which tells me I need the pure air, and the light of heaven, and that solitude is like death. Once more I don my customary garb; my door opens; I wander underthe spacious porticos of the Strada della Po; a thousand agreeable visions float before my eyes. Yes, there is that mansion, that door, that staircase! I thrill with expectation.
In like manner the act of slicing a lemon gives you a foretaste that makes your mouth water.
PoorANIMAL! Take care!
FOOTNOTES:[1]Bêteis not translatable here. The English wordanimalis hardly nearer thanbeast.Bêteis a milder word thanbeast, and when used metaphorically, implies silliness rather than brutality. In some cases ourcreaturewould translate it,Pauvre bête!Poor creature![2]VideWerther, chapter xxviii.[3]The reader will probably have been reminded of the “Sentimental Journey” before reaching this proof of our author’s acquaintance with the writings of Sterne.H. A.[4]A fashionable milliner of the time.[5]This work was not published.[6]The botanical garden of Turin.[7]Richardson’sClarissa Harlowe.[8]Goethe’sWerther.[9]Cleveland, by the Abbé Prévost.[10]Some freedom of translation is, perhaps, pardonable here. Our author, depending, it would seem, upon his memory, gives Satan wings large enough “to cover a whole army.” It was “the extended wings” of the gates of hell, not of Satan, that Milton describes as wide enough to admit a “bannered host.”Paradise Lost, ii. 885.H. A.[11]A popular Turin physician when theVoyagewas written.[12]A title known at the Sardinian court.
FOOTNOTES:
[1]Bêteis not translatable here. The English wordanimalis hardly nearer thanbeast.Bêteis a milder word thanbeast, and when used metaphorically, implies silliness rather than brutality. In some cases ourcreaturewould translate it,Pauvre bête!Poor creature!
[1]Bêteis not translatable here. The English wordanimalis hardly nearer thanbeast.Bêteis a milder word thanbeast, and when used metaphorically, implies silliness rather than brutality. In some cases ourcreaturewould translate it,Pauvre bête!Poor creature!
[2]VideWerther, chapter xxviii.
[2]VideWerther, chapter xxviii.
[3]The reader will probably have been reminded of the “Sentimental Journey” before reaching this proof of our author’s acquaintance with the writings of Sterne.H. A.
[3]The reader will probably have been reminded of the “Sentimental Journey” before reaching this proof of our author’s acquaintance with the writings of Sterne.
H. A.
[4]A fashionable milliner of the time.
[4]A fashionable milliner of the time.
[5]This work was not published.
[5]This work was not published.
[6]The botanical garden of Turin.
[6]The botanical garden of Turin.
[7]Richardson’sClarissa Harlowe.
[7]Richardson’sClarissa Harlowe.
[8]Goethe’sWerther.
[8]Goethe’sWerther.
[9]Cleveland, by the Abbé Prévost.
[9]Cleveland, by the Abbé Prévost.
[10]Some freedom of translation is, perhaps, pardonable here. Our author, depending, it would seem, upon his memory, gives Satan wings large enough “to cover a whole army.” It was “the extended wings” of the gates of hell, not of Satan, that Milton describes as wide enough to admit a “bannered host.”Paradise Lost, ii. 885.H. A.
[10]Some freedom of translation is, perhaps, pardonable here. Our author, depending, it would seem, upon his memory, gives Satan wings large enough “to cover a whole army.” It was “the extended wings” of the gates of hell, not of Satan, that Milton describes as wide enough to admit a “bannered host.”Paradise Lost, ii. 885.
H. A.
[11]A popular Turin physician when theVoyagewas written.
[11]A popular Turin physician when theVoyagewas written.
[12]A title known at the Sardinian court.
[12]A title known at the Sardinian court.