CHAPTER I.
A PORTRAIT.
MYSTERIOUS impulse at the heart, which never suffers us to be at rest,which urges us onward as by an unseen yet irresistible law--humanplanets in a petty orbit, hurried forever and forever, till our courseis run and our light is quenched--through the circle of a dark andimpenetrable destiny! art thou not some faint forecast and type of ourwanderings hereafter; of the unslumbering nature of the soul; ofthe everlasting progress which we are predoomed to make through thecountless steps and realms and harmonies in the infinite creation? Oh,often in my rovings have I dared to dream so,--often have I soared onthe wild wings of thought above the "smoke and stir" of this dim earth,and wrought, from the restless visions of my mind, a chart of theglories and the wonders which the released spirit may hereafter visitand behold!
What a glad awakening from self,--what a sparkling and fresh draughtfrom a new source of being,--what a wheel within wheel, animating,impelling, arousing all the rest of this animal machine, is the firstexcitement of Travel! the first free escape from the bonds of the linkedand tame life of cities and social vices,--the jaded pleasure andthe hollow love, the monotonous round of sordid objects and dulldesires,--the eternal chain that binds us to things and beings,mockeries of ourselves,--alike, but oh, how different! the shock thatbrings us nearer to men only to make us strive against them, and learn,from the harsh contest of veiled deceit and open force, that the more weshare the aims of others, the more deeply and basely rooted we grow tothe littleness of self!
I passed more lingeringly through France than I did through the otherportions of my route. I had dwelt long enough in the capital to beanxious to survey the country. It was then that the last scale which themagic of Louis Quatorze and the memory of his gorgeous court hadleft upon the mortal eye fell off, and I saw the real essence of thatmonarch's greatness and the true relics of his reign. I saw the poor,and the degraded, and the racked, and the priest-ridden, tillers andpeoplers of the soil, which made the substance beneath the glitteringand false surface,--the body of that vast empire, of which I hadhitherto beheld only the face, and THAT darkly, and for the most partcovered by a mask!
No man can look upon France, beautiful France,--her rich soil, hertemperate yet maturing clime, the gallant and bold spirits which sheproduces, her boundaries so indicated and protected by Nature itself,her advantages of ocean and land, of commerce and agriculture,--and notwonder that her prosperity should be so bloated, and her real state sowretched and diseased.
Let England draw the moral, and beware not only of wars which exhaust,but of governments which impoverish. A waste of the public wealth is themost lasting of public afflictions; and "the treasury which is drainedby extravagance must be refilled by crime."*
* Tacitus.
I remember one beautiful evening an accident to my carriage occasionedmy sojourn for a whole afternoon in a small village. The Cure honouredme with a visit; and we strolled, after a slight repast, into thehamlet. The priest was complaisant, quiet in manner, and not illinformed for his obscure station and scanty opportunities of knowledge;he did not seem, however, to possess the vivacity of his countrymen,but was rather melancholy and pensive, not only in his expression ofcountenance, but his cast of thought.
"You have a charming scene here: I almost feel as if it were a sin toleave it so soon."
We were, indeed, in a pleasant and alluring spot at the time I addressedthis observation to the good Cure. A little rivulet emerged from thecopse to the left, and ran sparkling and dimpling beneath our feet, todeck with a more living verdure the village green, which it intersectedwith a winding nor unmelodious stream. We had paused, and I was leaningagainst an old and solitary chestnut-tree, which commanded the wholescene. The village was a little in the rear, and the smoke from its fewchimneys rose slowly to the silent and deep skies, not wholly unlike thehuman wishes, which, though they spring from the grossness and thefumes of earth, purify themselves as they ascend to heaven. And from thevillage (when other sounds, which I shall note presently, were for aninstant still) came the whoop of children, mellowed by distance into aconfused yet thrilling sound, which fell upon the heart like the voiceof our gone childhood itself. Before, in the far expanse, stretched achain of hills on which the autumn sun sank slowly, pouring its yellowbeams over groups of peasantry, which, on the opposite side of therivulet and at some interval from us, were scattered, partly over thegreen, and partly gathered beneath the shade of a little grove. Theformer were of the young, and those to whom youth's sports are dear, andwere dancing to the merry music, which (ever and anon blended with thelaugh and the tone of a louder jest) floated joyously on our ears. Thefathers and matrons of the hamlet were inhaling a more quiet joybeneath the trees, and I involuntarily gave a tenderer interest to theirconverse by supposing them to sanction to each other the rustic loveswhich they might survey among their children.
"Will not Monsieur draw nearer to the dancers?" said the Cure; "there isa plank thrown over the rivulet a little lower down."
"No!" said I, "perhaps they are seen to better advantage where we are:what mirth will bear too close an inspection?"
"True, Sir," remarked the priest, and he sighed.
"Yet," I resumed musingly, and I spoke rather to myself than to mycompanion, "yet, how happy do they seem! what a revival of our Arcadiandreams are the flute and the dance, the glossy trees all glowing in theautumn sunset, the green sod, and the murmuring rill, and the buoyantlaugh, startling the satyr in his leafy haunts; and the rural loveswhich will grow sweeter still when the sun has set, and the twilight hasmade the sigh more tender and the blush of a mellower hue! Ah, why is itonly the revival of a dream? why must it be only an interval of labourand woe, the brief saturnalia of slaves, the green resting-spot in adreary and long road of travail and toil?"
"You are the first stranger I have met," said the Cure, "who seems topierce beneath the thin veil of our Gallic gayety; the first to whom thescene we now survey is fraught with other feelings than a belief in thehappiness of our peasantry, and an envy at its imagined exuberance. Butas it is not the happiest individuals, so I fear it is not the happiestnations, that are the gayest."
I looked at the Cure with some surprise. "Your remark is deeper than theordinary wisdom of your tribe, my Father," said I.
"I have travelled over three parts of the globe," answered the Cure:"I was not always intended for what I am;" and the priest's mild eyesflashed with a sudden light that as suddenly died away. "Yes, I havetravelled over the greater part of the known world," he repeated, in amore quiet tone; "and I have noted that where a man has many comforts toguard, and many rights to defend, he necessarily shares the thought andthe seriousness of those who feel the value of a treasure which theypossess, and whose most earnest meditations are intent upon providingagainst its loss. I have noted, too, that the joy produced by amomentary suspense of labour is naturally great in proportion to thetoil; hence it is that no European mirth is so wild as that of theIndian slave, when a brief holiday releases him from his task. Alas!that very mirth is the strongest evidence of the weight of the previouschains; even as, in ourselves, we find the happiest moment we enjoy isthat immediately succeeding the cessation of deep sorrow to the mind orviolent torture to the body."*
* This reflection, if true, may console us for the loss of thosevillage dances and pleasant holidays for which "merry England" was oncecelebrated. The loss of them has been ascribed to the gloomy influenceof the Puritans; but it has never occurred to the good poets, whohave so mourned over that loss, that it is also to be ascribed tothe _liberty_ which those Puritans _generalized_, if they did notintroduce.--ED.
I was struck by this observation of the priest.
"I see now," said I, "that as an Englishman I have no reason to repineat the proverbial gravity of my countrymen, or to envy the lighterspirit of the sons of Italy and France."
"No," said the Cure; "the happiest nations are those in whose people youwitness the least sensible reverses from gayety to dejection; a
nd that_thought_, which is the noblest characteristic of the isolated man, isalso that of a people. Freemen are serious; they have objects at theirheart worthy to engross attention. It is reserved for slaves to indulgein groans at one moment and laughter at another."
"At that rate," said I, "the best sign for France will be when thegayety of her sons is no longer a just proverb, and the laughing lip issucceeded by the thoughtful brow."
We remained silent for several minutes; our conversation had shed agloom over the light scene before us, and the voice of the flute nolonger sounded musically on my ear. I proposed to the Cure to return tomy inn. As we walked slowly in that direction, I surveyed my companionmore attentively than I had hitherto done. He was a model of masculinevigour and grace of form; and, had I not looked earnestly upon hischeek, I should have thought him likely to outlive the very oaks aroundthe hamlet church where he presided. But the cheek was worn and hectic,and seemed to indicate that the keen fire which burns at the deep heart,unseen, but unslaking, would consume the mortal fuel, long before Timeshould even have commenced his gradual decay.
"You have travelled, then, much, Sir?" said I, and the tone of my voicewas that of curiosity.
The good Cure penetrated into my desire to hear something of hisadventures; and few are the recluses who are not gratified by theinterest of others, or who are unwilling to reward it by recalling thoseportions of life most cherished by themselves. Before we parted thatnight, he told me his little history. He had been educated for thearmy; before he entered the profession he had seen the daughter of aneighbour, loved her, and the old story,--she loved him again, and diedbefore the love passed the ordeal of marriage. He had no longer a desirefor glory, but he had for excitement. He sold his little property andtravelled, as he had said, for nearly fourteen years, equally over thepolished lands of Europe and the far climates where Truth seems fableand Fiction finds her own legends realized or excelled.
He returned home poor in pocket and wearied in spirit. He became what Ibeheld him. "My lot is fixed now," said he, in conclusion; "but I findthere is all the difference between quiet and content: my heart eatsitself away here; it is the moth fretting the garment laid by, more thanthe storm or the fray would have worn it."
I said something, commonplace enough, about solitude, and the blessingsof competence, and the country. The Cure shook his head gently, butmade no answer; perhaps he did wisely in thinking the feelings areever beyond the reach of a stranger's reasoning. We parted moreaffectionately than acquaintances of so short a date usually do; andwhen I returned from Russia, I stopped at the village on purpose toinquire after him. A few months had done the work: the moth had alreadyfretted away the human garment; and I walked to his lowly and namelessgrave, and felt that it contained the only quiet in which monotony isnot blended with regret!