A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 04

ENTHUSIASM

This Greek word signifies "emotion of the bowels, internal agitation." Was the word invented by the Greeks to express the vibrations experienced by the nerves, the dilation and shrinking of the intestines, the violent contractions of the heart, the precipitous course of those fiery spirits which mount from the viscera to the brain whenever we are strongly and vividly affected?

Or was the term "enthusiasm," after painful affection of the bowels, first applied to the contortions of the Pythia, who, on the Delphian tripod, admitted the inspiration of Apollo in a place apparently intended for the receptacle of body rather than of spirit?

What do we understand by enthusiasm? How many shades are there in our affections! Approbation, sensibility, emotion, distress, impulse, passion, transport, insanity, rage, fury. Such are the stages through which the miserable soul of man is liable to pass.

A geometrician attends at the representation of an affecting tragedy. He merely remarks that it is a judicious, well-written performance. A young man who sits next to him is so interested by the performance that he makes no remark at all; a lady sheds tears over it; another young man is so transported by the exhibition that to his great misfortune he goes home determined to compose a tragedy himself. He has caught the disease of enthusiasm.

The centurion or military tribune who considers war simply as a profession by which he is to make his fortune, goes to battle coolly, like a tiler ascending the roof of a house. Cæsar wept at seeing the statue of Alexander.

Ovid speaks of love only like one who understood it. Sappho expressed the genuine enthusiasm of the passion, and if it be true that she sacrificed her life to it, her enthusiasm must have advanced to madness.

The spirit of party tends astonishingly to excite enthusiasm; there is no faction that has not its "energumens" its devoted and possessed partisans. An animated speaker who employs gesture in his addresses, has in his eyes, his voice, his movements, a subtle poison which passes with an arrow's speed into the ears and hearts of his partial hearers. It was on this ground that Queen Elizabeth forbade any one to preach, during six months, without an express licence under her sign manual, that the peace of her kingdom might be undisturbed.

St. Ignatius, who possessed very warm and susceptible feelings, read the lives of the fathers of the desert after being deeply read in romances. He becomes, in consequence, actuated by a double enthusiasm. He constitutes himself knight to the Virgin Mary, he performed the vigil of arms; he is eager to fight for his lady patroness; he is favored – with visions; the virgin appears and recommends to him her son, and she enjoins him to give no other name to his society than that of the "Society of Jesus."

Ignatius communicates his enthusiasm to another Spaniard of the name of Xavier. Xavier hastens away to the Indies, of the language of which he is utterly ignorant, thence to Japan, without knowing a word of Japanese. That, however, is of no consequence; the flame of his enthusiasm catches the imagination of some young Jesuits, who, at length, make themselves masters of that language. These disciples, after Xavier's death, entertain not the shadow of a doubt that he performed more miracles than ever the apostles did, and that he resuscitated seven or eight persons at the very least. In short, so epidemic and powerful becomes the enthusiasm that they form in Japan what they denominate a Christendom (une Chrétienté). This Christendom ends in a civil war, in which a hundred thousand persons are slaughtered: the enthusiasm then is at its highest point, fanaticism; and fanaticism has become madness.

The young fakir who fixes his eye on the tip of his nose when saying his prayers, gradually kindles in devotional ardor until he at length believes that if he burdens himself with chains of fifty pounds weight the Supreme Being will be obliged and grateful to him. He goes to sleep with an imagination totally absorbed by Brahma, and is sure to have a sight of him in a dream. Occasionally even in the intermediate state between sleeping and waking, sparks radiate from his eyes; he beholds Brahma resplendent with light; he falls into ecstasies, and the disease frequently becomes incurable.

What is most rarely to be met with is the combination of reason with enthusiasm. Reason consists in constantly perceiving things as they really are. He, who, under the influence of intoxication, sees objects double is at the time deprived of reason.

Enthusiasm is precisely like wine, it has the power to excite such a ferment in the blood-vessels, and such strong vibrations in the nerves, that reason is completely destroyed by it. But it may also occasion only slight agitations so as not to convulse the brain, but merely to render it more active, as is the case in grand bursts of eloquence and more especially in sublime poetry. Reasonable enthusiasm is the patrimony of great poets.

This reasonable enthusiasm is the perfection of their art. It is this which formerly occasioned the belief that poets were inspired by the gods, a notion which was never applied to other artists.

How is reasoning to control enthusiasm? A poet should, in the first instance, make a sketch of his design. Reason then holds the crayon. But when he is desirous of animating his characters, to communicate to them the different and just expressions of the passions, then his imagination kindles, enthusiasm is in full operation and urges him on like a fiery courser in his career. But his course has been previously traced with coolness and judgment.

Enthusiasm is admissible into every species of poetry which admits of sentiment; we occasionally find it even in the eclogue; witness the following lines of Virgil (Eclogue x. v. 58):

 
Jam mihi per rupes videor lucosque sonantes
Ire; libet Partho torquere cydonia cornu
Spicula; tanquam haec sint nostri medicina furoris,
Aut deus ille malis hominum mitescere discat!
 
 
Nor cold shall hinder me, with horns and hounds
To thrid the thickets, or to leap the mounds.
And now, methinks, through steepy rocks I go,
And rush through sounding woods and bend the Parthian
bow:
As if with sports my sufferings I could ease,
Or by my pains the god of Love appease.
 

The style of epistles and satires represses enthusiasm, we accordingly see little or nothing of it in the works of Boileau and Pope.

Our odes, it is said by some, are genuine lyrical enthusiasm, but as they are not sung with us, they are, in fact, rather collections of verses, adorned with ingenious reflections, than odes.

Of all modern odes that which abounds with the noblest enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that never abates, that never falls into the bombastic or the ridiculous, is "Timotheus, or Alexander's Feast," by Dryden. It is still considered in England as an inimitable masterpiece, which Pope, when attempting the same style and the same subject, could not even approach. This ode was sung, set to music, and if the musician had been worthy of the poet it would have been the masterpiece of lyric poesy.

The most dangerous tendency of enthusiasm in this occurs in an ode on the birth of a prince of the bast, rant, and burlesque. A striking example of this occurs in an ode on the birth of a prince of the blood royal:

 
Où suis-je? quel nouveau miracle
Tient encore mes sens enchantés
Quel vaste, quel pompeux spectacle
Frappe mes yeux épouvantés?
Un nouveau monde vient d'éclore
L'univers se reforme encore
Dans les abîmes du chaos;
Et, pour réparer ses ruines
Je vois des demeures divines
Descendre un peuple de héros.
 

– J.B. ROUSSEAU.

"Ode on the Birth of the Duke of Brittany."

Here we find the poet's senses enchanted and alarmed at the appearance of a prodigy – a vast and magnificent spectacle – a new birth which is to reform the universe and redeem it from a state of chaos, all which means simply that a male child is born to the house of Bourbon. This is as bad as "Je chante les vainqueurs, des vainqueurs de la terre."

We will avail ourselves of the present opportunity to observe that there is a very small portion of enthusiasm in the "Ode on the Taking of Namur."

ENVY

We all know what the ancients said of this disgraceful passion and what the moderns have repeated. Hesiod is the first classic author who has spoken of it.

"The potter envies the potter, the artisan the artisan, the poor even the poor, the musician the musician – or, if any one chooses to give a different meaning to the word avidos– the poet the poet."

Long before Hesiod, Job had remarked, "Envy destroys the little-minded."

I believe Mandeville, the author of the "Fable of the Bees," is the first who has endeavored to prove that envy is a good thing, a very useful passion. His first reason is that envy was as natural to man as hunger and thirst; that it may be observed in all children, as well as in horses and dogs. If you wish your children to hate one another, caress one more than the other; the prescription is infallible.

He asserts that the first thing two young women do when they meet together is to discover matter for ridicule, and the second to flatter each other.

He thinks that without envy the arts would be only moderately cultivated, and that Raphael would never have been a great painter if he had not been jealous of Michael Angelo.

Mandeville, perhaps, mistook emulation for envy; perhaps, also, emulation is nothing but envy restricted within the bounds of decency.

Michael Angelo might say to Raphael, your envy has only induced you to study and execute still better than I do; you have not depreciated me, you have not caballed against me before the pope, you have not endeavored to get me excommunicated for placing in my picture of the Last Judgment one-eyed and lame persons in paradise, and pampered cardinals with beautiful women perfectly naked in hell! No! your envy is a laudable feeling; you are brave as well as envious; let us be good friends.

But if the envious person is an unhappy being without talents, jealous of merit as the poor are of the rich; if under the pressure at once of indigence and baseness he writes "News from Parnassus," "Letters from a Celebrated Countess," or "Literary Annals," the creature displays an envy which is in fact absolutely good for nothing, and for which even Mandeville could make no apology.

Descartes said: "Envy forces up the yellow bile from the lower part of the liver, and the black bile that comes from the spleen, which diffuses itself from the heart by the arteries." But as no sort of bile is formed in the spleen, Descartes, when he spoke thus, deserved not to be envied for his physiology.

A person of the name of Poet or Poetius, a theological blackguard, who accused Descartes of atheism, was exceedingly affected by the black bile. But he knew still less than Descartes how his detestable bile circulated through his blood.

Madame Pernelle is perfectly right: "Les envieux mourront, mais non jamais l'envie." – The envious will die, but envy never. ("Tartuffe," Act V, Scene 3.)

That it is better to excite envy than pity is a good proverb. Let us, then, make men envy us as much as we are able.

EPIC POETRY

Since the word "epos," among the Greeks, signified a discourse, an epic poem must have been a discourse, and it was in verse because it was not then the custom to write in prose. This appears strange, but it is no less true. One Pherecydes is supposed to have been the first Greek who made exclusive use of prose to compose one of those half-true, half-false histories so common to antiquity.

Orpheus, Linus, Thamyris, and Musæus, the predecessors of Homer, wrote in verse only. Hesiod, who was certainly contemporary with Homer, wrote his "Theogony" and his poem of "Works and Days" entirely in verse. The harmony of the Greek language so invited men to poetry, a maxim turned into verse was so easily engraved on the memory that the laws, oracles, morals, and theology were all composed in verse.

Of Hesiod.

He made use of fables which had for a long time been received in Greece. It is clearly seen by the succinct manner in which he speaks of Prometheus and Epimetheus that he supposes these notions already familiar to all the Greeks. He only mentions them to show that it is necessary to labor, and that an indolent repose, in which other mythologists have made the felicity of man to consist, is a violation of the orders of the Supreme Being.

Hesiod afterwards describes the four famous ages, of which he is the first who has spoken, at least among the ancient authors who remain to us. The first age is that which preceded Pandora – the time in which men lived with the gods. The iron age is that of the siege of Thebes and Troy. "I live in the fifth," says he, "and I would I had never been born." How many men, oppressed by envy, fanaticism, and tyranny, since Hesiod, have said the same!

It is in this poem of "Works and Days" that those proverbs are found which have been perpetuated, as – "the potter is jealous of the potter," and he adds, "the musician of the musician, and the poor even of the poor." We there find the original of our fable of the nightingale fallen into the claws of the vulture. The nightingale sings in vain to soften him; the vulture devours her. Hesiod does not conclude that a hungry belly has no ears, but that tyrants are not to be mollified by genius.

A hundred maxims worthy of Xenophon and Cato are to be found in this poem.

Men are ignorant of the advantage of society: they know not that the half is more valuable than the whole.

Iniquity is pernicious only to the powerless.

Equity alone causes cities to flourish.

One unjust man is often sufficient to ruin his country.

The wretch who plots the destruction of his neighbor often prepares the way to his own.

The road to crime is short and easy. That of virtue is long and difficult, but towards the end it is delightful.

God has placed labor as a sentinel over virtue.

Lastly, the precepts on agriculture were worthy to be imitated by Virgil. There are, also, very fine passages in his "Theogony." Love, who disentangles chaos; Venus, born of the sea from the genital parts of a god nourished on earth, always followed by Love, and uniting heaven, earth, and sea, are admirable emblems.

Why, then, has Hesiod had less reputation than Homer? They seem to me of equal merit, but Homer has been preferred by the Greeks because he sang their exploits and victories over the Asiatics, their eternal enemies. He celebrated all the families which in his time reigned in Achaia and Peloponnesus; he wrote the most memorable war of the first people in Europe against the most flourishing nation which was then known in Asia. His poem was almost the only monument of that great epoch. There was no town nor family which did not think itself honored by having its name mentioned in these records of valor. We are even assured that a long time after him some differences between the Greek towns on the subject of adjacent lands were decided by the verses of Homer. He became, after his death, the judge of cities in which it is pretended that he asked alms during his life, which proves, also, that the Greeks had poets long before they had geographers.

It is astonishing that the Greeks, so disposed to honor epic poems which immortalized the combats of their ancestors, produced no one to sing the battles of Marathon, Thermopylæ, Platæa, and Salamis. The heroes of these times were much greater men than Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ajax.

Tyrtæus, a captain, poet, and musician, like the king of Prussia in our days, made war and sang it. He animated the Spartans against the Messenians by his verses, and gained the victory. But his works are lost. It does not appear that any epic poem was written-in the time of Pericles. The attention of genius was turned towards tragedy, so that Homer stood alone, and his glory increased daily. We now come to his "Iliad."

Of the Iliad.

What confirms me in the opinion that Homer was of the Greek colony established at Smyrna is the oriental style of all his metaphors and pictures: The earth which shook under the feet of the army when it marched like the thunderbolts of Jupiter on the hills which overwhelmed the giant Typhon; a wind blacker than night winged with tempests; Mars and Minerva followed by Terror, Flight, and insatiable Discord, the sister and companion of Homicide, the goddess of battles, who raises tumults wherever she appears, and who, not content with setting the world by the ears, even exalts her proud head into heaven. The "Iliad" is full of these images, which caused the sculptor Bouchardon to say, "When I read Homer I believe myself twenty feet high."

His poem, which is not at all interesting to us, was very precious to the Greeks. His gods are ridiculous to reasonable but they were not so to partial eyes, and it was for partial eyes that he wrote.

We laugh and shrug our shoulders at these gods, who abused one another, fought one another, and combated with men – who were wounded and whose blood flowed, but such was the ancient theology of Greece and of almost all the Asiatic people. Every nation, every little village had its particular god, which conducted it to battle.

The inhabitants of the clouds and of the stars which were supposed in the clouds, had a cruel war. The combat of the angels against one another was from time immemorial the foundation of the religion of the Brahmins. The battle of the Titans, the children of heaven and earth, against the chief gods of Olympus, was also the leading mystery of the Greek religion. Typhon, according to the Egyptians, had fought against Oshiret, whom we call Osiris, and cut him to pieces.

Madame Dacier, in her preface to the "Iliad," remarks very sensibly, after Eustathius, bishop of Thessalonica, and Huet, bishop of Avranches, that every neighboring nation of the Hebrews had its god of war. Indeed, does not Jephthah say to the Ammonites, "Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess? So, whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, from them will we possess."

Do we not see the God of Judah a conqueror in the mountains and repulsed in the valleys?

As to men wrestling against divinities, that is a received idea. Jacob wrestled one whole night with an angel. If Jupiter sent a deceiving dream to the chief of the Greeks, the Lord also sent a deceiving spirit to King Ahab. These emblems were frequent and astonished nobody. Homer has then painted the ideas of his own age; he could not paint those of the generations which succeeded him.

Homer has great faults. Horace confesses it, and all men of taste agree to it; there is only one commentator who is blind enough not to see them. Pope, who was himself a translator of the Greek poet, says: "It is a vast but uncultivated country where we meet with all kinds of natural beauties, but which do not present themselves as regularly as in a garden; it is an abundant nursery which contains the seeds of all fruits; a great tree that extends superfluous branches which it is necessary to prune."

Madame Dacier sides with the vast country, the nursery and the tree, and would have nothing curtailed. She was no doubt a woman superior to her sex, and has done great service to letters, as well as her husband, but when she became masculine and turned commentator, she so overacted her part that she piqued people into finding fault with Homer. She was so obstinate as to quarrel even with Monsieur de La Motte. She wrote against him like the head of a college, and La Motte answered like a polite and witty woman. He translated the "Iliad" very badly, but he attacked Madame Dacier very well.

We will not speak of the "Odyssey" here; we shall say something of that poem while treating of Ariosto.

Of Virgil.

It appears to me that the second, fourth, and sixth book of the "Æneid" are as much above all Greek and Latin poets, without exception, as the statues of Girardon are superior to all those which preceded them in France.

It is often said that Virgil has borrowed many of the figures of Homer, and that he is even inferior to him in his imitations, but he has not imitated him at all in the three books of which I am speaking; he is there himself touching and appalling to the heart. Perhaps he was not suited for terrific detail, but there had been battles enough. Horace had said of him, before he attempted the "Æneid:"

 
Molle atque facetum
Virgilio annuerunt gaudentes rure camoenæ.
 
 
Smooth flow his lines, and elegant his style,
On Virgil all the rural muses smile.
 

– FRANCIS.

"Facetum" does not here signify facetious but agreeable. I do not know whether we shall not find a little of this happy and affecting softness in the fatal passion of Dido. I think at least that we shall there recognize the author of those admirable verses which we meet with in his Eclogues: "Ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error!" – I saw, I perished, yet indulged my pain. – (Dryden.)

Certainly the description of the descent into hell would not be badly matched with these lines from the fourth Eclogue:

 
Ille Deum vitam accipiet, divisque videbit
Permistos heroas, et ipse videbitur illis —
Pacatumque reget patriis virtutibus orbem.
 
 
The sons shall lead the lives of gods, and be
By gods and heroes seen, and gods and heroes see.
The jarring nations he in peace shall bind,
And with paternal virtues rule mankind.
 

– DRYDEN.

I meet with many of these simple, elegant, and affecting passages in the three beautiful books of the "Æneid."

All the fourth book is filled with touching verses, which move those who have any ear or sentiment at all, even to tears, and to point out all the beauties of this book it would be necessary to transcribe the whole of it. And in the sombre picture of hell, how this noble and affecting tenderness breathes through every line.

It is well known how many tears were shed by the emperor Augustus, by Livia, and all the palace, at hearing this half line alone: "Tu Marcellus eris."– A new Marcellus will in thee arise.

Homer never produces tears. The true poet, according to my idea, is he who touches the soul and softens it, others are only fine speakers. I am far from proposing this opinion as a rule. "I give my opinion," says Montaigne, "not as being good, but as being my own."

Of Lucan.

If you look for unity of time and action in Lucan you will lose your labor, but where else will you find it? If you expect to feel any emotion or any interest you will not experience it in the long details of a war, the subject of which is very dry and the expressions bombastic, but if you would have bold ideas, an eloquent expatiation on sublime and philosophical courage, Lucan is the only one among the ancients in whom you will meet with it. There is nothing finer than the speech of Labienus to Cato at the gates of the temple of Jupiter Ammon, if we except the answer of Cato itself:

 
Hœremus cuncti superis? temploque tacente
Nil facimus non sponte Dei
… Steriles num legit arenas.
Ut caneret paucis; mersit ne hoc pulvere verum!
Estne Dei sedes nisi terra et pontus et aer,
Et cœlum et virtus? Superos quid quærimus ultra?
Jupiter est quodcumque vides quocumque moveris.
 
 
And though our priests are mutes, and temples still,
We act the dictates of his mighty will;
Canst thou believe, the vast eternal mind,
Was e'er to Syrts and Libyan sands confined?
That he would choose this waste, this barren ground,
To teach the thin inhabitants around?
Is there a place that God would choose to love
Beyond this earth, the seas, yon heaven above,
And virtuous minds, the noblest throne of Jove?
Why seek we farther, then? Behold around;
How all thou seest doth with the God abound,
Jove is seen everywhere, and always to be found.
 

– ROWE.

Put together all that the ancients poets have said of the gods and it is childish in comparison with this passage of Lucan, but in a vast picture, in which there are a hundred figures, it is not sufficient that one or two of them are finely designed.

Of Tasso.

Boileau has exposed the tinsel of Tasso, but if there be a hundred spangles of false gold in a piece of gold cloth, it is pardonable. There are many rough stones in the great marble building raised by Homer. Boileau knew it, felt it, and said nothing about it. We should be just.

We recall the reader's memory to what has been said of Tasso in the "Essay on Epic Poetry," but we must here observe that his verses are known by heart all over Italy. If at Venice any one in a boat sings a stanza of the "Jerusalem Delivered," he is answered from a neighboring bark with the following one.

If Boileau had listened to these concerts he could have said nothing in reply. As enough is known of Tasso, I will not repeat here either eulogies or criticisms. I will speak more at length of Ariosto.

Of Ariosto.

Homer's "Odyssey" seems to have been the first model of the "Morgante," of the "Orlando Innamorato," and the "Orlando Furioso," and, what very seldom happens, the last of the poems is without dispute the best.

The companions of Ulysses changed into swine; the winds shut up in goats' skins; the musicians with fishes' tails, who ate all those who approached them; Ulysses, who followed the chariot of a beautiful princess who went to bathe quite naked; Ulysses, disguised as a beggar, who asked alms, and afterwards killed all the lovers of his aged wife, assisted only by his son and two servants – are imaginations which have given birth to all the poetical romances which have since been written in the same style.

But the romance of Ariosto is so full of variety and so fertile in beauties of all kinds that after having read it once quite through I only wish to begin it again. How great the charm of natural poetry! I never could read a single canto of this poem in a prose translation.

That which above all charms me in this wonderful work is that the author is always above his subject, and treats it playfully. He says the most sublime things without effort and he often finishes them by a turn of pleasantry which is neither misplaced nor far-fetched. It is at once the "Iliad," the "Odyssey," and "Don Quixote," for his principal knight-errant becomes mad like the Spanish hero, and is infinitely more pleasant.

The subject of the poem, which consists of so many things, is precisely that of the romance of "Cassandra," which was formerly so much in fashion with us, and which has entirely lost its celebrity because it had only the length of the "Orlando Furioso," and few of its beauties, and even the few being in French prose, five or six stanzas of Ariosto will eclipse them all. His poem closes with the greater part of the heroes and princesses who have not perished during the war all meeting in Paris, after a thousand adventures, just as the personages in the romance of "Cassandra" all finally meet again in the house of Palemon.

The "Orlando Furioso" possesses a merit unknown to the ancients – it is that of its exordiums.

Every canto is like an enchanted palace, the vestibule of which is always in a different taste – sometimes majestic, sometimes simple, and even grotesque. It is moral, lively, or gallant, and always natural and true.