Ernest Maltravers — Complete

CHAPTER V.

     “Quid tam dextro pede concipis ut te,
  Conatus non poeniteat, votique peracti?” *—JUV.

* What, under such happy auspices do you conceive that you may not repent of your endeavour and accomplished wish?

“YES,” said De Montaigne, “in my way I also am fulfilling my destiny. I am a member of the Chambre des Deputes, and on a visit to England upon some commercial affairs. I found myself in your neighbourhood, and, of course, could not resist the temptation: so you must receive me as your guest for some days.”

“I congratulate you cordially on your senatorial honours. I have already heard of your rising name.”

“I return the congratulations with equal warmth. You are bringing my prophecies to pass. I have read your works with increased pride at our friendship.”

Maltravers sighed slightly, and half turned away.

“The desire of distinction,” said he, after a pause, “grows upon us till excitement becomes disease. The child who is born with the mariner’s instinct laughs with glee when his paper bark skims the wave of a pool. By and by nothing will content him but the ship and the ocean.—Like the child is the author.”

“I am pleased with your simile,” said De Montaigne, smiling. “Do not spoil it, but go on with your argument.”

Maltravers continued: “Scarcely do we win the applause of a moment, ere we summon the past and conjecture the future. Our contemporaries no longer suffice for competitors, our age for the Court to pronounce on our claims: we call up the Dead as our only true rivals—we appeal to Posterity as our sole just tribunal. Is this vain in us? Possibly. Yet such vanity humbles. ‘Tis then only we learn all the difference between Reputation and Fame—between To-Day and Immortality!”

“Do you think,” replied De Montaigne, “that the dead did not feel the same when they first trod the path that leads to the life beyond life? Continue to cultivate the mind, to sharpen by exercise the genius, to attempt to delight or to instruct your race; and even supposing you fall short of every model you set before you—supposing your name moulder with your dust, still you will have passed life more nobly than the unlaborious herd. Grant that you win not that glorious accident, ‘a name below,’ how can you tell but what you may have fitted yourself for high destiny and employ in the world not of men, but of spirits? The powers of the mind are things that cannot be less immortal than the mere sense of identity; their acquisitions accompany us through the Eternal Progress; and we may obtain a lower or a higher grade hereafter, in proportion as we are more or less fitted by the exercise of our intellect to comprehend and execute the solemn agencies of God. The wise man is nearer to the angels than the fool is. This may be an apocryphal dogma, but it is not an impossible theory.”

“But we may waste the sound enjoyments of actual life in chasing the hope you justly allow to be ‘apocryphal;’ and our knowledge may go for nothing in the eyes of the Omniscient.”

“Very well,” said De Montaigne, smiling; “but answer me honestly. By the pursuits of intellectual ambition do you waste the sound enjoyments of life? If so, you do not pursue the system rightly. Those pursuits ought only to quicken your sense for such pleasures as are the true relaxations of life. And this, with you peculiarly, since you are fortunate enough not to depend for subsistence upon literature;—did you do so, I might rather advise you to be a trunkmaker than an author. A man ought not to attempt any of the highest walks of Mind and Art, as the mere provision of daily bread; not literature alone, but everything else of the same degree. He ought not to be a statesman, or an orator, or a philosopher, as a thing of pence and shillings: and usually all men, save the poor poet, feel this truth insensibly.”

“This may be fine preaching,” said Maltravers; “but you may be quite sure that the pursuit of literature is a pursuit apart from the ordinary objects of life, and you cannot command the enjoyments of both.”

“I think otherwise,” said De Montaigne; “but it is not in a country house eighty miles from the capital, without wife, guests, or friends, that the experiment can be fairly made. Come, Maltravers, I see before you a brave career, and I cannot permit you to halt at the onset.”

“You do not see all the calumnies that are already put forth against me, to say nothing of all the assurances (and many by clever men) that there is nothing in me!”

“Dennis was a clever man, and said the same thing of your Pope. Madame de Sevigne was a clever woman, but she thought Racine would never be very famous. Milton saw nothing in the first efforts of Dryden that made him consider Dryden better than a rhymester. Aristophanes was a good judge of poetry, yet how ill he judged of Euripides! But all this is commonplace, and yet you bring arguments that a commonplace answers in evidence against yourself.”

“But it is unpleasant not to answer attacks—not to retaliate on enemies.”

“Then answer attacks, and retaliate on enemies.”

“But would that be wise?”

“If it give you pleasure—it would not please me.”

“Come, De Montaigne, you are reasoning Socratically. I will ask you plainly and bluntly, would you advise an author to wage war on his literary assailants, or to despise them?”

“Both; let him attack but few, and those rarely. But it is his policy to show that he is one whom it is better not to provoke too far. The author always has the world on his side against the critics, if he choose his opportunity. And he must always recollect that he is ‘A STATE’ in himself, which must sometimes go to war in order to procure peace. The time for war or for peace must be left to the State’s own diplomacy and wisdom.”

“You would make us political machines.”

“It would make every man’s conduct more or less mechanical; for system is the triumph of mind over matter; the just equilibrium of all the powers and passions may seem like machinery. Be it so. Nature meant the world—the creation—man himself, for machines.”

“And one must even be in a passion mechanically, according to your theories.”

“A man is a poor creature who is not in a passion sometimes; but a very unjust, or a very foolish one, if he be in a passion with the wrong person, and in the wrong place and time. But enough of this, it is growing late.”

“And when will Madame visit England?”

“Oh, not yet, I fear. But you will meet Cesarini in London this year or the next. He is persuaded that you did not see justice done to his poems, and is coming here as soon as his indolence will let him, to proclaim your treachery in a biting preface to some toothless satire.”

“Satire!”

“Yes; more than one of your poets made their way by a satire, and Cesarini is persuaded he shall do the same. Castruccio is not as far-sighted as his namesake, the Prince of Lucca. Good night, my dear Ernest.”