MORALISTS are wrong when they preach indiscriminately against Satiety and denounce the sated. There is a species of satiety which is productive of wisdom. When Pleasure palls, Philosophy begins. I doubt whether men ever thoroughly attain to knowledge of the world, until they have gone through its attractions and allurements. Experience is not acquired by the spectator of life, but by its actor. It was not by contemplating the fortunes of others, but by the remembrance of his own, that the wisest of Mortals felt that “All was vanity.” A true and practical philosophy, not of books alone, but of mankind, is acquired by the passions as well as by the reason. The Temple of the Science is approached by the garden as well as by the desert — and a healing spirit is distilled from the rose-leaves which withered in our hand.
A certain sentiment of satiety, of the vanity of human pleasures, of the labor ineptiarum, of the nothingness of trite and vulgar occupations, is often the best preparation to that sober yet elevated view of the ends of life, which is Philosophy. As many have blest the bed of sickness on which they had leisure to contemplate their past existence, and to form an improved chart of the future voyage — so there is a sickness of the soul, when exhaustion itself is salutary, and out of the languor and the tedium we extract the seeds of the moral regeneration. Much of what is most indulgent in Morals, much of what is most tender and profound in Poetry, have come from a sated spirit. The disappointments of an enthusiastic and fervent heart have great teaching in their pathos. As the first converts to the gospel were amongst the unfortunate and the erring — so the men who have known most the fallacies of our human nature, are perhaps those the most inclined to foster the aspirations of the spiritual. To the one Faust who found a comrade in the Fiend, there are a thousand who are visited by the Angel.
The more civilized, the more refined, becomes the period in which we are cast, the more are we subject to satiety —
“That weariness of all
We meet, or feel, or hear, or see.”
The even road of existence, the routine of nothings, the smooth and silken indolence, which is destined to those amongst us who, wealthy and well-born, have no occupation in life but the effort to live at ease, produce on the subject the same royalty of discontent that was once the attribute of a king. In a free and a prosperous country, all who are rich and idle are as kings. We have the same splendid monotony and unvarying spectacle of repeated pageants of which the victims of a court complain. All society has become a court, and we pass our lives like Madame de Maintenon, in seeking to amuse those who cannot be amused, or like Louis XIV., in seeking to be amused by those who cannot amuse us. Satiety is, therefore, the common and catholic curse of the idle portion of a highly civilized country. And the inequalities of life are fittingly adjusted. For those who are excluded from pleasure in the one extreme, there are those who are incapable of pleasure in the other. The fogs gather dull and cheerless over the base of the mountain, but the air at the summit exhausts and withers.
Yet the poor have their satiety no less than the wealthy — the satiety of toil and the conviction of its hopelessness. “Picture to yourself,” wrote a mechanic once to me, “a man, sensible that he is made for something better than to labour and to die, cursed with a desire of knowledge, while occupied only with the task to live, drudging on from year to year, to render himself above the necessity of drudgery; to feel his soul out of the clutches of want, and enabled to indulge at ease in the luxury of becoming better and wiser — picture to yourself such a man, with such an ambition, finding every effort in vain, seeing that the utmost he can do is to provide for the day, and so from day to day to live battling against the morrow. With what heart can he give himself up at night to unproductive tasks. Scarce is he lost for a moment, amidst the wonders of knowledge for the first time presented to him, ere the voice of his children disturbs and brings him back to the world, — the debt unpaid — the bill discredited — the demands upon the Saturday’s wages. O, Sir, in such moments, none can feel how great is our disgust at life, how jaded and how weary we feel; — we recoil alike from amusement and knowledge — we sicken at the doom to which we are compelled — we are as weary of the sun as the idlest rich man in the land — we share his prerogative of satiety, and long for the rest in the green bed where our forefathers sleep, released for ever from the tooth of unrelenting cares.”
The writer of this was a poet — let me hope that there are not many of his order condemned with him to a spirit out of harmony with its lot. Yet as knowledge widens its circle, the number will increase, and if our social system is to remain always the same, I doubt whether the desire of knowledge, which is the desire of leisure, will be a blessing to those who are everlastingly condemned to toil.
But the satiety of the rich has its cure in what is the very curse of the poor. Their satiety is from indolence, and its cure is action. Satiety with them is chiefly the offspring of a restless imagination and a stagnant intellect Their minds are employed on trifles, in which their feelings cease to take an interest. It is not the frivolous who feel satiety, it is a better order of spirits fated to have no other occupation than frivolities. The French memoir writers, who evince so much talent wasted away in a life of trifles, present the most melancholy pictures we possess of satiety and of the more gloomy wisdom of apathy in which it sometimes ends. The flowers of the heart run to seed. Madame D’Epinay has expressed this briefly and beautifully—” Le cœur se blase, les ressorts se brisent, et l’on finit, je crois, par n’être plus sensible à rien.”
Oh, that fearful prostration of the mind — that torpor of the affections, that utter hopeless indifference to all things —
“Full little can he tell who hath not tried
What hell it is!”
To rise and see through the long day no object that can interest, no pleasure that can amuse, with a heart perpetually craving excitement to pass mechanically through the round of unexcitable occupations — to make an enemy of Time — to count the moments of his march: — to be his captive in the prison-house — to foresee no delivery but death — to be a machine and not a man, having no - self-will and no emotion — wound up from day to day — things in a dream, in which we act involuntarily — feeling the best part of us locked up and lifeless, and that which is active, a puppet to a power that fools us with its objectless fancies — passive but not at rest; — the deep and crushing melancholy of such a state, let no happier being venture to despise.
It is usually after some sudden pause in the passions that we are thus afflicted. The winds drop, and the leaf they whirled aloft rots upon the ground. It is the dread close of disappointed love, or of baffled ambition. Who ever painted love when it discovers the worthlessness of its object and retreats gloomily into itself, that has not painted, even to the hackneying of the picture, the weariness that succeeds — the stale and unprofitable uses to which all the world seems abruptly and barrenly resolved? So with ambition — the retirement of a statesman before his time, is perhaps the least enviable repose that his enemies could inflict on him. “Damien’s bed of steel” is a luxury to the bed of withered laurels; the gloomy exile of Swift, fretting his heart out, “a rat in a cage the spectre of Olivares — the petulance of Napoleon wrestling with his gaoler upon a fashion in tea-cups — what mournful parodies of the dignity of human honours! Between the past glory and the posthumous renown — how awful an interlude! The unwilling rest to a long continued excitement, is a solitude from which the fiends might recoil!
But happy those on whom the curse of satiety falls early, and before the heart has exhausted its resources; when we can yet contend against the lethargy, ere it becomes a habit, and allow satiety to extend only to the trifles of life, and not to its great objects; when we are wearied only of the lighter pleasures, and can turn to the more grave pursuits; — and the discontent of the Imagination is the spur to the Intellect, Satiety is the heritage of the Heart, not of the Reason: and the Reason -properly invoked possesses in itself the genii to dissolve the charm, and awake the sleeper. For he alone, who thoroughly convinces himself that he has duties to perform — that his centre of being is in the world and not in himself — can conquer the egotisms of weariness. The objects confined to self becoming worn out and wearisome, he may find new and inexhaustible objects in the relations that he holds to others. Duty has pleasures which know no satiety. The weariness then known and thus removed, begets the philosophy I referred to in the commencement of these remarks. For wisdom is the true phoenix, and never rises but from the ashes of a former existence of the mind. Then perhaps, too, as we learn a proper estimate of the pleasures of this life, we learn also from those yearnings of our more subtile and tender soul, never satisfied below, a fresh evidence of our ultimate destinies. A consolation which Preacher and Poet have often deduced from the weariness of our disappointments — contending that our perpetual desire for something unattainable here, betokens and prophesies a possession in the objects of a hereafter — so that life itself is but one expectation of eternity. As birds, born in a cage from which they had never known release, would still flutter against the bars, and, in the instinct of their unconquered nature, long for the untried and pathless air which they behold through their narrow grating; — so, pent in our cage of clay — the diviner instinct is not dead within us; — at times we sicken with indistinct and undefinable apprehensions of a more noble birthright — and the soul feels stirringly that its wings, which it doth but bruise in its dungeon-tenement, were designed by the Creator — who shapeth all things to their uses — for the enjoyment of the royalties of Heaven.