Madame de Staël, surrounded by the most brilliant men of genius, beloved by a host of faithful and devoted friends, the centre of a circle of unsurpassed attractions, was yet doomed to mourn "the solitude of life." A short time before her death, she said to Châteaubriand, "I am now what I have always been—lively and sad."
The illustrious Madame Récamier, "after forty years of unchallenged queenship in French society, constantly enveloped in an intoxicating incense of admiration and love won not less by her goodness and purity than by her beauty and grace," writes thus from Dieppe to her niece: "I am here in the centre of fêtes, princesses, illuminations, spectacles. Two of my windows face the ball-room, the other two front the theatre. Amidst this clatter I am in a perfect solitude. I sit and muse on the shore of the ocean. I go over all the sad and joyous circumstances of my life. I hope you will be more happy than I have been."
Madame de Pompadour, recalling her follies, serious matters they were to her, said to the Prince de Soubise, "It is like reading a strange book; my life is an improbable romance; I do not believe it." "Gray hairs had come on like daylight streaming in,—daylight and a headache with it. Pleasure had gone to bed with the rouge on her cheeks."
"Ah!" wrote also Madame de Maintenon to her niece, "alas that I cannot give you my experience; that I could only show you the weariness of soul by which the great are devoured—the difficulty which they find in getting through their days! Do you not see how they die of sadness in the midst of that fortune which has been a burden to them? I have been young and beautiful; I have tasted many pleasures; I have been universally beloved. At a more advanced age, I have passed years in the intercourse of talent and wit, and I solemnly protest to you that all conditions leave a frightful void."
Coleridge sums up all more wisely. "I have known," he says, "what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience that more than three-score years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you that health is a great blessing,—competence obtained by honorable industry a great blessing,—and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian."
"We are born and we live so unhappily that the accomplishment of a desire appears to us a falsehood, the realization of hope a deception, as if our sad experience had taught us the bitter lesson that in the world nothing is true but sorrow." "Who ordered toil," says Thackeray, "as the condition of life, ordered weariness, ordered sickness, ordered poverty, failure, success,—to this man a foremost place, to the other a nameless struggle with the crowd; to that a shameful fall, or paralyzed limb, or sudden accident; to each some work upon the ground he stands on, until he is laid beneath it." "Nature," says Pliny, "makes us buy her presents at the price of so many sufferings, that it is dubious whether she deserves most the name of a parent or a step-mother." "Solomon and Job judged the best and spake the truest," thought Pascal, "of human misery; the former the most happy, the latter the most unfortunate of mankind; the one acquainted by long experience with the vanity of pleasure, the other with the reality of affliction and pain."
"We must patiently suffer," says Montaigne, "the laws of our condition; we are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, in spite of all physic. 'Tis the first lesson the Mexicans teach their children; so soon as ever they are born, they thus salute them: 'Child, thou art come into the world to endure, suffer, and say nothing.'" "Half the miseries of human life," thought Hazlitt, "proceed from our not perceiving the incompatibility of different attainments, and consequently aiming at too much. We make ourselves wretched in vainly aspiring after advantages we are deprived of; and do not consider that if we had these advantages it would be quite impossible for us to retain those which we actually do possess, and which, after all, if it were put to the question, we would not consent to part with for the sake of any others." "Men of true wisdom and goodness," says Fielding, "are contented to take persons and things as they are, without complaining of their imperfections, or attempting to amend them; they can see a fault in a friend, or relation, or an acquaintance, without ever mentioning it to the parties themselves or to any others; and this often without lessening their affection: indeed, unless great discernment be tempered with this overlooking disposition, we ought never to contract friendships but with a degree of folly which we can deceive; for I hope my friends will pardon me when I declare, I know none of them without a fault; and I should be sorry if I could imagine I had any friends who could not see mine. Forgiveness of this kind we give and demand in turn: it is an exercise of friendship, and perhaps none of the least pleasant, and this forgiveness we must bestow without desire of amendment. There is, perhaps, no surer mark of folly, than an attempt to correct the natural infirmities of those we love: the finest composition of human nature, as well as the finest china, may have a flaw in it; and this, I am afraid, in either case, is equally incurable, though nevertheless the pattern may remain of the highest value." "In short," says Bulwer, "I suspect that every really skilled man of the world—as the world exists for its citizens in this nineteenth century—who, at the ripe age of forty, looks from the window of his club on the every-day mortals whom Fourier has hitherto failed to reform, has convinced him that, considering all the mistakes in our education and rearing,—all the temptations to which flesh and blood are exposed—all the trials which poverty inflicts on the poor—all the seductions which wealth whispers to the rich,—men, on the whole, are rather good than otherwise, and women, on the whole, are rather better than the men."
"Let a man examine his own thoughts," says Pascal, "and he will always find them employed about the time past or to come. We scarce bestow a glance upon the present; or, if we do, 'tis only to borrow light from hence to manage and direct the future. The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim. Thus we never live, but we ever hope to live; and under this continual disposition and preparation to happiness, 'tis certain we can never be actually happy, if our hopes are terminated with the scene of this life."
The Thracians, according to Pliny, estimated their lives mathematically, making careful study and count of each day before any event of it was forgotten. "Every day they put into an urn either a black or a white pebble, to denote the good or bad fortune of that day; at last they separated these pebbles, and upon comparing the two numbers together, they formed their judgment of the whole of their lives." But time, past or present,—time, what is it? "Who can readily and briefly explain this?" inquired St. Augustine. "Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly, than time? And we understand, when we speak of it; we understand, also, when we hear it spoken of by another. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I explain it to one that asketh, I know not; yet I say boldly, that I know that if nothing passed away, time passed were not; and if nothing were coming, a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were not. Those two times then, past and to come, how are they, seeing the past now is not, and that to come is not yet? But the present, should it always be present, and never pass into time past, verily it should not be time, but eternity. If, therefore, time present, in order to be time at all, comes into existence only because it passes into time past, how can we say that that is in existence, whose cause of being is that it shall not be? How is it that we cannot truly say that time is, but because it is tending not to be?" Comprehend this, and you see how easy a thing it was for the Thracians to "form a judgment of the whole of their lives"—to strike a nice balance between their happiness and their misery.