One evening he sent to tell me he should be alone, if I would sup with him; accordingly I repaired to his house. He was walking up and down the room with uneven and rapid steps, and his countenance was flushed with an expression of joy and triumph, very rare to the thoughtful and earnest calm which it usually wore. “Congratulate me, Devereux,” said he, seizing me eagerly by the hand, “congratulate me!”
“For what?”
“Ay, true: you are not yet a politician; you cannot yet tell how dear—how inexpressibly dear to a politician—is a momentary and petty victory,—but—if I were Prime Minister of this country, what would you say?”
“That you could bear the duty better than any man living; but remember Harley is in the way.”
“Ah, there’s the rub,” said St. John, slowly, and the expression of his face again changed from triumph to thoughtfulness; “but this is a subject not to your taste: let us choose another.” And flinging himself into a chair, this singular man, who prided himself on suiting his conversation to every one, began conversing with me upon the lighter topics of the day; these we soon exhausted, and at last we settled upon that of love and women.
“I own,” said I, “that, in this respect, pleasure has disappointed as well as wearied me. I have longed for some better object of worship than the trifler of fashion, or the yet more ignoble minion of the senses. I ask a vent for enthusiasm, for devotion, for romance, for a thousand subtle and secret streams of unuttered and unutterable feeling. I often think that I bear within me the desire and the sentiment of poetry, though I enjoy not its faculty of expression; and that that desire and that sentiment, denied legitimate egress, centre and shrink into one absorbing passion,—which is the want of love. Where am I to satisfy this want? I look round these great circles of gayety which we term the world; I send forth my heart as a wanderer over their regions and recesses, and it returns, sated and palled and languid, to myself again.”
“You express a common want in every less worldly or more morbid nature,” said St. John; “a want which I myself have experienced, and if I had never felt it, I should never, perhaps, have turned to ambition to console or to engross me. But do not flatter yourself that the want will ever be fulfilled. Nature places us alone in this hospitable world, and no heart is cast in a similar mould to that which we bear within us. We pine for sympathy; we make to ourselves a creation of ideal beauties, in which we expect to find it: but the creation has no reality; it is the mind’s phantasma which the mind adores; and it is because the phantasma can have no actual being that the mind despairs. Throughout life, from the cradle to the grave, it is no real living thing which we demand; it is the realization of the idea we have formed within us, and which, as we are not gods, we can never call into existence. We are enamoured of the statue ourselves have graven; but, unlike the statue of the Cyprian, it kindles not to our homage nor melts to our embraces.”
“I believe you,” said I; “but it is hard to undeceive ourselves. The heart is the most credulous of all fanatics, and its ruling passion the most enduring of all superstitions. Oh! what can tear from us, to the last, the hope, the desire, the yearning for some bosom which, while it mirrors our own, parts not with the reflection! I have read that, in the very hour and instant of our birth, one exactly similar to ourselves, in spirit and form, is born also, and that a secret and unintelligible sympathy preserves that likeness, even through the vicissitudes of fortune and circumstance, until, in the same point of time, the two beings are resolved once more into the elements of earth: confess that there is something welcome, though unfounded in the fancy, and that there are few of the substances of worldly honour which one would not renounce, to possess, in the closest and fondest of all relations, this shadow of ourselves!”
“Alas!” said St. John, “the possession, like all earthly blessings, carries within it its own principle of corruption. The deadliest foe to love is not change nor misfortune nor jealousy nor wrath, nor anything that flows from passion or emanates from fortune; the deadliest foe to it is custom! With custom die away the delusions and the mysteries which encircle it; leaf after leaf, in the green poetry on which its beauty depends, droops and withers, till nothing but the bare and rude trunk is left. With all passion the soul demands something unexpressed, some vague recess to explore or to marvel upon,—some veil upon the mental as well as the corporeal deity. Custom leaves nothing to romance, and often but little to respect. The whole character is bared before us like a plain, and the heart’s eye grows wearied with the sameness of the survey. And to weariness succeeds distaste, and to distaste one of the myriad shapes of the Proteus Aversion; so that the passion we would make the rarest of treasures fritters down to a very instance of the commonest of proverbs,—and out of familiarity cometh indeed contempt!”
“And are we, then,” said I, “forever to forego the most delicious of our dreams? Are we to consider love as an entire delusion, and to reconcile ourselves to an eternal solitude of heart? What, then, shall fill the crying and unappeasable void of our souls? What shall become of those mighty sources of tenderness which, refused all channel in the rocky soil of the world, must have an outlet elsewhere or stagnate into torpor?”