Love and hate are sentiments which feed on themselves, but of the two hate is the stronger. Love is limited; its strength comes of life and prodigality. But hate is like death; it is in one sense an active abstraction; it subsists above men and things.
To invent is lingering death; to copy is to live.
If men were frank, they would acknowledge that misfortune has never taken them entirely unawares, nor without first sending to them some visible or occult warning. Many have not understood the meaning of these mysterious monitions until after the shipwreck.
A singular fascination attaches to celebrity, however acquired, and it would seem that with women, as formerly with families, the glory of a crime effaced the shame. As certain families boast of decapitated ancestors, so does a pretty woman become more attractive through the renown of a terrible betrayal. We are pitiless only to vulgar sentiments and commonplace adventures.
No moralist will deny that the well-bred, yet corrupt, are much more agreeable than the strictly exemplary; for, having sins to ransom, they are very indulgent to the defects of others. Virtue, on the contrary, considers herself sufficiently beautiful to dispense with any effort at being agreeable; and besides, those who are really virtuous have all a few slight suspicions about their position, and, feeling that they have been duped at the great bazaar of life, their speech has that bitter savor which is peculiar to those who affect to be misunderstood.
The woman who is deformed, yet whose husband considers her figure shapely; the woman who limps, yet whose husband would not have her otherwise; the woman who is old, and yet seems young, are the happiest creatures in the feminine world. The glory of a woman is in making her defects beloved. To forget that a woman who limps does not walk as she should is the effect of momentary fascination, but to love her because she does so is the deification of her infirmity. In the gospel of women, this sentence, I think, should be written: Blessed are the imperfect, for theirs is the kingdom of love. Beauty certainly must be a misfortune to a woman, for its transient charm is the mainspring of the sentiment which it inspires, and the beautiful woman is loved on the same principle that leads a man to marry an heiress. But the woman who is not dowered with the fragile advantages which the children of Adam seek is alone capable of inspiring that mysterious passion which never wanes; to her true love is given, and with it the deathless embrace of the soul. The most celebrated attachments in history were almost all inspired by women in whom the vulgar would have found defects,—Cleopatra, Jeanne de Naples, Diane de Poitiers, Mademoiselle de la Vallière, Madame de Pompadour; in a word, the women whom love has rendered most celebrated were wanting neither in imperfections nor in infirmities, while the majority of women whose beauty has been cited as perfect witnessed an unfortunate termination to their love affairs. The cause of this apparent contradiction is to be found in the fact that the charm of physical beauty is limited, while psychological attractions possess an infinite power; and this, it may be noted, is undoubtedly the moral of the fabulization of the “Thousand and One Nights.”
Suicide appears to me to be the climax of a moral disorder, as natural death is the climax of a physical one. Inasmuch, however, as the moral faculties are subjected to the laws of volition, should not their cessation coincide with the manifestations of the intelligence? It is the thought, therefore, and not the pistol, that kills. Besides, the fact that an accident may destroy us at the moment when life is most enjoyable should absolve the voluntary termination of an unhappy existence.... Suicide is the effect of a sentiment which may be termed self-esteem, in contradistinction to that of honor. When a man no longer respects himself and finds himself no longer respected, when the actuality of existence is at variance with his hopes, he kills himself, and thereby offers homage to the world in refusing to remain before it divested of his virtues or of his splendors.... Suicide is of three distinct classes: first, there is the suicide which is but the crisis of a long illness, and undoubtedly belongs to pathology; then, there is the suicide which is caused by despair; and lastly, the suicide from ratiocination. Of these three, the first alone is irrevocable. Sometimes the three classes unite, as in the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.... Suicide was permitted by Epicurus. It was the finishing touch to his philosophy. Where there was no enjoyment to the senses it was right and proper for the animated being to seek repose in inanimate nature. Man’s only aim consisting in happiness, or in the hope of happiness, death became a benefit to him who suffered, and who suffered hopelessly. He did not recommend suicide, nor did he blame it; he was content to say, “Death is not a subject for laughter, nor is it a subject for tears.” More moral and more imbued with the sentiment of duty, Zeno in certain cases forbade suicide to the stoic. Man, he taught, differs from the brute in that he disposes sovereignly of his person; divested of the right of life and death over himself, he becomes the slave of men and events. To man, therefore, freedom in all things should belong: freedom from passions, which should be sacrificed to duties; freedom from fellow creatures in exhibiting the steel or the poison which disarms attack; freedom from destiny in setting a limit beyond which it can have no effect.... Among the atheists of to-day, the coward alone accepts a dishonored life.
CHAPTER VI.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
“Habent sua fati libelli.”—Martial.