“Jamais nous ne goûtons de parfaite allégresse:
Nos plus heureux succès sont mêlés de tristesse;
Toujours quelques soucis en ces événements
Troublent la pureté de nos contentements.”
Semper amari aliquid. It is like Johnson’s reflections on his first transports at Ranelagh. When first he entered those festive gardens, it gave, he tells Boswell, an expansion and gay sensation to his mind, such as he never experienced anywhere else. But, as Xerxes wept when he reviewed his immense army, and considered that not one of that great multitude would be alive a hundred years afterwards, so it went to the doctor’s heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle but was afraid to go home and think; that “the thoughts of each individual there would be distressing when alone.” Boswell approves the reflection as “experimentally just,” and appends a commonplace of his own, upon the feeling of langour, which succeeds the animation of gaiety, being itself a very severe pain.
It was in the mid hey-day of military triumph that Paulus Æmilius astonished his encircling admirers by, first, a prolonged silence, and next, a sombre homily on the vicissitudes of fortune, and of human affairs. What time for confidence can there be to man, he asked, when in the very instant of victory he must necessarily dread the power of fortune, and the very joy of success must be mingled with anxiety—aliquid solliciti—from a reflection on the course of unsparing fate, which humbles one man to-day, and to-morrow another! Gladdening is the gourd, with its pleasant promise of protection against the arrow that flieth by day from a burning sun; but only him can it make, like Jonah, exceeding glad, who knows not, or makes a point of forgetting, what a worm can do, between a setting and a rising sun.
The night thoughts of man in general are one with the Night Thoughts of Young in particular, when he exclaims,
“How sad a sight is human happiness
To those whose thoughts can pierce beyond an hour!