Imagination resembles the magician of an oriental romance who transports his favorite hero to scenes of enchantment, to try him with pleasures; and then delivers him over to a hostile magician, who multiplies peril and misery around him. This creative faculty, in its perversion, is as fertile to invent torments as, in its more propitious moods, to bring forth pleasures. If once we resign ourselves to its gloomy caprices, it conjures up the terror of a thousand unreal evils. Reason cannot always follow its meteor path; but ought, at least, to point out the course in which happiness invites it to walk.
The aid of reason is still more necessary at the moment when the chimeras of imagination disappear. It is an afflicting moment. Reason should prepare us to meet it. Every man, with an elevated mind and a good heart, has delighted to imagine himself far away from the stupid and wicked; in a smiling country, separated from the rest of the world, and alone with a few friends. Suppose this dream realized; I am aware that, tomorrow, the peaceful exile might be indulging regrets for the place he had left; and forming plans to escape from the ennui of the new country. Since we change our destiny in these respects, without altering our instinctive desire of change, let us study the art of softening the pains of our actual condition; and let us learn to extract all possible advantages from it by imparting to it, if nothing more, the embellishment created by the happy anticipations of a fertile imagination.
Ought we to indulge regrets because these paintings of the imagination so rapidly disappear. I have seen the rich and the great stripped, in a moment, of their fortune and power; and shall I afflict myself because my dream has vanished? These unfortunate people lost all that was dear to them, forever. For me, I can renew these pleasures of imagination at my will.
Far from sacrificing any of our faculties, let us exercise them all; and let them mutually conduce to our happiness. As we advance in life, our reason should grow to the calm of mature age. But let the imagination and the heart still preserve scintillations of the fire of youth.
[LETTER XXI.]
MELANCHOLY.
There is no pleasure of earth but, as soon as it becomes vivid, has a tendency to tinge itself with melancholy. The birth of an infant, the convalescence of a father, the return of a friend who has been long absent, fill the eyes with tears. Nature has thus chosen to mingle the colors of joy and sadness. Having destined us to experience each of the emotions in turn, she has ordained that the shades of transition should melt into each other.[51]
The dearest remembrances are those which are accompanied by tenderness of heart. The sports of infancy, the first loves, the perils we have forever escaped, and the faults we have learned to repair, are of the number. Whoever will recollect the happiest moments of his life, will find them to have produced this emotion.
But there are two kinds of melancholy; or rather, we must not confound melancholy with gloom. Will the slight tenderness of sorrow which imparts a new charm to the fugitive pleasures of existence be inspired by those gloomy books which this age has attempted to bring into fashion; by those terrific and wild dreams in which hideous personages enact revolting scenes? Modern imagination has painted melancholy a tall and unearthly spectre enveloped in a winding sheet. The real traits of her countenance are those of innocence occupied in pleasant revery; and at the same time that tears are in her eyes, a smile dwells on her lips.
It is the resort of a sterile imagination and a cold heart, to invest even the tomb with borrowed ideas of darkness; to wait for night in which to visit it; and to torment the fancy to people it with sinister phantoms. Real sensibility would not require such an effort to be awakened. It fills my mind with a pleasing sadness to wander in the church-yard, under the melancholy radiance of the moon, among monuments of white marble, and hear the night breeze sigh among the weeping willows. I am deeply affected with, here and there, a touching inscription.[52] I remember one in which a father says, that he has had five children, and that here sleeps the last that remained to him for consolation. In another, a father and mother announce that their daughter died at seventeen, a victim of their weak indulgence, and of the extravagant modes of the time. This sojourn of repose, these words written in the abodes of silence, which inspire tenderness for those that are no more, and those whose treasured affection still remembers them, always penetrate the soul with an emotion not without its charms. In the view of tombs, we immediately direct our thoughts to an internal survey of ourselves. I mark out my place among the peaceful mansions. I imagine the vernal grass and flowers reviving over my place of rest. My imagination transports me to the days which I shall not see, and sounds for me the soothing dirge of the adieus of friendship pronounced over the spot where I am laid.[53]