Count Altenberg answered in French, speaking very rapidly. “It is a labour saved me fortunately, by the recorded experience of all history, by the testimony of the wisest and the best in all countries, ancient and modern—all agree in proclaiming love of our country to be one of the most powerful, most permanent motives to good and great actions; the most expansive, elevating principle—elevating without danger—expansive without waste; the principle to which the legislator looks for the preservative against corruption in states—to which the moralist turns for the antidote against selfishness in individuals. Recollect, name any great character, ancient or modern—is not love of his country one of his virtues? Can you draw—can you conceive a great character—a great or a good character, or even a safe member of society without it? A man hangs loose upon society, as your own Burke says—”
“Ah! M. le Comte!” cried Clay, shrinking with affected horror, “I repent—I see what I have brought upon myself; after Burke will come Cicero; and after Cicero all Rome, Carthage, Athens, Lacedemon. Oh! spare me! since I was a schoolboy, I could never suffer those names. Ah! M. le Comte, de grâce!—I know I have put myself in the case to be buried alive under a load of quotations.”
The Count, with that good humour which disappoints ridicule, smiled, and checked his enthusiasm.
“Is there not a kind of enthusiasm,” said Mrs. Percy, “which is as necessary to virtue as to genius?”
French Clay shook his head. He was sorry to differ from a lady; as a gallant man, he knew he was wrong, but as a philosopher he could not patronize enthusiasm. It was the business, he apprehended, of philosophy to correct and extinguish it.
“I have heard it said,” interposed Rosamond, “that it is a favourite maxim of law, that the extreme of justice is the extreme of injustice—perhaps this maxim may be applied to philosophy as well as to law.”
“Why extinguish enthusiasm?” cried Caroline. “It is not surely the business of philosophy to extinguish, but to direct it. Does not enthusiasm, well directed, give life and energy to all that is good and great?”
There was so much life and energy in Caroline’s beautiful countenance, that French Clay was for a moment silenced by admiration.
“After all,” resumed he, “there is one slight circumstance, which persons of feeling should consider, that the evils and horrors of war are produced by this very principle, which some people think so useful to mankind, this famous love of our country.”
Count Altenberg asked, whether wars had not more frequently arisen from the unlawful fancies which princes and conquerors are apt to take for the territories of their neighbours, than from the legitimate love of their own country?