“La Volonté, en se déréglant, devient passion; cette passion continuée se change en habitude, et faute de résister à cette habitude elle se transforme en besoin.”—St. Augustin. Which may be rendered—“out of the unregulated will, springs passion, out of passion gratified, habit; out of habits unresisted, necessity.” This, also, is one of the truths which become, from the impossibility of disputing or refuting them, truisms—and little regarded, till the truth makes itself felt.
47.
I wish I could realise what you call my “grand idea of being independent of the absent.” I have not a friend worthy the name, whose absence is not pain and dread to me;—death itself is terrible only as it is absence. At some moments, if I could, I would cease to love those who are absent from me, or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life diverges from mine—whose dwelling house is far off;—with whom I am united in the strongest bonds of sympathy while separated by duties and interests by space and time. The presence of those whom we love is as a double life; absence, in its anxious longing, and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.
“La mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment où ils meurent, mais de celui où nous cessons de vivre avec eux;” or, it might rather be said, pour eux; but I think this arises from a want either of faith or faithfulness.
“La peur des morts est une abominable faiblesse! c’est la plus commune et la plus barbare des profanations; les mères ne la connaissent pas!”—And why? Because the most faithful love is the love of the mother for her child.
48.
At dinner to-day there was an attempt made by two very clever men to place Theodore Hook above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might against both. It seems to me that a mind must be strangely warped that could ever place on a par two men with aspirations and purposes so different, whether we consider them merely as individuals, or called before the bar of the public as writers. I do not take to Sydney Smith personally, because my nature feels the want of the artistic and imaginative in his nature; but see what he has done for humanity, for society, for liberty, for truth,—for us women! What has Theodore Hook done that has not perished with him? Even as wits—and I have been in company with both—I could not compare them; but they say the wit of Theodore Hook was only fitted for the company of men—the strongest proof that it was not genuine of its kind, that when most bearable, it was most superficial. I set aside the other obvious inference, that it required to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest, grossest kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond.
It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after leaving the society of Sydney Smith you only remembered how much you had laughed, not the good things at which you had laughed. Few men—wits by profession—ever said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith.