MEDON.
Ay—"the perfumes of Paradise were poison to the Dives, and made them melancholy."[3] You pity them, and they will sneer at you. But what have we here?—"Characters of Imagination—Juliet—Viola;" are these romantic young ladies the pillars which are to sustain your moral edifice? Are they to serve as examples or as warnings for the youth of this enlightened age?
ALDA.
As warnings, of course—what else?
MEDON.
Against the dangers of romance?—but where are they? "Vraiment," as B. Constant says, "je ne vois pas qu'en fait d'enthousiasme, le feu soit à la maison." Where are they—these disciples of poetry and romance, these victims of disinterested devotion and believing truth, these unblown roses—all conscience and tenderness—whom it is so necessary to guard against too much confidence in others, and too little in themselves—where are they?
ALDA.
Wandering in the Elysian fields, I presume, with the romantic young gentlemen who are too generous, too zealous in defence of innocence, too enthusiastic in their admiration of virtue, too violent in their hatred of vice, too sincere in friendship, too faithful in love, too active and disinterested in the cause of truth—
MEDON.
Very fair! But seriously, do you think it necessary to guard young people, in this selfish and calculating age, against an excess of sentiment and imagination? Do you allow no distinction between the romance of exaggerated sentiment, and the romance of elevated thought? Do you bring cold water to quench the smouldering ashes of enthusiasm? Methinks it is rather superfluous; and that another doctrine is needed to withstand the heartless system of expediency which is the favorite philosophy of the day. The warning you speak of may be gently hinted to the few who are in danger of being misled by an excess of the generous impulses of fancy and feeling; but need hardly, I think, be proclaimed by sound of trumpet amid the mocks of the world. No, no; there are young women in these days, but there is no such thing as youth—the bloom of existence is sacrificed to a fashionable education, and where we should find the rose-buds of the spring, we see only the fullblown, flaunting, precocious roses of the hot-bed.