The practical mind can no more understand the regrets of the meditative one than a manufacturer, spending his days by choice amidst the roar of steam wheels and the ledgers of a counting-house, can understand the artist’s anguish when he is shut up in a city garret whence he cannot see a sunset or a sunrise.
‘The woes of the body, I grant, may be too much for one’s philosophy,’ the Baron was wont to say. ‘With the gout, or neuralgia, or sciatica, Seneca’s self might fail to retain serenity. But the sorrows of the emotions or of the imagination are so entirely fictitious that anyone, by the exercise of a little self-control, may put them aside completely.’
‘What! Even the losses of death?’ objected some one once.
The Baron smiled:
‘Death cannot affect you very greatly unless you have already committed an act of unwisdom—that is, have already attached yourself to some other life than your own.’
‘Then where is love?’ said his interlocutor.
‘Where it has always been,’ said Friederich Othmar, ‘chiefly in the senses partially in the imagination. When we have both the senses and the imagination under the control of our temperate judgment, it cannot disturb us seriously. In my youth, and even in my maturity,’ he continued, with complacence, ‘I have dallied with love as well as other men, but the moment that I felt that any one passion was likely to exercise undue influence upon me, I withdrew myself from it. To break a chain is difficult, but never to let it be forged is easy.’
He thought it his duty to put his young favourite on her guard against all the deceptions and delusions which the world prepares for its novices; he told her much more than her husband would have done of all the intricacies and meanings of the varied life which was about her, gave her the key to many of its secrets, and the hidden biographies of many of its personages.
‘You are in the world, you must understand the world,’ he said to her; ‘if not, it will be a mere labyrinth to you, and you will be lost in it. You need not become a mondaine with your heart, but you must become one with your head, or the mondaines will devour you. It is not necessary that you should gamble or swear or get into debts for your petticoats, as they do; but it is necessary that you should understand the society of your time. At Amyôt you may be a young saint, as heaven meant you to be, but in Paris you must be able to hold your own against those who are the reverse of saints. Otho ought to teach you all this himself, but he will not, so you must listen to me. I have not been so engrossed in the gold market all my days that I do not know la haute gomme down to the ground. In my leisure I have always gone into the world: the boudoir of a pretty woman is always much more amusing than a card-table or a pistol-gallery. L’Ecole des Femmes is the one to which every wise man goes.’
He paused, with a consciousness that he had better not pursue that theme.