M. Girardin has a lecture upon suicides, in which he attacks that sentimentality—a mixture, in reality, of weakness and impatience—which in modern literature, and in modern life, often conducts to suicide. The following passage will be acknowledged to be eloquent, and even poetic, unless our translation of it shall have entirely obscured its beauty. After having described the proud and philosophical suicides of ancient Rome, he adds:—
There is another species of suicide more in credit in our days, which is rather occasioned by the weakness and impatience of men than by the violence of their passions, or the eccentricity of their philosophies. This species of suicide is so much the peculiar malady of our times, that we are tempted to think that men are now for the first time infected by it. But no; there exists a literature which has already expressed this our state of restlessness and disquietude, which has described men consuming with melancholy in the midst of riotous joys, and seeking suicide rather as the natural termination of their career than the remedy of their evils. It is the literature of the fathers of the church.
I find amongst the homilies of St Chrysostom a certain Stagyra who was possessed by a demon. To be possessed by a demon is certainly not a malady of our times; but yet we do not wander from our theme. For the demon of Stagyra—it is melancholy, despondency, or, in the much more powerful expression of the Greek, it is athumia—exhaustion of all energy, all vitality of the soul. This is the demon of Stagyra. He is one of those sick and agitated souls who think they belong to the selected portion of mankind, because they want the energy of the vulgar; who contrive for themselves pleasures and afflictions apart from the rest of the world, and who (last trait of weakness and impatience) at once despise and envy the simplicity and the calm of those whom they call little souls. Stagyra, in order to deliver his spirit from its disquietudes, had entered into a monastery; but neither there did he find the peace and lightness of heart which he craved; for man finds at first, in solitude, that only which he brings to it. Stagyra complains to the saint—and the complaint is curious, for it indicates the knowledge of a cure for the evils which torment him, and shows that Stagyra, like many other patients, had neither resolution to support his disease, nor to accept its remedy. 'You complain,' says St Chrysostom, 'that while you, with all your fasts, and vigils, and monastic austerities, have failed to appease your disquietudes, others who, like yourself, had been tormented by the demon of melancholy, while living in the midst of idle pleasures and luxurious indulgence, have found a remedy in marriage, and felt themselves cured the moment they became fathers.' A sentence this full of sound instruction. It is not, then, because life is devoid of pleasure, that men are the prey of melancholy. That demon pierced, it is true, like a gnawing worm, through all the luxuries of the Roman world; there was no resource against it, either in beautiful slaves, or Ionian dances, or magnificent repasts, or the combats of gladiators, or Milesian tales, or the voluptuous pictures which garnish the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Athumia poisoned all, and the demon possessed the voluptuary in the midst even of the debauch. But if, fatigued with these alternate pleasures and disgusts, he adopted regular and simple manners, married and had had children, then, as if by enchantment the demon quitted him. No more despondency, no more bitterness. The spirit of the possessed was revived, refreshed, renewed by the caresses of his children. There is no demon, not even the demon of melancholy, which dares to encounter the presence of a little child. There is in the innocent fresh breathing of these creatures, something mortal to evil spirits, and a cradled infant in the house is sure talisman against all demoniac possession.
What is it, in fact, which man requires, in order to escape from this athumia, this exhaustion of the heart? Hope—a future. He must have a faith in the future. This is the nourishment of his soul; without it he cannot live, he despairs and dies. Well, the very charm of children, that which has ranked them, from of old, amongst the blessings of God, is this, that they form the future of every family— that they sustain in every house that sentiment by which the soul of man lives. Children represent the future, and in a form the most joyous and attractive. It is this which constitutes their irresistible fascination—it is this which sheds around their little heads that light of happiness and joy which reflects itself on the countenances of the parents—which warms the heart—which gives to the poor the force to labour, and to the miserable the force to live. Blessed be infancy, which chases the demon!—Blessed be infancy, which keeps alive in each family the sentiment of hope, indispensable to run as the air and the light!
Amongst the faults of his contemporaries, M. Girardin remarks a disposition to materialize the expression of passion, depicting it constantly by violent physical distortions; and also, a tendency to carry that expression to the extremity of rage, where, as he finely observes, all distinction between the various passions is lost, and man deserts his rational nature.
According to the ancient classic imagination, when passion becomes excessive, the man disappears; and this, he adds, is the foundation of what we call the philosophy of the Metamorphoses of Ovid.
In the course of this censure he makes use of a common-place expression, which, we think, includes a common-place error, and therefore we pause for a moment to take notice of it. "It is the pretension of modern art," he tells us, "to say all. What then is left to the imagination of the public? It is often well to trust to the spectator to complete the idea of the poet or the statuary."
This is a mode of expression frequently made use of. Even Lessing has sanctioned it, when in his Laocoon, he speaks of "the highest expression leaving nothing to the imagination."
The leaving something to the imagination can mean this only, that the expression of the artist is suggestive, and kindles thought, and in fact conveys more than is found in its literal interpretation. Now, whatever is highest in art, and especially in poetry, is pre-eminently suggestive; and the highest expression does in fact leave most, or, in other words, suggest most, to the imagination. M. Girardin, in common with many others, speaks of this suggestive quality, the characteristic of the highest form of art, as if it were the result of a voluntary surrender of something by the poet to the reader, as if it were an act of moderation on his part. Surely the poet does not proceed on the principle of saying half, and permitting us to say the other half—out of compliment, perhaps, to our understanding, and as a little bribe to our vanity. The more vivid and powerful his expressions, the more must he leave, or rather the more must he give, indirectly as well as directly, to the imagination of the reader. He will sometimes even bestow what he himself never possessed. The great poet, in pouring out his feelings, must always give something less and something more than was in him at the time.
It has been the fashion to illustrate the principle of leaving something to the imagination, by the ancient picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, where we are told that Agamemnon, the father, was painted hiding his face in his robe. The expression of grief and horror had been given in the countenance of the other bystanders, and it was left to the imagination to divine what passion would have been seen depicted on the face of Agamemnon if that robe had been torn aside. Lessing, and after him M. Girardin, have indeed given a different account of the intention of the painter. The Greek artist, say they, sedulously avoided that distortion of features through excessive grief, which was incompatible with beauty of form. They would tone down the expression, as Lessing argues that the sculptor did in the features of Laocoon, until it became consistent with the lines of beauty. Timanthes, therefore, finding that, in order to render with fidelity the expression of Agamemnon, he must admit such a distortion of the features as would violate the rule, chose rather to veil the countenance. But we would suggest that something else must have weighed with the artist; for if it was an acknowledged principle of Greek art rather to sacrifice a portion of the passion, so to speak, than to admit a distortion of the features, why should Timanthes have felt any scruple, in this instance, in modifying the expression of the father's countenance in obedience to a known rule of art? Why should he have thought himself obliged to resort to the expedient of concealing the face?