This is sheer nonsense. Joy smiles in good earnest, and many an aching heart knows too well the deep truth of distress.
The fervent eloquence of true piety springs from conviction, and reaches the heart; but we have sometimes listened to a dull sermon, which proceeded from weariness more than from zeal, and belonged to ennui more than to the stirring action of eloquent religion. The lawyer, too, is sometimes overborne in his plea by disgust with his work, and in his tiresome repetitions you may plainly see how he loathes—
"To drudge for the dregs of men,
And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen."
The life of Napoleon, in its busiest period, presents a remarkable instance of ennui. While the allies were collecting around him in their utmost strength, he was himself wavering in his purposes, and reluctant to decide on the retreat to Leipsic. Strange, that at such a time he should have given way to an overwhelming and almost childish languor. Yet an eyewitness relates, "I have seen him at that time, seated on a sofa, beside a table on which lay his charts, totally unemployed, unless in scribbling mechanically large letters on a sheet of white paper." Such was the power of ennui over Napoleon, at a time, when, in his own language, nothing but a thunderbolt could save him.
It is dangerous for a man of superior ability to find himself thrown upon the world without some regular employment. The restlessness inherent in genius being thus left undirected by any permanent influence, frames for itself occupations out of accidents. Moral integrity sometimes falls a prey to this want of fixed pursuits; and the man who receives his direction in active life from the fortuitous impulse of circumstances, will be very apt to receive his principles likewise from chance. Genius, under such guidance, attains no noble ends; but resembles rather a copious spring, conveyed in a falling aqueduct; where the waters continually escape through the frequent crevices, and waste themselves ineffectually on their passage. The law of nature is here, as elsewhere, binding; and no powerful results ever ensue from the trivial exercise of high endowments. The finest mind, when thus destitute of a fixed purpose, passes away without leaving permanent traces of its existence; losing its energy by turning aside from its course, it becomes as harmless and inefficient as the lightning, which, of itself irresistible, may yet be rendered powerless by a slight conductor.
These remarks apply perhaps in some measure even to Leibnitz, whose sublime intelligence and mental activity were the wonder of his age. He attained a celebrity of reputation, but hardly a contented spirit; at times he descended to the consideration of magnitudes infinitely small, and at times rose to the belief that he heard the universal harmony of nature; for years he was devoted to illustrating the antiquities of the family of a petty prince; and then again he assumed the sublime office of defending the perfections of Providence. Yet with all this variety of pursuit, the great philosopher was hardly to be called a happy man; and it almost fills us with melancholy to find, that the very theologian who would have proved this to be absolutely the best of all possible worlds, died after all of chagrin.
Yet the name of Leibnitz is one which should rather excite unmingled admiration; for the rich endowments of Heaven distinguished him as one of the most favoured in that intellectual superiority which is the choicest gift of God. Our subject is more fully illustrated in the case of a less gifted, though a notorious man; one whose qualities have been recently held up to admiration, yet for whom we find it impossible to conceive sentiments of respect. We mean Lord Bolingbroke.
His talents as a writer have secured to him a very distinguished place in the literature of England; and his political services, during the reign of Queen Anne, have rendered him illustrious in English history. But though he was possessed of wit, eloquence, family, wealth, and opportunity, he never displayed true dignity of character, nor real greatness of soul. He seemed to have no fixed principles of action; and to have loved contest more than victory. Wherever there was strife, there you might surely expect to meet St. John; and his public career almost justifies the inference, that apostacy (if indeed a man who has no principles can be called an apostate) would have seemed to him, after his defeat, a moderate price for permission to appear again in the lists. But as he had always coveted power with an insatiable avidity, he never could rest long enough to acquire it. On the stormy sea of public life, he was for ever struggling to be on the topmost wave; but the waves receded as fast as he advanced; and fate seemed to have destined him to waste his life in fruitless efforts and as fruitless changes.
In early life he sought distinction by his debaucheries; and from the accounts of his biographer, it would seem, that he succeeded in becoming the most daring profligate in London. Tired of the excess of dissipation, he attempted the career of politics, and found his way into Parliament under the auspices of the whigs. When politics failed, he put on the mask of a metaphysician. Tired of that costume, he next attempted to play the farmer. Dissatisfied with farming, he wrote political pamphlets. Still discontented with his condition in the world, he strove to undermine the basis of religion.
He began public life as a whig; but as the tories were in the ascendant, he rapidly ripened into a tory; he ended his political career by deserting the tories and avowing the doctrines of staunch and uncompromising whigs. He tried libertinism, married life, politics, power, exile, restoration, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the city, the country, foreign travel, study, authorship, metaphysics, infidelity, farming, treason, submission, dereliction,—but ennui held him with a firm grasp all the while, and it was only in the grave that he ceased from troubling.