LETTER XXI. MELANCHOLY.

There is no pleasure of earth but, as soon as it becomes vivid, has a tendency to tinge itself with melancholy. The birth of an infant, the convalescence of a father, the return of a friend who has been long absent, fill the eyes with tears. Nature has thus chosen to mingle the colors of joy and sadness. Having destined us to experience each of the emotions in turn, she has[149] ordained that the shades of transition should melt into each other.[51]

The dearest remembrances are those which are accompanied by tenderness of heart. The sports of infancy, the first loves, the perils we have forever escaped, and the faults we have learned to repair, are of the number. Whoever will recollect the happiest moments of his life, will find them to have produced this emotion.

But there are two kinds of melancholy; or rather, we must not confound melancholy with gloom. Will the slight tenderness of sorrow which imparts a new charm to the fugitive pleasures of existence be inspired by those gloomy books which this age has attempted to bring into fashion; by those terrific and wild dreams in which hideous personages enact revolting scenes? Modern imagination has painted melancholy a tall and unearthly spectre enveloped in a winding sheet. The real traits of her countenance are those of innocence occupied in pleasant revery; and at the same time that tears are in her eyes, a smile dwells on her lips.

It is the resort of a sterile imagination and a cold heart, to invest even the tomb with borrowed ideas of darkness; to wait for night in which to visit it; and to torment the fancy to people it with sinister phantoms. Real sensibility would not require such an effort to be awakened. It fills my mind with a pleasing sadness to wander in the church-yard, under the melancholy radiance of the moon, among monuments of white marble, and hear the night breeze sigh among the weeping willows. I am deeply affected with, here and there, a touching inscription.[52] I remember one in which a[150] father says, that he has had five children, and that here sleeps the last that remained to him for consolation. In another, a father and mother announce that their daughter died at seventeen, a victim of their weak indulgence, and of the extravagant modes of the time. This sojourn of repose, these words written in the abodes of silence, which inspire tenderness for those that are no more, and those whose treasured affection still remembers them, always penetrate the soul with an emotion not without its charms. In the view of tombs, we immediately direct our thoughts to an internal survey of ourselves. I mark out my place among the peaceful mansions. I imagine the vernal grass and flowers reviving over my place of rest. My imagination transports me to the days which I shall not see, and sounds for me the soothing dirge of the adieus of friendship pronounced over the spot where I am laid.[53]

I generally carry from my sojourn in these our last mansions, one painful sentiment. I remark that many tombs are raised by parents for their children; by husbands for their wives; by widows for their husbands. I observe that there are but few erected by children for their fathers. Perhaps it is right that love should ascend in that scale, rather than descend in the other.

Occasional visits to ruins and tombs inspire salutary melancholy. But the habit of frequently contemplating these lugubrious objects is dangerous. It blunts sensibility and creates the necessity of always requiring strong emotions. It nourishes in the soul sombre ideas which do not associate with happiness. Without doubt, there are those who are so unhappy as to long for the repose of the grave; who find solace in these gloomy[151] spectacles. Young, after having lost his only daughter, after having in vain solicited a little consecrated earth to cover the remains of the youthful victim; after being reduced to the necessity of interring the loved one with his own hands, might be tempted to fly his kind and love only night, solitude and tombs. There have been men, condemned by the award of nature, to such reverses as nourish an incurable and perpetual melancholy. Their frigid imitators, without their reason and profound feeling, in wishing to render themselves singular, become tiresome and ridiculous in their melancholy.

Writers of the most splendid genius of the age have consecrated their talents to celebrate melancholy; not that melancholy which has a smile of profound sensibility, but that which has been cradled in tombs and which holds out to us the full draught of sadness. There is something in these heart-rending scenes, these lugubrious spectacles, which the age seeks with avidity. A writer whose talent tends to render his errors seducing, has taken pleasure in viewing the christian religion as opening an inexhaustible source of melancholy. It seems to exalt his mind, most of all, when it presents itself to him under a funereal aspect.

He paints religion as born in the forests of Horeb and Sinai, forever surrounded with a formidable gloom; and offering to our adorations a God who died for men. He describes the invasion of the barbarians, the persecutions of the first believers, cloisters arising from deep and dark groves, and melancholy continually receiving new accessions from the austere rules imposed upon the pious inmates.

‘There,’ said he, ‘the tenants of these religious seclusions[152] dug their own tombs, by the light of the moon, in the cemeteries of their own cloisters. Their couch was a coffin. Some of them occasionally wandered away to sojourn among the ruins of Memphis and Babylon, striking the chords of the harp of David, surrounded by beasts of prey. Some condemned themselves to perpetual silence. Others sung a continual hymn, echoing the sighs of Job, the lamentations of Jeremiah, or the penitential songs of the prophet king. Their monasteries were built on sites the most savage, on the summits of Lebanon, in the deep forests of Gaul, or on the crags of the British shores. How sad the knell of the religious bells, heard at the noon of night, must have sounded when calling the vestals to their vigils and prayers! The sounds, as they swelled and died away, mingled the last strains of the hymns with the distant dashing of the waves. How profound must have been the meditations of the solitary who, from his grated window, indulged in revery, as his eye wandered over the illimitable sea, perhaps agitated with a tempest! What a contrast between the fury of the waves and the calm of his retreat! The expiring cries of men are heard as they dash upon the rocks at the foot of the asylum of peace. Infinity stretches out on one side of their cell; and on the other the slab of a tomb alone separates between eternity and life. All the different forms of misfortune, remembrance, manners, and the scenes of nature concurred to render the christian religion the genius of melancholy.’[53a]

Can it be thought, for a moment, possible that sighs without end, the love of deserts and the hope of the tomb are all the consolations that this divine religion is[153] calculated to bring to the heart of man? Such an error could only have had its origin in an unregulated imagination. The christian religion, though pensive and serious, is not sad. Less brilliant, less imaginative than paganism, less friendly to pleasure, she is far more favorable to happiness.

My opinion in regard to the legitimate tendency of religion, is not only different but directly opposite. A pure religion must produce tranquillity, confidence and joy. It is departure from religious views which are true and just, that is followed by a vague sadness, gloom and despondency.

These funereal and yet eloquent paintings, traced with the enthusiasm of melancholy, must have had the effect to increase the number of men of atrabilious temperament, weary of the world, and tired of themselves. Were it true that the christian religion inspired an insatiate craving for funereal reveries, far from considering it as I do, divine, I should estimate it anti-social.—The true friends of the christian religion always paint it as it is, more powerful than even human misery; giving clothing to the naked, bread to the hungry, an asylum to the sick, a peaceful home to the returning prodigal, and a mother to the orphan; wiping away the tears of innocence with a celestial hand, and filling the eyes of the culpable and contrite with tears of consolation. Let pious thankfulness and a calm courage, which even death cannot shake, environ its modest heroes. Let its martyrs be those of charity and toleration;—the protestant opening an asylum to catholic, falling under the fanatical fury of his brethren; and when bloody and impious mandates order the massacre of protestants, the catholic[154] sheltering them in his mansion. Such was the spirit of Erasmus; such, of the divine Fenelon; such, of William Penn, and a few tolerant lights that have gleamed through ages of persecution and darkness. Such are the men whose disciples we desire to multiply. Let us cease to incorporate melancholy errors and gloomy follies with the religion of peace, confidence and hope. Eloquence was imparted for a nobler use.