Heine, "Lady Macbeth"

An essay by this German poet on one of the most exquisite literary works known to man. You can read the original here.

From among the actually historical dramas I turn to those tragedies whose tales are either purely contrived or hewn from old Sagas and narratives. Macbeth transports us to these compositions in which Shakespeare's great genius may unfold his wings most pertly and freely. The contents are borrowed from an old legend; they do not belong to history. Nevertheless the play makes some claim to historical beliefs since in it the forebear of the Royal House of England played a role. Macbeth was staged during the reign of King James the First, who is famously said to be descended from the Scotsman Banquo. In this regard the poet also wove into his drama a few prophecies about the reigning dynasty.       

Macbeth is a favorite of critics who see it as an opportunity to promote as widely as possible their own views about the the ancient "drama of fate," in comparison with the concept of fate possessed by modern playwrights. On this subject I will allow myself only a passing remark.

Shakespeare's idea of fate is different from the idea of fate in ancient times in the same way that the soothsayer women, who meet Macbeth in the old Nordic legend with prophecies of the crown, differ from any sisterhood of witches one sees in Shakespeare's tragedies. These wondrous women in the Nordic legend are apparently Valkyries, frightful goddesses of the air who hover above the battlefields, decide on victory or defeat, and can be seen as the actual levers of human fate when the latter were initially dependent on the outcome of sword fights. Shakespeare transformed them into trouble-making witches, stripping away all the awesome grace of Nordic sorcery. He made them into androgynous miscreations who knew how to summon monstrous phantoms and fomented decay out of malicious glee or as bidden by Hell itself. They may be but the servants of Evil, yet whoever allows himself to be fooled by their words will be destroyed in body and soul. Shakespeare thus translated the old pagan goddesses of fate and their venerable magic into Christian terms, and the downfall of his hero is therefore no longer something predetermined and necessary but something as avoidable as ancient fate. Yet it is indeed the consequence of the temptations of Hell that so knows how to entrap the human heart with its most intricate nets. Macbeth falls under the power of Satan, the primordial Evil.

It is interesting to compare Shakespeare's witches to the witches of other English poets. One notices that Shakespeare cannot quite free himself from the old pagan point of view, and his coven of sisters is therefore noticeably more grandiose and respectable than the witches of Middleton who possess a more distinctly evil hag nature and play petty tricks. They also only damage the body: they have little sway over the spirit and can do no more than incrust our hearts with jealousy, resentment, prurience and suchlike leprosies of feeling.

The reputation of Lady Macbeth, whom one had thought a very evil person for two centuries now, has improved in Germany the last twelve years to her benefit. The pious Franz Horn, as it were, made the remark in the Brockhausen daily that the poor lady had been hitherto wholly misunderstood, that she truly loved her husband, and that all in all she possessed a lovable disposition. This opinion Mr. Ludwig Tieck then sought to buttress with all his science, erudition, and philosophical depth.  And it did not take long for us to behold Madame Stich upon the royal stage in the role of Lady Macbeth cooing like a turtle dove, so that no heart in Berlin could resist these tender tones and many a lovely eye was overcome with tears upon seeing the good Macbeth. This happened, as mentioned, about twelve years ago, in that gentle time of restoration where we had so much love within us. Since then bankruptcy has spread, and if many crowned persons do not enjoy our effusive love, then the guilt lies with those people like the Queen of Scotland who during this same restoration period thoroughly exploited our hearts.   

Whether Germany still advocates such amiability towards the aforementioned lady, I cannot say. Since the July Revolution our views on many matters have changed, and perhaps even in Berlin one may come to see that the good Macbeth was a rather foul beast.

Some Recollections of Mortality

We had been excited in the highest degree by seeing the Custodians pull off their coats and tuck up their shirt-sleeves, as the procession came along. It looked so interestingly like business.

                                                                                              Charles Dickens

One spring day and evening in New York twenty years ago I happened to watch, at intermittent points, the television news (what this author claims "tells no more than the survival of greed and fear and pain and hate"). Three white men, bearded and stout, were leaning against a vehicle surrounded by reporters, cameramen and, as it turned out, forces unsympathetic to their cause. Their cause, as it were, appeared to be nothing more than mere survival. They had been riddled with lead, not in any critical areas yet enough to stymie flight, and they pleaded with the camera and anyone to whom the camera dispensed its images to have pity on them. Should they be pitied because their cause is just or simply because without medical attention they will not live more than twenty-four hours? One of the three men, the broadest of chest, spoke loudly and with a Germanic accent, and the casual observer could not help but ask where all this was taking place. He spoke and the camera decided to listen for a minute or two, and then other events of the days required other cameras and other pleas. When, hours later, we returned to the three wounded soldiers – they were mercenaries in a pro-Apartheid South African militia – there was nothing more to hear or sense. They leaned motionlessly on the tires of their jeep, ambushed on the outskirts of this desert and the camera found them all quiet and cooperative. I asked myself and my uncle sitting next to me whether they were still alive and he responded with three words: "They look dead." There was no other confirmation, no voiceover from the camera which surveyed their bodies, no statement of anguish or regret; these were contract killers who had known that they would probably die pursuing their odious profession. We were not expected to pity but to observe them, gaze upon them, and, as it stated in this essay, "look at something that could not return a look."

Perhaps not surprisingly, our narrator is British and the field of his investigation French; death, after all, is a foreign affair. In the first paragraph, he saunters out at four o'clock in the morning – when nothing but birds and the most debauched of Paris's nightcrawlers are out and about – only to end up, a few hours later, at the far end of the plaza before Notre Dame. It is here that he beholds "an airy procession coming round," which he mistakes for "a marriage in Blouse-life, or a Christening, or some other domestic festivity," yet which happens to be the funeral march of an old man. He ponders how we can insouciantly look upon the lot of a stranger and speculate as to the reasons for his demise. The ideas that surface are not among the most pleasant:

An old man was not much: moreover, we could have wished he had been killed by human agency – his own, or somebody else's: the latter, preferable – but our comfort was, that he had nothing about him to lend to his identification, and that his people must seek him here. Perhaps they were waiting dinner for him right now? We liked that. Such of us as had pocket-handkerchiefs took a slow intense protracted wipe at our noses, and then crammed our handkerchiefs into the breast of our blouses.

His death may not be tragic; it may in fact be just as commonplace as his life. A wonderful passage follows between a pair of creaking hinges in which the custodian to the funeral,  a "tall and sallow Mason," reminds the crowd of onlookers about the procedures necessary so that this man, unknown to most if not all of them, may enjoy full burial rites in accordance with the lay tradition. 

The scene is the first of three glimpses at death: an old man who passed after a long life; an unknown thirty-year-old woman found dead on the street; and then the narrator's participation as a juror in the inquest of the death of a child. All three stations in life – thirty being roughly halfway through our existence according to life expectancy of the mid-nineteenth-century – are accounted for, as are three very different ways to look at what may happen to us when our biological systems fail and end. In the case of the young child who may or may not have been done away with by his mother, the courtroom's suspicious faces and baleful implications are not kind to the accused:

The miserable young creature who had given birth to this child within a very few days, and who had cleaned the cold wet door-steps immediately afterwards, was brought before us when we resumed our horse-hair chairs, and was present during the proceedings. She had a horse-hair chair herself, being very weak and ill; and I remember how she turned to the unsympathetic nurse who attended her, and who might have been the figurehead of a pauper-ship, and how she hid her face and sobs and tears upon that wooden shoulder.  

Despite her posturings and testimony, the woman was convicted although "her sentence was lenient, and her history and conduct proved that it was right." Her child had barely tasted life, and her responsibility for its well-being was never quite bereft of doubts about her ability and desire to be a good mother. Thus the one who is to bestow life upon her child cannot bring herself to accept the commitment she has entered into, leaving her child from her inception already in the dark and thorned arms of death.

For those unaware of Dickens's contributions as an essayist – he is one of the finest in the English language – look no further than this succulent collection. The pieces range from odd piles of observations on life's minutia to short and modest tracts on more profound matters, and they are unequivocally a rousing success. Dickens has a love for Paris betrayed only by his greater endearment to certain facets of his homeland, and his feelings are evident in the detail which he proffers on death in its various guises. He wonders aloud "whether it is positively in the essence and nature of things, as a certain school of Britons would seem to think it, that a Capital must be ensnared and enslaved before it can be made beautiful" (we would do well to apply this credo to our own daily routines). He is also puzzled by the inquest, considering that the truth might never be fully revealed, attributing all of this to his own ingenuousness:

The thing happened, say five-and-twenty years ago. I was a modest young uncommercial then, and timid and inexperienced. Many suns and winds have browned me in the line, but those were my pale days.

And his brown skin will one day become pale and sallow like that of the pallbearer and custodian, as we too become greyer and night gains in its darkness.

Christianity and Rationalism

More than a few modern minds have come to the conclusion that belief – and belief's ideal manifestation, faith – could not really be anything more than a neurological delusion of the weak. You will hear these people (they are sometimes loud, especially when confederates lurk nearby) mocking temples and places of worship as dens of ignorance and fear. Those who believe are foolish, backward, and scared of modern science – as if one could really be scared of a movement that spends its time annihilating itself; those who do not believe are brave, intelligent, and progressive. Why do we worship the Cross? Because we are subliminally re-enacting some pagan ritual of the Winter Solstice. Why do we wish to protect the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden? Because such was the hopeful superstition of primitive tribes who did not understand that our world was one of strife and oneupmanship, and we were all fashioned to outdo one another, one long chain of death in which the last to perish will be the most perfect being the world will ever see. Readers of these pages know how I feel about such garrulous twaddle, as morally disgusting as it is uninformed. And readers also know that there has probably been no mind as sprightly or brilliant in the refutation of such nonsense as this author, which brings us to one of his most magnificent short works. 

One consistent myth about Christianity is the notion that Christians are not allowed to enjoy life to its hilt. Christ, we are told, never laughed; the Devil, on the other hand, is often portrayed as cackling in some dark corner or fornicating in ecstasy with as many partners as can be squeezed into one mind's panorama. Laughter and enjoyment, carnal or otherwise, are the marks unique to the Evil One, which anyone of even middling intelligence will tell you simply cannot be. The conclusion? Both Christ and Devil are figments of a primitive imagination shackled to black-and-white opposites and allegorical truths. To control society's natural whims to make merry and engage in salacious activity, Christians have erected their temples to solemn abstinence and asked the same of all their priests. Worship or be damned; fear of fun; laughter is the keepsake of the flagitious – many a motto could be generated along these lines. Yet according to Chesterton, such an understanding stands Christian truth on its happy head:

The Secularist says that Christianity has been a gloomy and ascetic thing, and points to the procession of austere or ferocious saints who have given up home and happiness and macerated health and sex. But it never seems to occur to him that the very oddity and completeness of the men's surrender make it look very much as if there were really something actual and solid in the thing for which they sold themselves. They gave up all human experiences for the sake of one superhuman experience. They may have been wicked, but it looks as if there were such an experience. It is perfectly tenable that this experience is as dangerous and selfish a thing as drink. A man who goes ragged and homeless in order to see visions may be as repellent and immoral as a man who goes ragged and homeless in order to drink brandy. That is a quite reasonable position. But what is manifestly not a reasonable position what would be, in fact not far from being an insane position, would be to say that the raggedness of the man, and the homelessness of the man, and the stupefied degradation of the man proved that there was no such thing as brandy.

We are reminded here of Chesterton's definition of marriage – which involves forsaking all the women of the world for one woman, and, of course, considering yourself the victor – but something else is worth mentioning. The arrogance of the modern mind steeped in its fossils and galaxies is the claim that our forefathers were bound together in falsehoods. True, Chesterton quips, we may now possess such vital knowledge as "the four-hundredth accurate origin of protoplasm," but such information does not really mean much to anyone except the protoplasm and its conqueror. That so many people believed in something they could not see or touch, that had no mathematical formula or shape, that provided us with everything in the way of hope but left us with nothing in the way of proof – all this is used by Christianity's enemies to denounce it as a fraud. And it can be used without changing a syllable by Christians who proclaim it to be our Salvation.

One by one, the most common complaints are summoned. Christianity has led to endless 'wars and persecution,' but no mention is made of how much war and persecution has been undertaken solely for the wealth and power of a greedy monarch or a wicked prince. Nowadays, we do not have really have many kings in gene and lineage; their fiefs have been usurped by the economic elite whose lavish and unrepentant greed is so eerily reminiscent of the decadence of pre-Revolutionary France that one wonders why we do not simply commit them all to a bloody end. Since the European-based wars of the twentieth century demonstrated how atheism and political doctrine, when misapplied, can be just as wicked as any religious fervor, modern minds have relinquished this territory of debate. Instead, they have marched on to the theory that because Judaism and then Christianity (and, as it were, Islam) were local phenomena, they must have simply been expansions of pagan expression. Nothing, we are told, could be further from the truth:

For if there really are some other and higher beings than ourselves, and if they in some strange ways, at some emotional crisis, really revealed themselves to rude poets or dreamers in very simple times, that the rude people should regard the revelation as local, and connect it with the particular hill or river where it happened, seems to me exactly what any reasonable human being would expect. It has a far more credible look than if they had talked cosmic philosophy from the beginning. If they had, I should have suspected "priestcraft" and forgeries and third-century Gnosticism. If there be such a being as God, and He can speak to a child, and if God spoke to a child in the garden the child would, of course, say that God lived in the garden. I should not think it any less likely to be true for that. If the child said: "God is everywhere: an impalpable essence pervading and supporting all constituents of the Cosmos alike" – if, I say, the infant addressed me in the above terms, I should think he was much more likely to have been with the governess than with God.

We still adhere to such a paradigm when we examine an allegedly haunted house or sacred site (the fact that many of these latter-day spooks turn out to be hoaxes lies more with the investigators than the investigated), but this is yet another example of modernity's insufferable egocentrism. How could God, should He at all exist, appear to some simple shepherd and not to the head of a philosophy department, someone, in other words, who would know what to do with Him? Perhaps because although philosophy departments may know how to do certain things, confronting things that they cannot explain through their philosophies has never been one of them. Belief starts in the mind of a single person, who finds it rather amazing that someone else who has had a very different life believes in precisely the same thing – but I think here we are getting far too ecumenical for modern tastes.     

Bookworms often daydream as to which author they would select if stranded on a desert island (never mind that desert islands do not tend to promote literary pursuits), and I wonder whether I wouldn't choose Chesterton. In the history of English literature, which should without fear of perjury be considered mankind's most glorious tradition after this one, there may be no one as talented or consistently accurate. His accomplishments are even more impressive in view of his prodigious output, and perhaps the one book that does not enthrall the reader is the one book that needn't have been written, since a writer's true autobiography is necessarily the sum of his works. Chesterton, like all great geniuses, is at his best when he can refract his wisdom through something other than himself – be that subject a fictional plot, a political debate, a book review, or an essay on why he believes that we are immortal. And if eternal life remains our most irrational thought, a rationalist would then conclude that we are all merely at various stages of pre-death. And if that doesn't make sense to you, then Christianity's nonsense has never seemed more sensible.   

Pasternak, "Paul-Marie Verlaine"

An essay about this French poet by this Russian man of letters.  You can read the original in this collection.

One hundred years ago, on the 30th of March, 1844, in the city of Metz, the great lyric poet of France Paul Verlaine was born.  How can he interest us now, in our fiery days, amidst our distinct lack of humor and in light of our stunning victory?

He bequeathed a brilliant record of what he saw and experienced, similar in spirit and expression to the later works of Blok, Rilke, Ibsen, Chekhov, and other modern writers, yet connected in places by a deep kinship with the newest wave of impressionist painting in France, the Scandinavian countries, and Russia.

These artists were surrounded by a new urban reality quite different than that of Pushkin, Mérimée, and Stendhal.  The sun was setting on the nineteenth century and it drifted to its end with all its whims intact, the high-handedness of its industry, its monetary storms, and a society composed of victims and mischievous children.  The streets had just been paved with asphalt and lit by gas.  There factories took hold and grew like mushrooms just like the excessive spread of daily papers.   Railways enjoyed enough expansion to become a part of every child's existence, the only difference being whether he spent his childhood years speeding by a sleeping town on such a train, or whether such night trains sped by the town's outskirts of his own impoverished childhood.

On this newly lit street the shadows did not lie the way they did in Balzac's time, and these streets were walked in a new way; we wished to draw them in this same new way, in accordance with nature.  The main novelties of this street were not, however, the lamps or the telegraph poles, but the vortex of an egoistic element which bore with it the clarity of an autumnal wind and chased away poverty, tuberculosis, prostitution, and other niceties of that era like leaves off a sidewalk.  This vortex caught everyone's eye and became the center of the picture.  With its gust the labor movement moved into its cognitive phase.  Its breath in particular provided the viewpoint of a group of new artists.

They wrote in smears and dots, in hints and half-tones, not because they wanted to do so or that they were symbolists.  Reality for a symbolist was that dimension in which everything was in transition and development; this reality in its entirety meant, if not comprised something, as well as served if not fulfilled a symptom and a sign.  Everything was mixed and jumbled, old and new, the Church, the village, the city, and the people.  Everything was a spinning whirlpool of conventions, between the absoluteness of what remained and what had yet to be achieved, that distant presentiment of the century's most important happening – socialism – and its actual embodiment, the Russian Revolution.

And just as Blok the realist provided us with an elevated picture of Petersburg singular in its symbolic gleam, so too did Verlaine the realist, in his impermissibly personal confessions, play the main role for that time and place from where his fall and repentance would arise.

Verlaine was the son of a lieutenant who would die young.  The lieutenant was his mother's favorite as well as the favorite of all the estate's servant women, and thus Verlaine was sent at the age of four from the provinces to Paris to an exclusive institute of learning.  There is something akin to Lermontov's life in his dove-like cleanliness begotten from the circle of women, as well as in his subsequent fate among his debauched Parisian comrades.  Upon finishing school he became an official at city hall.  The events of 1870 led to his becoming a militiaman amidst the Parisian fortifications; he got married; an uprising broke out; he took part in the tasks of the Commune by working in printing; and once order had been restored, he was discharged.  It was then that he began to drink.  And fate sent him an evil genius in the form of a freak of immense talent, however surly, the eccentric adolescent poet Arthur Rimbaud.

He himself dug up this "novice" in Charleroi and summoned him in writing to Paris.  Once Rimbaud moved in with the Verlaines, their normal life came to an end, and Verlaine's subsequent existence was drowned in the tears of his wife and child.  With Verlaine's family abandoned for good, Rimbaud and Verlaine began their wanderings on the longer roads of France and Belgium in a mutual haze of alcohol, leading them to London and semi-starvation where they did menial work to stay alive, to brawling in Stuttgart, and to prisons and hospitals.

Finally, in Brussels, after a terrible row, Verlaine raced after the absconded Rimbaud and fired twice, wounding him.  Verlaine was then arrested and sentenced to a two-year prison term in Mons. 

After all this Rimbaud took off for Africa to fight for the new territories of Menelik II of Ethiopia, and came into the King's service.  Meanwhile, in prison, Verlaine would write one of his greatest books.

He died in the winter of 1896, not having added anything astonishing to his long-held fame and surrounded by the reverent attention of some youths and admirers.

Verlaine began to write quite early on.  The Poèmes saturniens of his first book were written when he was still in high school.  His deceptive poetry, like the titles of some of his books such as Romances sans paroles (a rather impudent term for the production of literature), provokes false notions of aesthetics.  One might have thought that the disregard for style with which he named his works was imbued with a desire for a pre-verbal "musicality" (something few if any understand), and that he is sacrificing the logical and visual aspects of poetry in favor of its sound.  This is not so; quite the opposite, in fact.  Like any great artist he needed "not words, but deeds," even from the art of words; that is, he wanted poetry to contain the actually experienced or witnessed truth of the observer.

This is precisely what he states in his brilliant work "Art poétique," incorrectly having become the manifesto of both Zaum and "melodiousness":

Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie             (You would do well, in thrall's ado,)
De rendre un peu la Rime assagie.         (To give your rhymes a conscience, too.)

And then later:

Que ton vers soit la chose envolée        (May your verse be that thing in flight)
Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une âme en allée    (We see depart a soul so light,)
Vers d'autres cieux à d'autres amours.  (Towards other skies and other loves.)

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure      (May your verse be that fortune pure,)
Eparse au vent crispé du matin              (Strewn tense against the morning wind)
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym...   (On which shall bloom both thyme and mint,)
Et tout le reste est littérature.               (And all the rest is literature.) 

Verlaine had the right to speak in this way.  He was able in his poetry to imitate bells, seize and augment the scents of the prevailing flora of his homeland, successfully mimic birds, and reproduce in his works all the flows of silence, internal and external, from winter's starry wordlessness to summer's torpor during a hot sunny midday.  He like no one else expressed the long, engulfing and irrepressible pain of lost possession, be it the loss of a god who was and then died, a woman who changed her mind, a place which became dearer than life itself but which had to be forsaken, or the loss of peace.

Who would one have to be to imagine a great and defeated artist as a spiritual crumb, a spoiled child who doesn't know what he's creating.  Our notions likewise underestimate the eagle-like sobriety of Blok, his historical tact, his feelings of earthly pertinence, inseparable from genius.  No, Verlaine knew perfectly well what he needed and what French poetry lacked in order to convey this new vortex present in the soul and in the city I previously mentioned.  And at any stage of drunkenness or mischief-induced scribbling, having expanded the sensation to the desired limit and led his thoughts into sublime clarity, Verlaine granted the language in which he wrote that boundless freedom which was his discovery in lyric poetry and which can be found only in the novels and plays of the masters of prose dialogue.  Parisian speech and cadence in all its untouchable and captivating keenness flew in from the street and slipped in its entirety into every line without the slightest crack, like the melodic material for all that was to be constructed thereafter.  This progressive ease is the finest thing about Verlaine.  Idiomatic French was impossible for him to shed.  He wrote not in words but in entire locutions, without shattering or transposing them.

Many things are simple and natural, if not all things; and yet they are simple only at their initial level, when they remain a matter of one's conscience, and one wonders only whether they are truly simple or whether one has misinterpreted them.  Such simplicity is an uncreative quantity and bears no relationship whatsoever to art.  What we are talking about is idealistic and endless simplicity, and Verlaine was simple in precisely this regard.  In comparison to naturalness, M. Verlaine is unexpectedly natural and does not give any ground: in colloquial parlance we would say that Verlaine is supernaturally natural, that is, he is simple not so that we might believe him, but so that the voice of life roaring out from within him might not be hampered in any way.  And this is all, as it were, that we can say given our limitations of time and space.

Pascal, "Faiblesse de l’homme"

An essay ("Man's weakness") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

It is surprising to see how each of us remains unsurprised by his own weakness.  We act in all seriousness, each in pursuit of his own lot in life, not because it is actually worth pursuing as fashion suggests, but as if we knew for certain where reason and justice lay.  Along this path we will be disappointed; and by dint of some pleasant humility we will believe it is our fault, and not owing to the methods of which we have always boasted.  How good that there exist in our world so many people of this kind, if but to show us that man is quite capable of more extravagant opinions.  Why?  Because man is capable of believing himself free from this natural and inevitable weakness, and of believing that, on the contrary, he basks in the warmth of natural wisdom. 

The weakness of man's reason seems more prevalent in those who do not know such weakness than in those who do.  

One cannot exercise good judgment if one is too young; the same can be said if one is too old.  If one does not think enough, or if one thinks all too much, one becomes stubborn and unable to find the truth.  If one judges one's work immediately after having completed it, one will be far too biased.  If too long a time has passed, that same work will never be revisited.  There is but one indivisible point that remains the true location whence to gaze upon a painting, all other points being too near, too far, too high, or too low.  Such a perspective is determined during the very act of painting, yet within the truth and morality of this same determination.       

Error's willing partner, which we may term imagination and opinion, is even more deceitful than is her habit.  For if she is deemed incapable of a lie, so then will she become the infallible barometer of truth.  Yet being more often false, she will reveal no mark of her quality, marking in the same manner both the false and the true.  

This splendid power, enemy of reason, one who enjoys controlling and dominating her foe if only to demonstrate such an ability in all matters, has established a second nature within man.  She has her happy and her unhappy souls; her healthy and her unhealthy; her rich and her poor; her madmen and her sane.  And yet nothing causes us greater vexation than to see her fill her hosts with a satisfaction far more substantial and whole than reason might provide.  The talented, as it were, take a certain enjoyment in themselves which the prudent could not possibly experience.  They regard others with a majestic sway.  They argue with confidence and audacity, while others resort to fear and defiance.  And this joyousness of countenance often grants them an advantage in the opinion of onlookers.  So many imaginary sages gain the favor of judges of a kindred nature.  This splendid power cannot make madmen sane, but she can indeed make them happy, in contrast to reason, who can only make its friends miserable.  One showers them in glory; the other covers them in shame.

Who dispenses reputation?  Who bestows respect and veneration upon people, works, and historical figures, if not opinion?  How insufficient would all the riches of the earth be without opinion's satisfaction?  

Opinion has a hold on everything.  She creates beauty, she creates justice; and she creates happiness, the pinnacle of this world.  I wholeheartedly would like to see that Italian book, of which I know but the title, a title which suits it alone: Della opinione Regina del mundo.  I would subscribe to the book's teachings, apart from anything evil, should there be any, without even knowing them.  

In changing climates, one will notice almost nothing just or unjust which does not change in quality.  Moving three degrees of elevation north changes the jurisprudence entirely.  A meridian decides the truth, as a few years may decide possession.  Basic laws change.  Rights have their eras.  Satisfactory or pleasing justice determined merely by a river or a mountain border!  Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, falsehood beyond them.     

The art of wreaking havoc in a state involves shaking up established customs and penetrating to their very source to expose the flaw in authority and justice.  One must, it is said, recur to those basic and primitive laws of the state which some unjust custom has abolished.  This is a high-stakes game.  Nothing in this equation will be fair.  Nevertheless, the people will lend an ear to such discussions because the yoke is shaken as soon as the people are acknowledged, with major figures profiting from such discussions to the people's detriment, as well as to the detriment of those curious examiners of accepted customs.  Yet, by a contrary shortcoming, men sometimes believe themselves capable of acting justly in all matters which are not unprecedented.   

You can place the greatest philosopher in the world on a plank so large that he may walk as he would ordinarily; yet if below him lies a precipice, no matter how much his reason may convince him of his safety, his imagination will prevail.  Many could not even tolerate the thought without turning pale and sweaty – I do not wish to enumerate the effects.  Who knows what possesses those who become unhinged upon the sight of cats, rats, or the crushing of a piece of charcoal?     

Would you not say that the magistrate whose venerable old age demands respect from everyone is governed by pure and sublime reason, and that he judges things by their nature without wallowing in those vain circumstances that only afflict the imagination of the weak?  Watch him now as he enters the room where he is to dispense justice.  There he sits, ready to listen, in exemplary solemnity.  Now if an attorney appeared, and nature were to bless this attorney with a hoarse voice and an odd patch of face which a barber might have badly shaven, and on which, furthermore, chance had put splotches against his beard, I would bet on the loss of the magistrate's solemnity. 

The mind of the greatest man in the world is not sufficiently independent for him not to be troubled by the slightest racket in his immediate surroundings.  The boom of a cannon is not needed to interfere with his thoughts; the noise from a weathervane or pulley will suffice.  Do not be surprised if at such a time reason fails him.  A fly buzzing in his ear is enough to make him incapable of providing good advice.  If you want him to be able to find the truth, chase away the animal who holds his reason in check and troubles this powerful intelligence which governs cities and kingdoms.

We have another principle of error, the knowledge of illnesses.  These spoil our judgment and our sense.  And if great illnesses alter our judgement perceptibly, I do not doubt the smaller ones make a proportionate impression.

Our own interest is still a marvelous means for us gladly to gouge our eyes out.  Affection and hate change justice.  In fact, to what degree does an attorney, well-paid in advance, find the cause he pleads any more just?  Yet by another oddity of the human mind, I know of some who, so as not to fall into such traps of vanity, were in contrary bias the most unjust people in the world.  The sure way to lose a very just case was to have it referred to them by their closest relatives.  

Justice and truth are two points so subtle that our instruments are too blunt to touch upon them exactly.  If they manage to do so they, in so doing, blunt the tip and press down more on the false than on the true.  

Old impressions are not the only ones capable of hurting us.  The charms of novelty possess the same power.  Hence come all the disputes of men who reproach one another, or follow the false impressions of their childhood, or run recklessly in pursuit of new things.

To whom then belongs the happy medium?  To that person who appears to have it, and who can prove it.  There is no natural principle as to what it may be (even from childhood) which we could not dismiss as a false impression, be it inculcated or sensed.  One side will say: just because you believed since childhood that a trunk was empty when you saw nothing there, you believed that this emptiness was possible.  This is an illusion of your senses reinforced by custom which science will then have to correct.  Others will say: on the contrary, because you were taught in school that there is nothing empty, your common sense has been corrupted.  And your common sense understood things so clearly before this bad impression that we now need to correct it by recurring to your first nature.  Which has now triumphed, sense or indoctrination?  

All of man's occupations are to have some good in them; and the title by which they possess this good is merely in the imagination of those who created laws.  There is no force to possess the good for certain: a thousand accidents deprive them of it.  It is the same with science: illness removes it from us.

Without grace, man is therefore a subject full of indelible errors.  Nothing will show him the truth: everything will abuse him.  The two principles of truth, reason and sense, apart from the fact that they often want for sincerity, will mutually abuse one another.  Senses will abuse reason through false appearances and will, in turn, be subjected to this same deception as reason will have its revenge.  The passions of the soul will trouble the senses and create upsetting impressions.  They will lie, and again and again they will deceive.  

What are our natural principles if not our accustomed principles?  In children, those they received after the custom of their parents, like hunting in animals.

A different custom will yield different natural principles.  This we can see in our own experience.  And if there are some indelible elements to custom, there are also indelible customs within nature.  This will depend on disposition.

Fathers fear that children's natural love will dissipate.  What then is this nature subject to dissipation?  Custom is second nature, one that destroys the first nature.  Why is custom not natural?  I fear somehow that this nature might itself be a first custom, like custom is a second nature.