Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. (The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.)
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
The ideal of friendship is to feel as one while remaining two.
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.― Mark Twain
"Enough!" he concluded at last, "you understand me, and that is the great thing. A heart like yours cannot help understanding the sufferings of another. Prince, you are the ideal of generosity; what are other men beside yourself? But you are young--accept my blessing! My principal object is to beg you to fix an hour for a most important conversation--that is my great hope, prince. My heart needs but a little friendship and sympathy, and yet I cannot always find means to satisfy it."
I felt I became a favourite in the neighbourhood. Whenever I went out, I heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with friendly smiles. To live amidst general regard, though it be but the regard of working people, is like "sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet;" serene inward feelings bud and bloom under the ray. At this period of my life, my heart far oftener swelled with thankfulness than sank with dejection: and yet, reader, to tell you all, in the midst of this calm, this useful existence--after a day passed in honourable exertion amongst my scholars, an evening spent in drawing or reading contentedly alone--I used to rush into strange dreams at night: dreams many-coloured, agitated, full of the ideal, the stirring, the stormy--dreams where, amidst unusual scenes, charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic chance, I still again and again met Mr. Rochester, always at some exciting crisis; and then the sense of being in his arms, hearing his voice, meeting his eye, touching his hand and cheek, loving him, being loved by him--the hope of passing a lifetime at his side, would be renewed, with all its first force and fire. Then I awoke. Then I recalled where I was, and how situated. Then I rose up on my curtainless bed, trembling and quivering; and then the still, dark night witnessed the convulsion of despair, and heard the burst of passion. By nine o'clock the next morning I was punctually opening the school; tranquil, settled, prepared for the steady duties of the day.
Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not very friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way. Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart.
Varvara Ardalionovna was not like her brother. She too, had passionate desires, but they were persistent rather than impetuous. Her plans were as wise as her methods of carrying them out. No doubt she also belonged to the category of ordinary people who dream of being original, but she soon discovered that she had not a grain of true originality, and she did not let it trouble her too much. Perhaps a certain kind of pride came to her help. She made her first concession to the demands of practical life with great resolution when she consented to marry Ptitsin. However, when she married she did not say to herself, "Never mind a mean action if it leads to the end in view," as her brother would certainly have said in such a case; it is quite probable that he may have said it when he expressed his elder-brotherly satisfaction at her decision. Far from this; Varvara Ardalionovna did not marry until she felt convinced that her future husband was unassuming, agreeable, almost cultured, and that nothing on earth would tempt him to a really dishonourable deed. As to small meannesses, such trifles did not trouble her. Indeed, who is free from them? It is absurd to expect the ideal! Besides, she knew that her marriage would provide a refuge for all her family. Seeing Gania unhappy, she was anxious to help him, in spite of their former disputes and misunderstandings. Ptitsin, in a friendly way, would press his brother-in-law to enter the army. "You know," he said sometimes, jokingly, "you despise generals and generaldom, but you will see that 'they' will all end by being generals in their turn. You will see it if you live long enough!"
Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes and placed his elbows upon the arms of his chair, with his finger-tips together. "The ideal reasoner," he remarked, "would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilise all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. It is not so impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this I have endeavoured in my case to do. If I remember rightly, you on one occasion, in the early days of our friendship, defined my limits in a very precise fashion."
"My dear friend, above all things I want to behave like a gentleman and to be recognized as such," the visitor began in an excess of deprecating and simple-hearted pride, typical of a poor relation. "I am poor, but ... I won't say very honest, but ... it's an axiom generally accepted in society that I am a fallen angel. I certainly can't conceive how I can ever have been an angel. If I ever was, it must have been so long ago that there's no harm in forgetting it. Now I only prize the reputation of being a gentlemanly person and live as I can, trying to make myself agreeable. I love men genuinely, I've been greatly calumniated! Here when I stay with you from time to time, my life gains a kind of reality and that's what I like most of all. You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate equations! I wander about here dreaming. I like dreaming. Besides, on earth I become superstitious. Please don't laugh, that's just what I like, to become superstitious. I adopt all your habits here: I've grown fond of going to the public baths, would you believe it? and I go and steam myself with merchants and priests. What I dream of is becoming incarnate once for all and irrevocably in the form of some merchant's wife weighing eighteen stone, and of believing all she believes. My ideal is to go to church and offer a candle in simple-hearted faith, upon my word it is. Then there would be an end to my sufferings. I like being doctored too; in the spring there was an outbreak of smallpox and I went and was vaccinated in a foundling hospital--if only you knew how I enjoyed myself that day. I subscribed ten roubles in the cause of the Slavs!... But you are not listening. Do you know, you are not at all well this evening? I know you went yesterday to that doctor ... well, what about your health? What did the doctor say?"
This prosecution finally discredited the new society. Enfantin was released in a few months, and then, accompanied by some of his followers, he went to Egypt. He stayed there two years, and might have entered the service of the viceroy if he would have professed himself, as a few of his friends did, a Mahommedan. On his return to France, a sadder and practically a wiser man, he settled down to very prosaic work. He became first a postmaster near Lyons, and in 1841 was appointed, through the influence of some of his friends who had risen to posts of power, member of a scientific commission on Algeria, which led him to engage in researches concerning North Africa and colonization in general. in 1845 he was appointed a director of the Paris & Lyons railway. Three years later he established, in conjunction with Duveyrier, a daily journal, entitled _Le Crédit_, which was discontinued in 1850. He was afterwards attached to the administration of the railway from Lyons to the Mediterranean. Father Enfantin held fast by his ideal to the end, but he had renounced the hope of giving it a local habitation and a name in the degenerate obstinate world. His personal influence over those who associated with him was immense. "He was a man of a noble presence, with finely formed and expressive features. He was gentle and insinuating in manner, and possessed a calm, graceful and winning delivery" (_Gent. Mag_., Jan. 1865). His evident sincerity, his genuine enthusiasm, gave him his marvellous ascendancy. Not a few of his disciples ranked afterwards amongst the most distinguished men of France. He died suddenly at Paris on the 1st of September 1864. Entry: ENFANTIN
Casaubon, in a letter to Scaliger, salutes that scholar as worthy to have lived at Athens with Aristophanes and Euripides--a compliment which certainly implies respect for his correspondent's powers as a peacemaker. In popular literature, too, where Aeschylus and Sophocles were as yet little known, the 16th and 17th centuries testify to the favour bestowed upon Euripides. G. Gascoigne's and Francis Kinwelmersh's _Jocasta_, played at Gray's Inn in 1566, is a literal translation of Lodovico Dolce's _Giocasta_, which derives from the _Phoenissae_, probably through the Latin translation of R. Winter (Basel, 1541). Among early French translations from Euripides may be mentioned the version of the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ by Thomas Sibilet in 1549, and that of the _Hecuba_ by Bouchetel in 1550. About a century later Racine gave the world his _Andromaque_, his _Iphigénie_ and his _Phèdre_; and many have held that, at least in the last-named of these, "the disciple of Euripides" has excelled his master. Bernhardy notices that the performance of the _Hippolytus_ at Berlin in 1851 seemed to show that, for the modern stage, the _Phèdre_ has the advantage of its Greek original. Racine's great English contemporary seems to have known and to have liked Euripides better than the other Greek tragedians. In the _Reason of Church Government_ Milton certainly speaks of "those dramatic constitutions in which Sophocles and Euripides reign"; in the preface to his own drama, again, he joins the names of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides,--"the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any." But the _Samson Agonistes_ itself clearly shows that Milton's chief model in this kind was the dramatist whom he himself has called--as if to suggest the skill of Euripides in the delineation of pathetic women--"sad Electra's poet"; and the work bears a special mark of this preference in the use of Euripidean monodies. In the second half of the 18th century such men as J.J. Winckelmann (1717-1768) and G.E. Lessing (1729-1781) gave a new life to the study of the antique. Hitherto the art of the old world had been better known through Roman than through Greek interpreters. The basis of the revived classical taste had been Latin. But now men gained a finer perception of those characteristics which belong to the Greek work of the great time, a fuller sense of the difference between the Greek and the Roman genius where each is at its best, and generally a clearer recognition of the qualities which distinguish ancient art in its highest purity from modern romantic types. Euripides now became the object of criticism from a new point of view. He was compared with Aeschylus and Sophocles as representatives of that ideal Greek tragedy which ranges with the purest type of sculpture. Thus tried, he was found wanting; and he was condemned with all the rigour of a newly illuminated zeal. B.G. Niebuhr (1776-1831) judged him harshly; but no critic approached A.W. Schlegel (1767-1845) in severity of one-sided censure. Schlegel, in fact, will scarcely allow that Euripides is tolerable except by comparison with Racine. L. Tieck (1773-1853) showed truer appreciation for a brother artist when he described the work of Euripides as the dawn of a romantic poetry haunted by dim yearnings and forebodings. Goethe--who, according to Bernhardy, knew Euripides only "at a great distance"--certainly admired him highly, and left an interesting memorial of Euripidean study in his attempted reconstruction of the lost _Phaëthon_. There are some passages in Goethe's conversations with Eckermann which form effective quotations against the Greek poet's real or supposed detractors. "To feel and respect a great personality, one must be something oneself. All those who denied the sublime to Euripides were either poor wretches incapable of comprehending such sublimity or shameless charlatans who, in their presumption, wished to make more of themselves than they were." "A poet whom Socrates called his friend, whom Aristotle lauded, whom Alexander admired, and for whom Sophocles and the city of Athens put on mourning on hearing of his death, must certainly have been some one. If a modern man like Schlegel must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought only to do it upon his knees" (J.A. Symonds, _Greek Poets_, i. 230). We yield to no one in admiration of Goethe; but we cannot think that these rather bullying utterances are favourable examples of his method in aesthetic discussion; nor have they any logical force except as against those--if there be any such--who deny that Euripides is a great poet. One of the most striking of modern criticisms on Euripides is the sketch by Mommsen in his history of Rome (bk. iii. ch. 14). It is, in our opinion, less than just to Euripides as an artist. But it indicates, with true historical insight, his place in the development of his art, the operation of those external conditions which made him what he was, and the nature of his influence on succeeding ages. Entry: 19
In spite of the success which attended these first ventures, Gleyre retired from public competition, and spent the rest of his life in quiet devotion to his own artistic ideals, neither seeking the easy applause of the crowd, nor turning his art into a means of aggrandizement and wealth. After 1845, when he exhibited the "Separation of the Apostles," he contributed nothing to the Salon except the "Dance of the Bacchantes" in 1849. Yet he laboured steadily and was abundantly productive. He had an "infinite capacity of taking pains," and when asked by what method he attained to such marvellous perfection of workmanship, he would reply, "En y pensant toujours." A long series of years often intervened between the first conception of a piece and its embodiment, and years not unfrequently between the first and the final stage of the embodiment itself. A landscape was apparently finished; even his fellow artists would consider it done; Gleyre alone was conscious that he had not "found his sky." Happily for French art this high-toned laboriousness became influential on a large number of Gleyre's younger contemporaries; for when Delaroche gave up his studio of instruction he recommended his pupils to apply to Gleyre, who at once agreed to give them lessons twice a week, and characteristically refused to take any fee or reward. By instinct and principle he was a confirmed celibate: "Fortune, talent, health,--he had everything; but he was married," was his lamentation over a friend. Though he lived in almost complete retirement from public life, he took a keen interest in politics, and was a voracious reader of political journals. For a time, indeed, under Louis Philippe, his studio had been the rendezvous of a sort of liberal club. To the last--amid all the disasters that befell his country--he was hopeful of the future, "la raison finira bien par avoir raison." It was while on a visit to the Retrospective Exhibition, opened on behalf of the exiles from Alsace and Lorraine, that he died suddenly on the 5th of May 1874. He left unfinished the "Earthly Paradise," a noble picture, which Taine has described as "a dream of innocence, of happiness and of beauty--Adam and Eve standing in the sublime and joyous landscape of a paradise enclosed in mountains,"--a worthy counterpart to the "Evening." Among the other productions of his genius are the "Deluge," which represents two angels speeding above the desolate earth, from which the destroying waters have just begun to retire, leaving visible behind them the ruin they have wrought; the "Battle of the Lemanus," a piece of elaborate design, crowded but not cumbered with figures, and giving fine expression to the movements of the various bands of combatants and fugitives; the "Prodigal Son," in which the artist has ventured to add to the parable the new element of mother's love, greeting the repentant youth with a welcome that shows that the mother's heart thinks less of the repentance than of the return; "Ruth and Boaz"; "Ulysses and Nausicaa"; "Hercules at the feet of Omphale"; the "Young Athenian," or, as it is popularly called, "Sappho"; "Minerva and the Nymphs"; "Venus [Greek: pandêmos]"; "Daphnis and Chloë"; and "Love and the Parcae." Nor must it be omitted that he left a considerable number of drawings and water-colours, and that we are indebted to him for a number of portraits, among which is the sad face of Heine, engraved in the _Revue des deux mondes_ for April 1852. In Clément's catalogue of his works there are 683 entries, including sketches and studies. Entry: GLEYRE
Theologian, tutor, university reformer, a great master of a college, Jowett's best claim to the remembrance of succeeding generations was his greatness as a moral teacher. Many of the most prominent Englishmen of the day were his pupils and owed much of what they were to his precept and example, his penetrative sympathy, his insistent criticism, and his unwearying friendship. Seldom have ideal aims been so steadily pursued with so clear a recognition of practical limitations. Jowett's theological work was transitional, and yet has an element of permanence. As has been said of another thinker, he was "one of those deeply religious men who, when crude theological notions are being revised and called in question seek to put new life into theology by wider and more humane ideas." In earlier life he had been a zealous student of Kant and Hegel, and to the end he never ceased to cultivate the philosophic spirit; but he had little confidence in metaphysical systems, and sought rather to translate philosophy into the wisdom of life. As a classical scholar, his scorn of littlenesses sometimes led him into the neglect of _minutiae_, but he had the higher merit of interpreting ideas. His place in literature rests really on the essays in his Plato. When their merits are fully recognized, it will be found that his worth, as a teacher of his countrymen, extends far beyond his own generation. Entry: JOWETT
The second great poet of the time--Q. Horatius Flaccus or Horace (68-8) is both the realist and the idealist of his age. If we want to know the actual lives, manners and ways of thinking of the Romans of the generation succeeding the overthrow of the republic it is in the _Satires_ and partially in the _Epistles_ of Horace that we shall find them. If we ask what that time provided to stir the fancy and move the mood of imaginative reflection, it is in the lyrical poems of Horace that we shall find the most varied and trustworthy answer. His literary activity extends over about thirty years and naturally divides itself into three periods, each marked by a distinct character. The first--extending from about 40 to 29--is that of the _Epodes_ and _Satires_. In the former he imitates the Greek poet Archilochus, but takes his subjects from the men, women and incidents of the day. Personality is the essence of his _Epodes_; in the _Satires_ it is used merely as illustrative of general tendencies. In the _Satires_ we find realistic pictures of social life, and the conduct and opinions of the world submitted to the standard of good feeling and common sense. The style of the _Epodes_ is pointed and epigrammatic, that of the _Satires_ natural and familiar. The hexameter no longer, as in Lucilius, moves awkwardly as if in fetters, but, like the language of Terence, of Catullus in his lighter pieces, of Cicero in his letters to Atticus, adapts itself to the everyday intercourse of life. The next period is the meridian of his genius, the time of his greatest lyrical inspiration, which he himself associates with the peace and leisure secured to him by his Sabine farm. The life of pleasure which he had lived in his youth comes back to him, not as it was in its actual distractions and disappointments, but in the idealizing light of meditative retrospect. He had not only become reconciled to the new order of things, but was moved by his intimate friendship with Maecenas to aid in raising the world to sympathy with the imperial rule through the medium of his lyrical inspiration, as Virgil had through the glory of his epic art. With the completion of the three books of _Odes_ he cast aside for a time the office of the _vates_, and resumed that of the critical spectator of human life, but in the spirit of a moralist rather than a satirist. He feels the increasing languor of the time as well as the languor of advancing years, and seeks to encourage younger men to take up the rôle of lyrical poetry, while he devotes himself to the contemplation of the true art of living. Self-culture rather than the fulfilment of public or social duty, as in the moral teaching of Cicero, is the aim of his teaching; and in this we recognize the influence of the empire in throwing the individual back on himself. As Cicero tones down his oratory in his moral treatises, so Horace tones down the fervour of his lyrical utterances in his _Epistles_, and thus produces a style combining the ease of the best epistolary style with the grace and concentration of poetry--the style, as it has been called, of "idealized common sense," that of the _urbanus_ and cultivated man of the world who is also in his hours of inspiration a genuine poet. In the last ten years of his life Horace resumed his lyrical function for a time, under pressure of the imperial command, and produced some of the most exquisite and mature products of his art. But his chief activity is devoted to criticism. He first vindicates the claims of his own age to literary pre-eminence, and then seeks to stimulate the younger writers of the day to what he regarded as the manlier forms of poetry, and especially to the tragic drama, which seemed for a short time to give promise of an artistic revival. Entry: LATIN
KLEIST, BERND HEINRICH WILHELM VON (1777-1811), German poet, dramatist and novelist, was born at Frankfort-on-Oder on the 18th of October 1777. After a scanty education, he entered the Prussian army in 1792, served in the Rhine campaign of 1796 and retired from the service in 1799 with the rank of lieutenant. He next studied law and philosophy at the university of Frankfort-on-Oder, and in 1800 received a subordinate post in the ministry of finance at Berlin. In the following year his roving, restless spirit got the better of him, and procuring a lengthened leave of absence he visited Paris and then settled in Switzerland. Here he found congenial friends in Heinrich Zschokke (q.v.) and Ludwig Friedrich August Wieland (1777-1819), son of the poet; and to them he read his first drama, a gloomy tragedy, _Die Familie Schroffenstein_ (1803), originally entitled _Die Familie Ghonorez_. In the autumn of 1802 Kleist returned to Germany; he visited Goethe, Schiller and Wieland in Weimar, stayed for a while in Leipzig and Dresden, again proceeded to Paris, and returning in 1804 to his post in Berlin was transferred to the _Domänenkammer_ (department for the administration of crown lands) at Königsberg. On a journey to Dresden in 1807 Kleist was arrested by the French as a spy, and being sent to France was kept for six months a close prisoner at Châlons-sur-Marne. On regaining his liberty he proceeded to Dresden, where in conjunction with Adam Heinrich Müller (1779-1829) he published in 1808 the journal _Phöbus_. In 1809 he went to Prague, and ultimately settled in Berlin, where he edited (1810-1811) the _Berliner Abendblätter_. Captivated by the intellectual and musical accomplishments of a certain Frau Henriette Vogel, Kleist, who was himself more disheartened and embittered than ever, agreed to do her bidding and die with her, carrying out this resolution by first shooting the lady and then himself on the shore of the Wannsee near Potsdam, on the 21st of November 1811. Kleist's whole life was filled by a restless striving after ideal and illusory happiness, and this is largely reflected in his work. He was by far the most important North German dramatist of the Romantic movement, and no other of the Romanticists approaches him in the energy with which he expresses patriotic indignation. Entry: KLEIST