fill it with distaste and terror; for the imagination is as liable to pain as pleasure. When the brain is hurt by any accident, or the mind disordered by dreams or sickness, the fancy is overrun with wild dismal ideas, and terrified with a thousand hideous monsters of its own framing. Eumenidum veluti demens videt agmina Pentheus, Et solem geminum, et duplices se ostendere Thebas : VIRG. N. iv. 469. Like Pentheus, when, distracted with his fear, And shook her snaky locks: he shuns the sight, DRYDEN. There is not a sight in nature so mortifying as that of a distracted person, when his imagination is troubled, and his whole soul disordered and confused. Babylon in ruins is not so melancholy a spectacle. But to quit so disagreeable a subject, I shall only consider, by way of conclusion, what an infinite advantage this faculty gives an Almighty Being over the soul of man, and how great a measure of happiness or misery we are capable of receiving from the imagination only. We have already seen the influence that one man has over the fancy of another, and with what ease he conveys into it a variety of imagery: how great a power then may we suppose lodged in Him, who knows all the ways of affecting the imagination, who can infuse what ideas He pleases, and fill those ideas with terror and delight to what degree He thinks fit! He can excite images in the mind without the help of words, and make scenes rise up before us, and seem present to the eye, without the assistance of bodies or exterior objects. He can transport the imagination with such beautiful and glorious visions as cannot possibly enter into our present conceptions, or haunt it with such ghastly spectres and apparitions as would make us hope for annihilation, and think existence no better than a curse. In short, He can so exquisitely ravish or torture the soul through this single faculty, as might suffice to make up the whole heaven or hell of any finite being. [This essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination having been published in separate papers, I shall conclude it with a table of the principal contents of each paper*.] No. 422. FRIDAY, JULY 4, 1712. Hæc scripsi non otii abundantiâ, sed amoris erga te. TULL. EPIST. I have written this, not out of the abundance of leisure, but of my affection towards you. I Do not know any thing which gives greater disturbance to conversation, than the false notion some people have of raillery. It ought, certainly, to be * These contents are printed all together in the original folio, at the end of No. 421; but are in this edition arranged in their proper places and placed at the beginnings of the several papers. the first point to be aimed at in society, to gain the good-will of those with whom you converse: the way to that is, to show you are well inclined towards them. What then can be more absurd than to set up for being extremely sharp and biting, as the term is, in your expressions to your familiars? A man who has no good quality but courage, is in a very ill way towards making an agreeable figure in the world because that which he has superior to other people cannot be exerted without raising himself an enemy. Your gentleman of a satirical vein is in the like condition. To say a thing which perplexes the heart of him you speak to, or brings blushes into his face, is a degree of murder; and it is, I think an unpardonable offence to show a man you do not care whether he is pleased or displeased. But will not you then take a jest ?—Yes; but pray let it be a jest. It is no jest to put me, who am so unhappy as to have an utter aversion to speaking to more than one man at a time, under a necessity to explain myself in much company, and reducing me to shame and derision, except I perform what my infirmity of silence disables me to do. Callisthenes has great wit, accompanied with that quality without which a man can have no wit at all a sound judgement. This gentleman rallies the best of any man I know; for he forms his ridicule upon a circumstance which you are in your heart not unwilling to grant him; to wit, that you are guilty of an excess in something which is in itself laudable. He very well understands what you would be, and needs not fear your anger for declaring you are a little too much that thing. The generous will bear being reproached as lavish, and the valiant as rash, without being provoked to resentment against their monitor. What has been said to be a mark of a good writer will fall in with the character of a good companion. The good writer makes his reader better pleased with himself, and the agreeable man makes his friends enjoy themselves, rather than him, while he is in their company. Callisthenes does this with inimitable pleasantry. He whispered a friend the other day, so as to be overheard by a young officer who gave symptoms of cocking upon the company, "That gentleman has very much of the air of a general officer.' The youth immediately put on a composed behaviour, and behaved himself suitably to the conceptions he believed the company had of him. It is to be allowed that Callisthenes will make a man run into impertinent relations to his own advantage, and express the satisfaction he has in his own dear self, till he is very ridiculous; but in this case the man is made a fool by his own consent, and not exposed as such whether he will or no. I take it, therefore, that, to make raillery agreeable, a man must either not know he is rallied, or think never the worse of himself if he sees he is. Acetus is of a quite contrary genius, and is more generally admired than Callisthenes, but not with justice. Acetus has no regard to the modesty or weakness of the person he rallies; but if his quality or humility gives him any superiority to the man he would fall upon, he has no mercy in making the onset. He can be pleased to see his best friend out of countenance, while the laugh is loud in his own applause. His raillery always puts the company into little divisions and separate interests, while that of Callisthenes cements it, and makes every man not only better pleased with himself, but also with all the rest in the conversation. To rally well, it is absolutely necessary that kindness must run through all you say; and you must ever preserve the character of a friend to support your pretensions to be free with a man. Acetus ought to be banished human society, because he raises his mirth upon giving pain to the person upon whom he is pleasant. Nothing but the malevolence which is too general towards those who excel could make his company tolerated; but they with whom he converses are sure to see some man sacrificed wherever he is admitted; and all the credit he has for wit, is owing to the gratification it gives to other men's ill nature. Minutius has a wit that conciliates a man's love, at the same time that it is exerted against his faults. He has an art of keeping the person he rallies in countenance, by insinuating that he himself is guilty of the same imperfection. This he does with so much address, that he seems rather to bewail himself, than fall upon his friend. It is really monstrous to see how unaccountably it prevails among men to take the liberty of displeasing each other. One would think sometimes that the contention is, who shall be most disagreeable. Allusions to past follies, hints which revive what a man has a mind to forget for ever, and deserves that all the rest of the world should, are commonly brought forth even in company of men of distinction. They do not thrust with the skill of fencers, but cut up with the barbarity of butchers. It is, methinks, below the character of men of humanity and goodmanners, to be capable of mirth while there is any one of the company in pain and disorder. They who have the true taste of conversation, enjoy themselves in a communication of each other's excellences, and not in a triumph over their imperfections. Fortius would have been reckoned a wit, if there had never been a fool in the world; he wants not foils to be a beauty, but has that natural pleasure in observing perfection in others, that his own faults are overlooked out of gratitude by all his acquaintance. |