Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection
A clerk in office, an accountant, a gauger of small beer, a songwriter
for a tavern dinner, produces more. He thrusts his rags into the hole
whence the wind comes, and sleeps soundly. While you and I are talking
about elevations and proportions, pillars and pilasters, architraves
and friezes, the buildings we should repair are falling to the earth,
and the materials for their restoration are in the quarry.
_Rousseau._ I could answer you: but my mind has certain moments of
repose, or rather of oscillation, which I would not for the world
disturb. Music, eloquence, friendship, bring and prolong them.
_Malesherbes._ Enjoy them, my dear friend, and convert them if
possible to months and years. It is as much at your arbitration on
what theme you shall meditate, as in what meadow you shall botanize;
and you have as much at your option the choice of your thoughts, as of
the keys in your harpsichord.
_Rousseau._ If this were true, who could be unhappy?
_Malesherbes._ Those of whom it is not true. Those who from want of
practice cannot manage their thoughts, who have few to select from,
and who, because of their sloth or of their weakness, do not roll away
the heaviest from before them.
LUCULLUS AND CAESAR
_Caesar._ Lucius Lucullus, I come to you privately and unattended for
reasons which you will know; confiding, I dare not say in your
friendship, since no service of mine toward you hath deserved it, but
in your generous and disinterested love of peace. Hear me on. Cneius
Pompeius, according to the report of my connexions in the city, had,
on the instant of my leaving it for the province, begun to solicit his
dependants to strip me ignominiously of authority. Neither vows nor
affinity can bind him. He would degrade the father of his wife; he
would humiliate his own children, the unoffending, the unborn; he
would poison his own nascent love--at the suggestion of Ambition.
Matters are now brought so far, that either he or I must submit to a
reverse of fortune; since no concession can assuage his malice, divert
his envy, or gratify his cupidity. No sooner could I raise myself up,
from the consternation and stupefaction into which the certainty of
these reports had thrown me, than I began to consider in what manner
my own private afflictions might become the least noxious to the
republic. Into whose arms, then, could I throw myself more naturally
and more securely, to whose bosom could I commit and consign more
sacredly the hopes and destinies of our beloved country, than his who
laid down power in the midst of its enjoyments, in the vigour of
youth, in the pride of triumph, when Dignity solicited, when
Friendship urged, entreated, supplicated, and when Liberty herself
invited and beckoned to him from the senatorial order and from the
curule chair? Betrayed and abandoned by those we had confided in, our
next friendship, if ever our hearts receive any, or if any will
venture in those places of desolation, flies forward instinctively to
what is most contrary and dissimilar. Caesar is hence the visitant of
Lucullus.
_Lucullus._ I had always thought Pompeius more moderate and more
reserved than you represent him, Caius Julius; and yet I am considered
in general, and surely you also will consider me, but little liable to
be prepossessed by him.
_Caesar._ Unless he may have ingratiated himself with you recently,
by the administration of that worthy whom last winter his partisans
dragged before the Senate, and forced to assert publicly that you and
Cato had instigated a party to circumvent and murder him; and whose
carcass, a few days afterward, when it had been announced that he had
died by a natural death, was found covered with bruises, stabs, and
dislocations.
_Lucullus._ You bring much to my memory which had quite slipped out of
it, and I wonder that it could make such an impression on yours. A
proof to me that the interest you take in my behalf began earlier than
your delicacy will permit you to acknowledge. You are fatigued, which
I ought to have perceived before.
_Caesar._ Not at all; the fresh air has given me life and alertness: I
feel it upon my cheek even in the room.
_Lucullus._ After our dinner and sleep, we will spend the remainder of
the day on the subject of your visit.
_Caesar._ Those Ethiopian slaves of yours shiver with cold upon the
mountain here; and truly I myself was not insensible to the change of
climate, in the way from Mutina.
What white bread! I never found such even at Naples or Capua. This
Formian wine (which I prefer to the Chian), how exquisite!
_Lucullus._ Such is the urbanity of Caesar, even while he bites his
lip with displeasure. How! surely it bleeds! Permit me to examine the
cup.
_Caesar._ I believe a jewel has fallen out of the rim in the carriage:
the gold is rough there.
_Lucullus._ Marcipor, let me never see that cup again! No answer, I
desire. My guest pardons heavier faults. Mind that dinner be prepared
for us shortly.
_Caesar._ In the meantime, Lucullus, if your health permits it, shall
we walk a few paces round the villa? for I have not seen anything of
the kind before.
_Lucullus._ The walls are double; the space between them two feet: the
materials for the most part earth and straw. Two hundred slaves, and
about as many mules and oxen, brought the beams and rafters up the
mountain; my architects fixed them at once in their places: every part
was ready, even the wooden nails. The roof is thatched, you see.
_Caesar._ Is there no danger that so light a material should be
carried off by the winds, on such an eminence?
_Lucullus._ None resists them equally well.
_Caesar._ On this immensely high mountain, I should be apprehensive of
the lightning, which the poets, and I think the philosophers too, have
told us strikes the highest.
_Lucullus._ The poets are right; for whatever is received as truth is
truth in poetry; and a fable may illustrate like a fact. But the
philosophers are wrong, as they generally are, even in the commonest
things; because they seldom look beyond their own tenets, unless
through captiousness, and because they argue more than they meditate,
and display more than they examine. Archimedes and Euclid are, in my
opinion, after our Epicurus, the worthiest of the name, having kept
apart to the demonstrable, the practical, and the useful. Many of the
rest are good writers and good disputants; but unfaithful suitors of
simple science, boasters of their acquaintance with gods and
goddesses, plagiarists and impostors. I had forgotten my roof,
although it is composed of much the same materials as the
philosophers'. Let the lightning fall: one handful of silver, or less,
repairs the damage.
_Caesar._ Impossible! nor indeed one thousand, nor twenty, if those
tapestries and pictures are consumed.
_Lucullus._ True; but only the thatch would burn. For, before the
baths were tessellated, I filled the area with alum and water, and
soaked the timbers and laths for many months, and covered them
afterward with alum in powder, by means of liquid glue. Mithridates
taught me this. Having in vain attacked with combustibles a wooden
tower, I took it by stratagem, and found within it a mass of alum,
which, if a great hurry had not been observed by us among the enemy in
the attempt to conceal it, would have escaped our notice. I never
scrupled to extort the truth from my prisoners; but my instruments
were purple robes and plate, and the only wheel in my armoury destined
to such purposes was the wheel of Fortune.
_Caesar._ I wish, in my campaigns, I could have equalled your clemency
and humanity; but the Gauls are more uncertain, fierce, and perfidious
than the wildest tribes of Caucasus; and our policy cannot be carried
with us, it must be formed upon the spot. They love you, not for
abstaining from hurting them, but for ceasing; and they embrace you
only at two seasons--when stripes are fresh, or when stripes are
imminent. Elsewhere, I hope to become the rival of Lucullus in this
admirable part of virtue.
I shall never build villas, because--but what are your proportions?
Surely the edifice is extremely low.
_Lucullus._ There is only one floor; the height of the apartments is
twenty feet to the cornice, five above it; the breadth is twenty-five,
the length forty. The building, as you perceive, is quadrangular:
three sides contain four rooms each; the other has many partitions and
two stories, for domestics and offices. Here is my salt-bath.
_Caesar._ A bath, indeed, for all the Nereids named by Hesiod, with
room enough for the Tritons and their herds and horses.
_Lucullus._ Here stand my two cows. Their milk is brought to me with
its warmth and froth; for it loses its salubrity both by repose and by
motion. Pardon me, Caesar: I shall appear to you to have forgotten
that I am not conducting Marcus Varro.
_Caesar._ You would convert him into Cacus: he would drive them off.
What beautiful beasts! how sleek and white and cleanly! I never saw
any like them, excepting when we sacrifice to Jupiter the stately
leader from the pastures of the Clitumnus.
_Lucullus._ Often do I make a visit to these quiet creatures, and with
no less pleasure than in former days to my horses. Nor indeed can I
much wonder that whole nations have been consentaneous in treating
them as objects of devotion: the only thing wonderful is that
gratitude seems to have acted as powerfully and extensively as fear;
indeed, more extensively, for no object of worship whatever has
attracted so many worshippers. Where Jupiter has one, the cow has ten:
she was venerated before he was born, and will be when even the
carvers have forgotten him.
_Caesar._ Unwillingly should I see it; for the character of our gods
hath formed the character of our nation. Serapis and Isis have stolen
in among them within our memory, and others will follow, until at last
Saturn will not be the only one emasculated by his successor. What can
be more august than our rites? The first dignitaries of the republic
are emulous to administer them: nothing of low or venal has any place
in them; nothing pusillanimous, nothing unsocial and austere. I speak
of them as they were; before Superstition woke up again from her
slumber, and caught to her bosom with maternal love the alluvial
monsters of the Nile. Philosophy, never fit for the people, had
entered the best houses, and the image of Epicurus had taken the place
of the Lemures. But men cannot bear to be deprived long together of
anything they are used to, not even of their fears; and, by a reaction
of the mind appertaining to our nature, new stimulants were looked
for, not on the side of pleasure, where nothing new could be expected
or imagined, but on the opposite. Irreligion is followed by
fanaticism, and fanaticism by irreligion, alternately and perpetually.
_Lucullus._ The religion of our country, as you observe, is well
adapted to its inhabitants. Our progenitor, Mars, hath Venus recumbent
on his breast and looking up to him, teaching us that pleasure is to
be sought in the bosom of valour and by the means of war. No great
alteration, I think, will ever be made in our rites and
ceremonies--the best and most imposing that could be collected from
all nations, and uniting them to us by our complacence in adopting
them. The gods themselves may change names, to flatter new power: and,
indeed, as we degenerate, Religion will accommodate herself to our
propensities and desires. Our heaven is now popular: it will become
monarchal; not without a crowded court, as befits it, of apparitors
and satellites and minions of both sexes, paid and caressed for
carrying to their stern, dark-bearded master prayers and
supplications. Altars must be strown with broken minds, and incense