These have been my three favourite and particular occupations; I speak not of those I owe to the world by civil obligation. CHAPTER IV. OF DIVERSION. I was once employed to console a lady truly afflicted; most of their mournings are put on and for outward ceremony, "Uberibus semper lacrymis, semperque paratis, In statione sua, atque expectantibus illam, A man goes the wrong way to work when he opposes this passion; for opposition does but irritate and make them more obstinate in sorrow; the evil is exasperated by being contended with. We see, in common discourse, that what I have indifferently let fall from me, if any one takes it up to controvert it, I justify it with the best arguments I have; and much more a thing wherein I had a real interest. And, besides, in so doing, you enter roughly upon your operation; whereas the first addresses of a physician to his patieut should be gracious, gay, and pleasing; never did any ill-looking, morose physician do anything to purpose. On the contrary, then, a man should, at the first approaches, favour their grief, and express some approbation of their sorrow. By this intelligence you obtain credit to proceed further, and by a facile and insensible gradation fall into discourses more solid and proper for their cure. I, whose aim it was principally to gull the company who had their eyes fixed upon me, took it into my head only to palliate the disease. And, indeed, I have found by experience that I have an unlucky hand in persuading. My arguments are either too sharp and dry, or pressed too roughly, or not home enough. After I had some time 1 "A woman has ever a fountain of tears ready to gush up whenever she requires to make use of them."-JUVENAL, vi. 272. 1 applied myself to her grief, I did not attempt to cure her by strong and lively reasons, either because I had them not at hand, or because I thought to do my business better another way; neither did I make choice of any of those methods of consolation which philosophy prescribes: that what we complain of is no evil, according to Cleanthes ;' that it is a light evil, according to the Peripatetics; that to bemoan one's self is an action neither commendable nor just, according to Chrysippus; nor this of Epicurus, more suitable to my way, of shifting the thoughts from afflicting things to those that are pleasing; nor making a bundle of all these together, to make use of upon occasion, according to Cicero; but, gently bending my discourse, and by little and little digressing, sometimes to subjects nearer, and sometimes more remote from the purpose, according as she was more intent on what I said, Î imperceptibly led her from that sorrowful thought, and kept her calm and in good humour whilst I continued there. I herein made use of diversion. They who succeeded me in the same service, did not for all that find any amendment in her, for I had not gone to the root. I, peradventure, may elsewhere have glanced upon some sort of public diversions; and the practice of military ones, which Pericles' made use of in the Peloponnesian war, and a thousand others in other places, to withdraw the adverse forces from their own countries, is too frequent in history. It was an ingenious evasion' whereby the Sieur d'Himbercourt saved both himself and others in the city of Liege, into which the Duke of Burgundy, who kept it besieged, had made him enter to execute the articles of their promised surrender: the people being assembled by night to consider of it, began to mutiny against the agreement, and several of them resolved to fall upon the commissioners, whom they had in their power; he, feeling the gusts of this first storm of the people who were coming to rush into his lodgings, suddenly sent out to them two of the inhabitants of the city (of whom he had some with him) with new and milder terms to be proposed in their council, which he had then 1 Cicero, Tusc. Quæs., iii. 31. 2 Plutarch in vita. The story is told in Comines' Memoirs, bk. ii. c 3. and there contrived for his need. These two diverted the first tempest, carrying back the enraged rabble to the town-hall to hear and consider of what they had to say. The deliberation was short; a second storm arose as violent as the other, whereupon he despatched four new mediators of the same quality to meet them, protesting that he had now better conditions to present them with, and such as would give them absolute satisfaction, by which means the tumult was once more appeased, and the people again turned back to the conclave. In fine, by this dispensation of amusements, one after another, diverting their fury and dissipating it in frivolous consultations, he laid it at last. asleep till the day appeared, which was his principal end. This other story that follows is also of the same category: Atalanta, a virgin of excelling beauty and of wonderful disposition of body, to disengage herself from the crowd of a thousand suitors who sought her in marriage, made this proposition, that she would accept of him for her husband who should equal her in running, upon condition that they who failed should lose their lives. There were enough who thought the prize very well worth the hazard, and who suffered the cruel penalty of the contract. Hippomenes, about to make trial after the rest, made his address to the goddess of love, imploring her assistance; and she, granting his request, gave him three golden apples, and instructed him how to use them. race beginning, as Hippomenes perceived his mistress to press hard up to him, he, as it were by chance, let fall one of these apples; the maid, taken with the beauty of it, failed not to step out of her way to pick it up: "Obstupuit virgo, nitidique cupidine pomi The He did the same, when he saw his time, by the second and the third, till by so diverting her, and making her lose so much ground, he won the race. When physicians cannot stop a catarrh, they divert and turn it into some other less dangerous part. And I find also that this is the most 1 "The virgin, dazzled at beholding the glittering apple, and eager to possess it, stopped her career, and seized the rolling gold." -OVID, Metam., x. 663. ordinary practice for the diseases of the mind: "Abducendus etiam nonnunquam animus est ad alia studia, sollicitudines, curas, negotia; loci denique mutatione, tanquam ægroti non convalescentes, sæpe curandus est."1 'Tis to little effect directly to jostle a man's infirmities; we neither make him sustain nor repel the attack; we only make him decline and evade it. This other lesson is too high and too difficult: 'tis for men of the first form of knowledge purely to insist upon the thing, to consider and judge it; it belongs to a Socrates only, to meet death with an ordinary countenance, to grow acquainted with it, and to sport with it; he seeks no consolation out of the thing itself; dying appears to him a natural and indifferent accident; 'tis there that he fixes his sight and resolution, without looking elsewhere. The disciples of Hegesias," who starved themselves to death, animated thereunto by his fine lectures, and in such numbers that King Ptolemy ordered he should be forbidden to entertain his followers with such homicidal doctrines, did not consider death in itself, neither did they judge of it; it was not there they fixed their thoughts; they ran towards and aimed at a new being. The poor wretches whom we see brought upon the scaffold, full of ardent devotion, and therein, as much as in them lies, employing all their senses, their ears in hearing the instructions given them, their eyes and hands lifted up towards heaven, their voices in loud prayers, with a vehement and continual emotion, do doubtless things very commendable and proper for such a necessity: we ought to commend them for their devotion, but not properly for their constancy; they shun the encounter, they divert their thoughts from the consideration of death, as children are amused with some toy or other, when the surgeon is going to give them a prick with his lancet. I have seen some, who, casting their eyes upon the dreadful instruments of death round about, have fainted, and 1 "The mind is sometimes to be diverted to other studies, thoughts, cares, and business: and lastly, by change of place, as sick persons who do not recover are ordered change of air.” CICERO, Tusc. Quæs., iv. 35. 2 Cicero, Tusc. Quæs, i. 34. furiously turned their thoughts another way; such as are to pass a formidable precipice, are advised either to shut or to avert their eyes. Subrius Flavius, being by Nero's command to be put to death, and by the hand of Niger, both of them great captains, when they led him to the place appointed for his execution, seeing the grave that Niger had caused to be hollowed to put him into, ill-made: "Neither is this," said he, turning to the soldiers who guarded him, "according to military discipline." And to Niger, who exhorted him to keep his head firm; "do but thou strike as firmly," said he.' And he very well foresaw what would follow, when he said so; for Niger's arm so trembled, that he had several blows at his head before he could cut it off. This man seems to have had his thoughts rightly fixed upon the subject. He who dies in a battle, with his sword in his hand, does not then think of death, he feels or considers it not; the ardour of the fight diverts his thought another way. A worthy man of my acquaintance, falling, as he was fighting a duel, and feeling himself nailed to the earth by nine or ten thrusts of his enemy, every one present called to him to think of his conscience; but he has since told me, that though he very well heard what they said, it nothing moved him, and that he never thought of anything but how to disengage and revenge himself. He afterwards killed his man in that very duel. He who brought to L. Silanus the sentence of death, did him a very great kindness, in that having received his answer, that he was well prepared to die, but not by base hands, he ran upon him with his soldiers to force him, and as he, unarmed as he was, obstinately defended himself with his fists and feet, he made him lose his life in the contest, by that means dissipating and diverting in a sudden and furious rage the painful apprehension of the lingering death to which he was designed. We always think of something else; either the hope of a better life comforts and supports us, or the hope of our children's worth, or the future glory of our name, or the 1 Tacitus, Annal., xv. 67. |