He entirely lacked the keen insight and
dialectic subtlety of such a writer as Bishop Butler; and, in his
explanation of this Stoical shibboleth, any real meaning which it may
possess is evaporated into a gorgeous mist of confused declamation and
splendid commonplace.
2. Nor is he much more fortunate with his ideal man. This pompous
abstraction presents us with a conception at once ambitious and sterile.
The Stoic wise man is a sort of moral Phoenix, impossible and repulsive.
He is intrepid in dangers, free from all passion, happy in adversity,
calm in the storm; he alone knows how to live, because he alone knows
how to die; he is the master of the world, because he is master of
himself, and the equal of God; he looks down upon everything with
sublime imperturbability, despising the sadnesses of humanity and
smiling with irritating loftiness at all our hopes and all our fears.
But, in another sketch of this faultless and unpleasant monster, Seneca
presents us, not the proud athlete who challenges the universe and is
invulnerable to all the stings and arrows of passion or of fate, but a
hero in the serenity of absolute triumph, more tender, indeed, but still
without desires, without passions, without needs, who can fell no pity,
because pity is a weakness which disturbs his sapient calm! Well might
the eloquent Bossuet exclaim, as he read of these chimerical
perfections, "It is to take a tone too lofty for feeble and mortal men.
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