HUMAN SADNESS.* A compound of Ecclesiastes and the "Miseries of

Human Life," written by a sentimental Frenchwoman, who has imbibed Evangelical opinions. That is not a flattering description, but it is true, and the book is beautiful nevertheless. To the majority • Human Sadness. By the Countess de Gasparin. London: Strahan.

of Englishmen it will seem, we suspect, utterly unreadable, and that majority will be the healthier, but the remainder will recog- nize in its writer a friend who has shared and is not ashamed of their mental troubles, who has put their half-formed thoughts into the most pellucid of words, who invests the burdens which they feel severely and yet regard as half unreal with substance and almost with dignity. To all who ever feel that melancholy which is not misery, and has its root not in misfortune, or any external suffering, but in the mind itself, that sadness which arises from some jar between the soul and the circumstances amid which it has been placed, that dreary weariness which Frenchmen call ennui, and for which Englishmen who feel it most have not invented a word, or finally, that febrile self-con- scious nervousness which is the besetting evil of constitutions bred in great cities and habituated to sedentary life, Madame de Gasparin's reflections will have a singular charm. Whether it is a healthy charm may be doubted, for there is a tendeney in all this self-analysis to increase the evil of which the sufferer com- plains, a pleasantness in the unhealthy pain which arises from touching the raw flesh such as a child sometimes feels in ex- asperating a sore. The desire of the melancholy to realize their own sadness, to assure themselves that it is not a humour, a vapour, some thing, as they half suspect, begotten of ill-health upon indolence,—to probe, and analyze, and weigh, to measure the grief, and put the oppression in the scales, and try whether or no the fancy have cubical content, is one to be repressed, and Madame de Gasparin may help with many only to exaggerate it. Still diagnosis is the foundation of the medical art, and surgery is not to be silent because ignorant people reading surgical books think themselves the victims of all the symptoms which they know may swell into disease. There is help in analysis such as this book contains, if only because there is sympathy, the sympathy of the friend so dear to the hypochondriac, who understands thoroughly, who can listen to the minutest details of the most baseless trouble, and yet who does not smile. It differs from English works on the same subject as doctors differ among each other. All comprehend diseases of the nerves, but it is to few among them that the hypochondriac will ever resort with the slightest trust that he is comprehended, the smallest confi- dence that he will not be told how his permanent oppression, which seems to him to make all nature black, is but the natural result of acil on the stomach. The statement may be quite true, but unless the physician proves that he understands every symptom, can suggest that the sufferer does not sleep, and is liable to unreal terrors, and has a morbid fear of every incident pleasant or otherwise, and has this, that, and the other quasi- mental qualm, the patient will not believe that he is to obtain relief. Madame de Gasparin has just that suggestiveness of knowledge.

With the analytical habit of her nation the authoress separates, and in a manner classifies, the mental causes of human sadness. She heads her chapters, " Oppression," " Mistakes," " 'Weariness," "Decay," "Soul-torture," "Beautiful Sadness," "Death," and "The Reason Why," and under each describes a separate form, not of human sadness, but of the misery which as we read we feel will produce the emotion. Very sentimental titles! smiles the strong- minded Englishwoman, who rides every day, and though she has known trouble believes melancholy to be only a fine name for bad digestion. Well, they are sentimental; but then is it only senti- ment which lends force to this terrible paragraph, or is there not also hard, shrewd, practical insight into human nature, a gleam of La Rochefoucauld's spirit flashing in the eyes of this devote?—

" The defects of a certain nature irritate me ; its very virtues put me out of patience ; so distasteful, indeed, are they, that I am not sure but that I should prefer imperfections that were more congenial. This man compromises my future, exerts an inimical influence around me. How, then, can I think well of him? Then the next step is that I think ill, nourish myself with gall ; commend my own irritation • the demons that were sleeping within me wake; they smite me with their serpents ; at each sting I feel a kind of excitement. Should any one come to tell me : That man is ill, I 'should not rejoice ; that he was in pain, this would give me no kind of pleasure ; but if I am told that he is wicked, if some unworthy action of his is related, then I am conscious of a diabolical satisfaction. Horrible, this ! it is like dogs fastening greedily on carrion. And more ! I nurse my antipathy. I do not want to love that man. I might possibly consent to pray for him, but not to detest him less. Bill him ! no, certainly; only do not let him stand in my way. And if, to remove him out of it, it be absolutely necessary that God should take him out of life,—well, be it so, let him go to another world. Yes, there are murderous thoughts, silent and swift of flight as the bats that flit round us at nightfall ; their cold wing has touched my brow."

Or is there only sentiment in this description

—not of env, that is the mistake to be avoided,—but of thos'z flashes of envy ,

which pass suddenly through the souls of those who are not envious, but only vain and self-conscious, yet healthy enough to hate the emotion they acknowledge ?

" The happiness of others, when I was myself unhappy, has saddened me still more. When I have seen one who was rich, kind-hearted, generous, popular, celebrated, a question has risen to trouble my soul : Why should he be so, and not I? This woman is beautiful, and for no other reason she displeases me. That intellect radiates, scatters happy sayings, has just views, all the world is conscious of its fascinations; as for me I remain apart; that sound of delighted laughter makes me in- clined to weep ; I wait till something foolish escapes the phcenix, to be pleased in my turn. That voice is sympathetic, has touching vibrations, its tone answers to the depths of the heart ; it is listened to with enchantment, I do not share that enchantment, I resist it; those mag- nificent accents jar me ; I wait for a false note to applaud. Why should I be one of God's disinherited children ? Others possess talents which he has refused to me ; others exercise a charm,—as for me I have charmed no one. There are women whose everysilly smile subjugates and bewitches ; I know not how to smile thus. That man speaks mere common-places in high-sounding language, everybody bows ; his com- mon-places are approved, he is the fashion, his place is ready made for him ; and I, who am better worth by far, I am not listened to, I am not looked up to, I cannot establish my own poor little footing in the sun- shine. See those eyes beaming with mirth, and that brilliant com- plexion, and that gay laugh; to her smooth, easy days are allotted. I, too, my eyes might beam as brightly, if God chose; my face would be fresh, too ; I am young as she is ; I might welcome every morning as it came; but no ; God has bowed me down ; laden my soul with gnawing cares ; filled my life with insupportable suffering. When that woman passes me, when the air, perfumed by her happiness, reaches me, it is as though I had inhaled poison. My disease—an appalling one—is com- posed of the felicity of others ; my hideous enjoyments are made up of their griefs. I will console sufferers as much as you like ; I will go as often as you will into the house of mourning ; only, do not take me to the happy ; do not oblige me to enter homes that abound in all the blessings of this life ; they stifle me."

It is, however, in tracing the sadness of the half-hypochondriac that Madame de Gasparin excels, in showing how the mind, or, as she says, the soul, is saddened by every variety of oppression, by the presence of antagonistic natures, by the power of wealth, by fatigue, by the hard autocracy of nature, by exile, by the only real terror—that which is born within, by constraint, by that in- tolerable watchfulness of the crowd which only the melancholy feel, by that mental habit which the authoress has described in a passage of which only its victims will perhaps recognize the full beauty :-

" The solar microscope has been invented by science, but it is not science alone that makes use of it, everybody has one of his own that he applies to the infinitely little. There where the eye, as God has made it, sees only a grain of dust, a monster makes his appearance. Empty space is peopled with formidable creatures on all sides,—claws, forceps, triple rows of grinders. These gigantic animals open mon- strous jaws, their bodies wriggle, their tail, armed with a dart, is threateningly curved ; the thousand facets of their eyeballs are fixed upon us ; countless feet keep stirring, hairs bristling ; and all this array of weapons is turned against us, and we stand terrified, gazing at the drop of water that contains such horrors. And all tho time that drop re- mains clear and undisturbed, and when our glances quit that atomic universe, to wander on familiar objects around, a smile replaces our alarm."

Every oppression is described, and in every case with the subtle force, the hard determination to tell the truth, which shines out in this paragraph, one written by a woman to women, but intelligible to all :-

"People have wondered at family antipathies ; they have asked how those that everything—life-interests, occupations—tended to unite, should ever have come to hate each other. The galley-slaves also are -closely bound together; do they love each other any the better for that? For my part, I have always been surprised at this passage of Scripture, If ye love not men whom ye have seen, how shall ye love God whom ye have not seen ? ' Alas ! the more I know myself, the more I detest. As for the absent, I can without effort represent them to my mind as good, compassionate, generous, easy to live with. But this individual who weighs me down, from whom not one portion of my life can escape, oh hovr difficult I find it to love him, seeing him as I do so near!"

There is a still better description at page 10,—an account of the tyranny of the prosaic, of the people whose talk resembles steam, most powerful for its end, but amidst which human breath is stifled; but our extracts are already too long, and we must be content with a single sentence :—" This last form goes deeper than any of the rest. It plunges into the very recesses of your heart ; you have not spoken, but it has found you out ; it drags your idols into broad daylight, and turns them into ridicule ; it enters irreverently into that realm of the ideal, where you only venture with timid step, and scatters to all the winds what it is pleased to call the mere tinsel of a booth at a faire Who has not experienoed those invasions of hostile natures ?— 'I heard a language that was not my own!' Alien voices, cha- racters fundamentally different ; yet worthy people, that one must needs esteem." It is all, say the strong, imaginary, nay, absurd, such griefs need nothing except a breath of the fresh air.

That also is all that the man whom smoke is stifling needs, but if he does not get it, and get it quickly ?—"Imaginary People think they have effected a cure when they have let that drop of boiling oil fall upon your wounds. Absurd!. My own common sense had told me so before you, and that is the very thing that aggravates my torment. I am wrong, you say, to suffer I Go, take that comforting opinion to the mutilated man who suffers terrible pain in the leg that has been cut off long ago. Prove to him that he cannot possibly feel anything, since the seat of the suffering no longer exists. Do you know what he will do ? He will look at you, will pass his trembling hand over his forehead, on which stands the sweat, then he will turn on the other side, and speak to you no more."

Madame de Gasparin has hor remedy for this sadness, and to those who have read her former works we need not say it is re- ligion, but religion of a somewhat peculiar kind, a religion like her writing, a concrete and strong belief embedded in soft sen- timent, a peachy religion with a core of hard dogmatic faith (with life in it too), and a soft pulpy coating of mysticism out- side. She is a Christian in the ordinary Protestant sense, but with a crave to reach closer to the infinite Centre than dogmas will let her do, with such a passion for communion with God that she would almost pass by Christ to reach Him. She does not pass Him, but it is Christ the God visible on earth rather than Christ the Intercessor whom she adores, and her real faith is summed up in this sentence :—" You talk to me of distractions : I have a soul, and it cannot be satisfied with lies. You tell me of penitence and penance : I have a heart, and it cannot be filled with vanities like these. I want my God."

We have given, we fear, but a poor idea of the book, but let any one who cares to indulge in the luxury of feeling the inmost symptoms of hypochondria analyzed by a writer full of mysti- cism and hard solid sense, who knows by experience everything the melancholy feel, yet is full of a pleasant sub-humour, who can teach the deepest truths of religion in the style of a French- woman of the salons, who tells him to strive after communion with God in sentences that ring with hard metallic point, buy and study this book. If there is melancholy anywhere about him he will be grateful for the advice, more grateful if ho can take to himself the caution which Madame de Gasparin embodies in this apophthegm, "The perfumes that exhale from the heart are those that can only be obtained from bruising the plant." Lot the perfume go and keep your heart unbruised.