It is questionable whether, if he had
never touched opium or wine, his real achievements would have been
substantial, for he had no conception of a veritable stand-point of
philosophical investigation; but the actual effect of his intemperance
was to aggravate to excess his introspective tendencies, and to remove
him incessantly further from the needful discipline of true science. His
conditions of body and mind were abnormal, and his study of the one
thing he knew any thing about--the human mind--was radically imperfect.
His powers, noble and charming as they might have been, were at once
wasted and weakened through their own partial excess. His moral nature
relaxed and sank, as must always be the case where sensibility is
stimulated and action paralyzed; and the man of genius who, forty years
before his death, administered a moral warning to all England, and
commanded the sympathy and admiration of a nation, lived on, to achieve
nothing but the delivery of some confidences of questionable value and
beauty, and to command from us nothing more than a compassionate sorrow
that an intellect so subtle and an eloquence so charming in its pathos,
its humor, its insight, and its music, should have left the world in no
way the better for such gifts, unless by the warning afforded in
"Confessions" first, and then, by example, against the curse which
neutralized their influence and corrupted its source.--HARRIET
MARTINEAU.
* * * * *
XXXIII.
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