Lord Brougham: ‘Memnon’

Memnon, or Human Wisdom

Memnon one day conceived the useless project of being perfectly wise. There is scarcely any man who has not at one time or other let this folly pass through his head. To be very wise (said Memnon to himself), an, of consequence, very happy, one has only to be without passions, and (as we all know) nothing is easier.

In the first place, I shall never love any woman; for when I see a perfect beauty I shall say to myself, ‘These cheeks will one day be wrinkled; these fine eyes will be fringed with red; that plum neck will turn fat and flabby; that beautiful head will grow bald.’ Now, I have only to see all this with the same eyes at present that I must see it with afterwards, and surely that head will never turn mine.

In the second place, I shall always be sober. In vain shall good cheer, delicious wines, agreeable society, try to tempt me. I have only to figure to myself the consequences of excess - a heavy head - a disordered stomach - loss of reason, health, and time; and surely I shall never eat but to satisfy nature; my health shall be constant, my ideas always luminous and pure. All this is so easy that there is no merit in keeping to it.

Then (continued Memnon) I must think a little of my fortune. My desires are moderate; my income is lodged in the hands of the Receiver-General of the Finances of Nineveh; I have wherewithal to live independent; and that is the greatest of earthly blessings. I shall never have the disagreeable necessity of paying court to anybody. I shall envy no one, and be envied by none. Besides, here is another thing equally plain. I have friends: I shall keep them; so they can have nothing to dispute with me about: I shall never be out of humour with them, nor they with me. In all this there’s no sort of difficulty.

Having thus formed in his room his little scheme of wisdom, Memnon put his head out of the window. He saw two women washing near his house, under the plane-trees: one of them was old, and seemed not to be thinking about anything; the other was young, handsome, and appeared much engaged. She sighed; she wept; and seemed to have only the more graces.

Our sage was moved - not with the beauty of the lady (he was quite confident he never could be guilty of such a weakness), but was touched with the affliction she appeared to be in. He went down-stairs, and approached the young daughter of Nineveh, in the intention of consoling her with wisdom. The fair creature related with an air the most natural and affecting, all the injuries she had received from an uncle whom she never had - with the artifices by which he had taken from her a fortune she never possessed, and all the evils she had to fear from his ill-treatment.

‘You appear,’ said she, ‘to be a man of such good counsel, that if you’ll only have the condescendence to step home with me and examine my affairs, I’m sure you’ll relieve me from the cruel embarrassments into which I have fallen.’

Memnon followed her without hesitation, for the purpose of examining, safely, her affairs, and giving her good advice. The afflicted lady carried him into a perfumed apartment, and politely bid him to be seated upon a large sofa, where they both remained with their legs crossed, and opposite to each other. The damsel, while she spoke, cast her eyes on the ground, and sometimes dropt tears from them; and whenever she raised them, they always happened to meet those of the sage Memnon.

The conversation was full of tenderness, which redoubled every time they looked at one another. Memnon took her affairs extremely to heart, and felt every moment more and more a desire to oblige so worthy and so unfortunate a personage. Insensibly they ceased (in the heat of conversation) to sit opposite to each other - their legs were no longer crossed. Memnon gave his advice so near and so tenderly, that neither one nor t’other could now speak of business, and they no longer knew where they were.

Whilst they continued in this situation, in comes the uncle. As may easily be imagined, he was armed cap-a-pie. His first words were that he proposed (as was reasonable) killing Memnon and his niece on the spot; and the last thing which escaped him was that he would pardon them, if he was well paid for it. Memnon was forced to give all he had about him. These were happy days when one could get off so cheap. America was not then known, and afflicted ladies were not half so dangerous as they are in our times.

Memnon went home in shame and despair: he found a card inviting him to dine with some of his intimate friends. If (said he) I stay at home by myself, I shall think on nothing by my sad adventure. I shall eat none, and shall fall sick. I had much better go and make a frugal meal with my companions. The sweets of their society will make me forget the morning’s folly.

He goes to the place appointed; they perceive him somewhat out of sorts; they make him drink to drown sorrow. A little wine taken in moderation is a cure both for mind and body, so thinks the sage Memnon; and so thinking he gets drunk. They propose to play after dinner. A little play, well regulated, with one’s friends, makes an honourable pastime. He plays, loses all his ready money, and four times more on tick.

During the game a dispute arises; they turn warm. One of his particular friends throws a decanter at Memnon’s head; and shuts up an eye for him. The sage Memnon is carried home, mortal drunk, with the loss of all his money, and half his eyes. He throws up a little of his wine, and as soon as his head is a little clear, he sends his servant to the Receiver-General for money to pay his particular friends. He is told that his debtor had that morning broke fraudulently, to the alarm of half the families in town.

Memnon, quite beside himself, sets off for court, with a patch on his eye, and petition in his hand, to demand justice of the king against the bankrupt. He meets in the drawing-room several ladies, who sported, with an easy air, hoops of twenty-four feet in circumference. One of these, who knew him a little, muttered (eyeing him askance), ‘How horrid!’ Another, who was better acquainted with him, accosted him with a ‘How do, Mr Memnon? But, indeed, Mr Memnon, I’m prodigious glad to see you. By the by, Mr Memnon, how do you happen to have lost an eye?’ And so she trifled on, without waiting for an answer.

Memnon hid himself in a corner, and waited for the moment when he might throw himself at the monarch’s feet. The moment came, and he kissed the ground three times, presenting his petition. His most gracious Majesty of all the Ninevahs received it very favourably, and handed it to one of his satraps to make a report of its substance. The satrap took Memnon aside, and said to him, grinning bitterly, and with a contemptuous air, - ‘You’re a pleasant sort of a blinkard, truly, to address the king rather than me, and still more pleasant to dare to demand justice against an honest bankrupt whom I honour with my protection, and who, indeed, is the nephew of my kept mistress’s waiting-woman! Leave off this business, friend, I advise you, if you value the health of your remaining eye.’

Memnon having thus in the morning abjured women, the excesses of the table, play, quarrels, and above all, the court, had been, before night, duped and pigeoned by a fine lady, filled drunk, rooked at play, drawn into a quarrel, robbed of an eye; and had been at court, where he found himself laughed at.

Petrified with astonishment, and overpowered with grief, he moves homeward, death-sick at heart. He finds his house surrounded by bailiffs, in the act of gutting it on the part of his creditors. He stops half dead under a plane-tree; he here meets the fair lady of the morning, walking her dear uncle. She bursts out laughing at seeing Memnon with his plaister.

The night came on; Memnon laid himself down on some straw near the walls of his house. A fever seized him; he fell asleep in the crisis of the disorder, and a celestial spirit appeared to him in a dream. It was clothed in a resplendent light; it had six fine wings - but neither feet, nor head, nor tail, nor resemblance to anything earthly.

‘What art thou?’ said Memnon.

‘Thy good genius,’ replied the being.

‘Restore me, then,’ said Memnon, ‘my eye, my health, my money, my wisdom.’

He then related how he had, in one day’s time, lost all these.

‘These are adventures for you,’ said the spirit, ‘which we never meet with in our world.’

‘And where may your world be?’ said the man of woe.

‘My country,’ said the spirit, ‘is five hundred millions of leagues from the sun, in a little star near Sirius; as you see here.’

‘Dear, what a nice country!’ said Memnon: ‘so you have no sluts who dupe a poor man; no particular friends who win his money and knock out his eye; no bankrupts; no satraps who laugh at you because they refuse you justice.’

‘No,’ said the native of the star, ‘none of these things at all. We are never cozened by women, for we have no women. We never commit excess at table, for we never feed. We have no bankrupts, for with us there is neither silver nor gold. We can’t have our eyes closed up, because we have no bodies made like yours; and satraps never do us injustice, because in our little star all the world is on a footing.’

Memnon then addressed him: ‘My good master, wifeless and dinnerless? How do you contrive to pass your time?’

‘In watching over the other world intrusted to our care,’ said he, ‘and I am come here just now to console thee.’

‘Alackaday!’ replied Memnon, ‘why didn’t you come last night to prevent me from committing so many follies?’

‘I was with thy eldest brother Haspar,’ said the celestial being. ‘He is more to be pitied than thou. His gracious Majesty King of the Indians, at whose court he has the honour of belonging, hath caused put out both his eyes for some petty indiscretion; and he is at this moment in a dungeon with his hands and feet in irons.’

‘It’s very hard,’ said Memnon, ‘when one has a good genius in the family, that one brother should be blind in one eye, the other in both - one lying on straw, the other in prison.’

‘Thy lot shall change,’ replied the animal of the star. It is true that thou shalt always be half blind, but then, this excepted, thou shalt be happy enough, provided always thou shalt not form the foolish project of being perfectly wise.’

‘That, then, is out of the question?’ said Memnon with a sigh.

‘As impossible,’ said the other, ‘as to think of being perfectly clever, strong, powerful, or happy. Even we ourselves are far from it. There is, indeed, one globe where all that may be had; but in a hundred thousand million of others which are sprinkled over space, everything is got by degrees. One feels less pleasanter in the second than in the first; still less in the third than in the second; and so on down to the last, where every mother’s son is an absolute fool.’

‘I greatly fear,’ said Memnon, ‘that our little terraqueous globe is precisely the little habitation of the universe about which you are doing me the honour to speak.’

‘Not altogether’ said the spirit, ‘but nearly so; everything must have its place.’

‘But stay,’ said Memnon; ‘some poets and philosophers, then, are in the wrong to say that everything is for the best?’

‘They are quite right,’ said the philosopher of the upper regions, ‘if we consider the arrangement of the whole universe.’

‘Ah!’ replied poor Memnon, ‘I shall never be able to see that, till I’ve got back my other eye.’