LOGIC OF FINE WRITERS.

“Chateaubriand, speaking of the variety and extent of modern discoveries, observes ‘Le Génie de l’homme est véritablement trop grand pour sa petite habitation; il faut en conclure qu’il est destiné à une plus haute demeure.’”⁠[33]⁠

Voyage en Italie et en Amérique.

This is a good specimen of the logic of “fine writing,” “plenty of eloquence, and little wisdom.” What a sweeping conclusion from one little word (trop)! Man is too great for this world, and therefore he belongs to another! Never was an oratorical exaggeration worse applied. Amidst all the magnificent results of human ingenuity, which have thus powerfully excited the susceptible imagination of the French academician, want, and disease, and ignorance, are still the especial characteristics of the species. No where are the essentials of good government generally understood; still less so the art of maintaining public liberty, when once acquired. No where is morality independent of the executioner,—no where is life maintained by the great bulk of the community at a less expence, than that of constant unremitting labour. Look at that half-starved moving mass of rags, by courtesy called an Irish peasant; reflect upon his helpless incapacity, his physical destitution, his moral annihilation! Yet is he the subject of an empire, in which all the powers of the species are carried to the highest point of development, to which man has ever reached. Might we not equally conclude, from this spectacle, that the human animal is so ill adapted to his mundane existence, that he must be intended for another? Stripped of all exaggeration, the adaptation of our intellectual powers to our necessities, though exceedingly imperfect, is still abundantly sufficient to carry conviction, that the earth is the sojourn of man’s especial destiny: whether, with Chateaubriand, we are to jump to a conclusion, and say, “therefore he is destined to no other,” I leave to the consideration of those who have no better argument for determining their faith.