It is one mode of pleasure to listen to
the music of 'Don Giovanni,' in a theatre glittering with light, and
crowded with elegance and beauty: it is another to glide at sunset
over the bosom of a lonely lake, where no sound disturbs the silence
but the motion of the boat through the waters. A happy disposition
derives pleasure from both, a discontented temper from neither, but
is always busy in detecting deficiencies, and feeding dissatisfaction
with comparisons. The one gathers all the flowers, the other all the
nettles, in its path. The one has the faculty of enjoying every thing,
the other of enjoying nothing. The one realises all the pleasure of
the present good; the other converts it into pain, by pining after
something better, which is only better because it is not present, and
which, if it were present, would not be enjoyed. These morbid spirits
are in life what professed critics are in literature; they see nothing
but faults, because they are predetermined to shut their eyes to
beauties. The critic does his utmost to blight genius in its infancy;
that which rises in spite of him he will not see; and then he
complains of the decline of literature. In like manner, these cankers
of society complain of human nature and society, when they have
wilfully debarred themselves from all the good they contain, and done
their utmost to blight their own happiness and that of all around
them.
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