n. This pompous
abstraction presents us with a conception at once ambitious and sterile.
The Stoic wise man is a sort of moral Phoenix, impossible and repulsive.
He is intrepid in dangers, free from all passion, happy in adversity,
calm in the storm; he alone knows how to live, because he alone knows
how to die; he is the master of the world, because he is master of
himself, and the equal of God; he looks down upon everything with
sublime imperturbability, despising the sadnesses of humanity and
smiling with irritating loftiness at all our hopes and all our fears.
But, in another sketch of this faultless and unpleasant monster, Seneca
presents us, not the proud athlete who challenges the universe and is
invulnerable to all the stings and arrows of passion or of fate, but a
hero in the serenity of absolute triumph, more tender, indeed, but still
without desires, without passions, without needs, who can fell no pity,
because pity is a weakness which disturbs his sapient calm! Well might
the eloquent Bossuet exclaim, as he read of these chimerical
perfections, "It is to take a tone too lofty for feeble and mortal men.
But, O maxims truly pompous! O affected insensibility! O false and
imaginary wisdom! which fancies itself strong because it is hard, and
generous because it is puffed up! How are these principles opposed to
the modest simplicity of the Saviour of souls, who, in our Gospel
contemplating His faithful ones in affliction, confesses that they will
be saddened by it! _Ye shall weep and lament_." Shall Christians be
jealous of such wisdom as Stoicism did really attain, when they compare
this dry and bloodless ideal with Him who wept over Jerusalem and
mourned by the grave of Lazarus, who had a mother and a friend, who
disdained none, who pitied all, who humbled Himself to death, even the
death of the cross, whose divine excellence we cannot indeed attain
because He is God, but whose example we can imitate because He was
very man?[77]

[Footnote 77: See Martha, _Les Moralistes_, p. 50; Aubertin, _Seneque et
St. Paul_ p. 250.]

The one grand aim of the life and philosophy of Seneca was _Ease_. It is
the topic which constantly recurs in his books _On a Happy Life, On
Tranquility of Mind, On Anger_, and _On the Ease_ and _On the Firmness
of the Sage_. It is the pitiless apathy, the stern repression, of every
form of emotion, which was constantly glorified as the aim of
philosophy. It made Stilpo exclaim, when he had l