solitude. La Sagesse et la Chasteté sont sœurs. La chasteté est l’ornement, la splendeur de la sagesse. Ceux-là sont frères des Muses vierges qui conservent une perpétuelle virginité. Le plus grand remède à la volupté et le moyen le plus puissant pour conserver la chasteté, c’est l’étude de la sagesse et des lettres, c’est surtout la pratique de la religion et l’amour de la solitude. Voilà ce que pensait l’antiquité païenne.
Voyons maintenant l’opinion du plus grand poète dissident, l’auteur du Paradis perdu, le Dante de l’Angleterre.
Les vers que nous citons sont tirés de la pièce intitulée, Comus :
— Elder brother.
My sister is not so defenceless left
As you imagine ; she has a hidden strength
Which you remember not.
— Second brother.
What hidden strength,
Unless the strength of Heaven, if you mean that ?
— Elder brother.
I mean that too, but yet a hidden strength,
Which, if Heaven gave it, may be termed her own ;
’T is chastity, my brother, chastity ;
SHE THAT HAS THAT, IS CLAD IN COMPLETE STEEL ;
And, like a quivered Nymph with arrows keen,
May trace huge forest, and unharboured heaths,
Infamous hills, and sandy perilous wilds,
Where, through the sacred rays of chastity,
No savage fierce, bandit, or mountaineer,
Will dare to soil her virgin purity ;
Yea there, where very desolation dwells,
By grots, and caverns shagged with horrid shades
She may pass on with unblenched majesty,
Be it not done in pride, or in presumption.
Some say, no evil thing that walks by night
In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen,
Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost
That breaks his magic chains at curfew time,
No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine,
Hath hurtful power o’er true virginity.
Do ye believe me yet, or shall I call
Antiquity from the old schools of Greece
To testify the arms of chastity ?
Hence had the huntress Dian her dread bow,
Fair silver-shafted queen, for ever chaste,
Wherewith she tam’d the brinded lioness
And spotted mountain-pard, but set at nought
The frivolous bolt of Cupid : god and men
Fear’d her stern frown, and she was queen o’the woods.
What was that snaky-headed Gorgon shield,
That wise Minerva wore, unconquered virgin,
Wherewith she freezed her foes to congealed stone,
But rigid looks of chaste austerity,
And noble grace, that dashed brute violence
With sudden adoration and blank awe ?
SO DEAR TO HEAVEN IS SAINTLY CHASTITY,
That, when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried Angels lakey her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt ;
And in clear dream and solemn vision,
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
Till oft converse with heavenly habitants
Regin to cast a beam on the outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind ;
And turns it by degrees to the soul’s essence,
Till all be made immortal : but when lust,
By unchaste looks, gestures, and foul talk,
But most by lewd and lavish act of sin,
Lets in defilement to the inward parts,
The soul grows clotted by contagion,
Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose
The divine property of her first being.
Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp,
Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres
Lingering, and, sitting by a new-made grave,
As loath to leave the body that it loved,
And link’d itself by carnal sensuality
To a degenerate and degraded state.
— Second brother.
How charming is divine philosophy !
Not harsh, and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo’s lute ;
And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets,
Where no crude surfeit reigns.
Après ces témoignages éclatants de l’antiquité païenne et du plus grand poète anglais, nous ne pouvons mieux faire que de citer quelques pages de Blanc Saint-Bonnet :
« Le grand moyen de s’élever à la vertu, c’est l’enthousiasme.
« Mais l’enthousiasme, comment l’obtenir ? Il ne faut pas l’obtenir, il faut le conserver ; car vous êtes tous nés enthousiastes. Mais hélas ! tous les jours, vous travaillez à éteindre en vous cette flamme sacrée. Croyez-vous que les héros, que les Saints et les poètes, tous ces rois de l’enthousiasme, soient d’une autre race que la vôtre ? L’enthousiasme naît de la double vigueur de l’âme et du corps. C’est une impulsion presque physique et spirituelle tout à la fois ; il s’allume
