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Updated: June 28, 2025
He is the heir of madness, an egotist with the makings of a cynic, raised to sanity by a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature, passing from the heights of triumph to the lowest depths of misery, driven into madness by the loss of her whom he has loved, and when he has at length passed through the fiery furnace, and has recovered his reason, giving himself up to work for the good of mankind through the unselfishness born of his great passion."
In her face, although it was still the face of a child, there was the same inscrutable expression, the same calm languor of one who takes and receives what life offers with the indifference of the cynic, or the imperturbability of the philosopher.
When, during their engagement, the Queen had remarked with pride to Lord Melbourne that the Prince paid no attention to any other woman, the cynic had answered, "No, that sort of thing is apt to come later;" upon which she had scolded him severely, and then hurried off to Stockmar to repeat what Lord M. had said.
What was the consequence? That, at three-and-twenty, he was a cynic and an epicure. He had drained the cup of pleasure till it had palled in his unnerved hand. He had looked at the Pyramids without awe, at the Alps without reverence. He was unmoved by the sandy solitudes of the Desert as by the placid depths of Mediterranean's sea of blue.
And now, only touching middle life, he believed in nothing and nobody. He had become a cold, keen, strong-headed, selfish cynic. If ever his mind reverted to the fresher and more generous impulses or actions of his younger days, it was with a contemptuous self-pity. His view of the morality of life now was just the amount of success, of advantage, of gratification to be got out of it.
For, as well as I can guess, if that profligate is in favour with our tyrants, he will be able to crow not only over the "cynic consular," but over your Tritons of the fish-ponds also. For I shall not possibly be an object of anybody's jealousy when robbed of power and of my influence in the senate. If, on the other hand, he should quarrel with them, it will not suit his purpose to attack me.
A sentimental cynic, a sceptical believer, he was restless and melancholy at heart. Above all, he could never harden himself; those sensitive petals shivered in every wind. Whatever else he might be, one thing was certain: Lord Melbourne was always human, supremely human too human, perhaps. And now, with old age upon him, his life took a sudden, new, extraordinary turn.
Is even the abject creature who strikes his wife more abandoned than a man of the type of Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda, whose insults are dealt with a marble politeness, and who crushes his wife's sensibilities, not with a vulgar blow but with the cold and calculating cruelty of a cynic?
More moderate and more equitable than Voltaire, D'Alembert felt the danger of discord amongst the philosophical party. In vain he wrote to the irritated poet: "I come to Jean Jacques, not Jean Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan, who thinks he is somebody, but to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who thinks be is a cynic, and who is only inconsistent and ridiculous.
"I never was one, that's certain. And you are too pretty to be a cynic." "A what?" She did not know the word. "Is that a good cigar you have? Give me one. Do women smoke in your old country?" "Oh, yes many of them." "Where is it, then?" "I have no country now." "But the one you had?" "I have forgotten I ever had one." "Did it treat you ill, then?" "Not at all."
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