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Title: Scripture texts illustrated by general literature : Secular annotations on scripture texts
Author: Jacox, Francis
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Scripture texts illustrated by general literature : Secular annotations on scripture texts" ***
BY GENERAL LITERATURE ***
SECULAR ANNOTATIONS ON SCRIPTURE TEXTS.
Scripture Texts Illustrated
BY
GENERAL LITERATURE.
BY THE
REV. FRANCIS JACOX, B.A.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK: THOMAS NELSON & SONS,
42, BLEECKER STREET.
1871.
_Issued in this country by special arrangement with Messrs.
HODDER & STOUGHTON, of London, England._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
FELLOWSHIP IN ACHAN’S FALL 1
JOSHUA xxii. 20.
SILENT SYMPATHY 6
JOB ii. 13.
THE TEMPTER’S “IT IS WRITTEN” 10
ST. MATTHEW iv. 6, sq.
ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR 15
DANIEL iv. 27.
WIND, EARTHQUAKE, FIRE, AND STILL SMALL VOICE 32
1 KINGS xix. 11, 12.
HAMAN HANGED ON HIS OWN GALLOWS 41
ESTHER vii. 10.
TO-DAY’S SUFFICING EVIL, AND TO-MORROW’S FORECAST CARE 47
ST. MATTHEW vi. 34.
MEDICAMENTAL MUSIC 55
1 SAMUEL xvi. 23.
FREE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS 60
ROMANS vi. 20.
THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM 66
ST. MATTHEW xi. 29, 30.
THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY 70
PROVERBS xvii. 28.
PENAL PREVISION 76
1 SAMUEL xxvii. 19, 20.
BEATIFIC VISION AND OVERSHADOWING CLOUD 86
ST. LUKE ix. 34.
THE SPREADING GOURD AND THE SPEEDING WORM 91
JONAH iv. 6-8.
SELF-PRAISE 96
PROVERBS xxvii. 2.
PAINTED FACE, TIRED HEAD, AND EXPOSED SKULL 101
2 KINGS ix. 30, 35.
THE CARCASE OF JEZEBEL ON THE FACE OF THE FIELD 104
2 KINGS ix. 37.
“CONSIDER THE LILIES” 109
ST. MATTHEW vi. 28.
A HISTRIONIC ASPECT OF LIFE 114
1 CORINTHIANS vii. 31.
PHARAOH’S ALTERNATIONS OF AMENDMENT AND RELAPSE 125
EXODUS vii.-x. _passim_.
SLEEP AND DEATH 134
ST. JOHN xi. 11-14.
ELIAB AND DAVID IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH 139
1 SAMUEL xvii. 28.
THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY 143
ST. LUKE iv. 24.
DESIRED BOON: REALIZED BANE 147
PSALM cvi. 15; lxxviii. 22, sq.
“AND HE DIED” 156
GENESIS v. _passim_.
AN ULTRA-PROTESTER 165
ST. MATTHEW xxvi. 33-35; 69-75.
FLEETING SHADOWS 170
JOB xiv. 2.
HARAN TAKEN: TERAH LEFT 182
GENESIS xi. 28.
THE MOTE AND THE BEAM 187
ST. MATTHEW vii. 5.
STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS 192
1 PETER ii. 11.
THE FALSITY OF THE FAMILIAR FRIEND 200
PSALM xli. 9.
“JUDGE NOT” 208
ST. MATTHEW vii. 1.
PART-KNOWLEDGE 224
1 CORINTHIANS xiii. 9.
RULING THE WAVES 231
PSALM cxiv. 1-5; ST. MARK iv. 39.
IN DEADLY PERIL UNAWARES 237
1 SAMUEL xxvi. 8-25.
NO LEISURE 242
ST. MARK vi. 31.
A PROPHYLACTIC KNIFE TO THE THROAT 249
PROVERBS xxiii. 2.
HAZAEL’S ABHORRENT REPUDIATION OF HIS FUTURE SELF 255
2 KINGS viii. 13.
THE OPEN RIGHT HAND’S SECRET FROM THE LEFT 259
ST. MATTHEW vi. 3.
TO-MORROW 263
ST. JAMES iv. 13, 14.
THE DIVINE AUTHORSHIP OF ORDER 273
1 CORINTHIANS xiv. 33, 40.
SWEET SLEEP AND ITS FORFEITURE 282
PROVERBS iii. 24.
ONCE DENIED, THRICE DENIED 286
ST. MATTHEW xxvi. 69, sq.
LINKED LIES 290
GENESIS xxvii. 19-24.
A TIME TO WEEP, AND A TIME TO LAUGH 296
ECCLESIASTES iii. 4.
DISALLOWED DESIGNS 301
PROVERBS xix. 21
MAN DEVISING: GOD DIRECTING 305
PROVERBS xvi. 9.
A PURSEBEARER’S PROTEST AGAINST PURPOSELESS WASTE 309
ST. JOHN xii. 5.
LIGHT AT EVENING-TIME 313
ZECHARIAH xiv. 7.
WISHED-FOR DAY 323
ACTS xxvii. 29.
THE MORE THAN BROTHERHOOD OF A BOSOM FRIEND 328
PROVERBS xviii. 24.
MANY YEARS TO ENJOY LIFE: THIS NIGHT TO DIE 333
ST. LUKE xii. 19, 20.
GREAT BABYLON BUILT: A BUILDER’S BOAST 337
DANIEL iv. 29-33.
INVOCATION AND INACTION 342
EXODUS xiv. 15.
CO-OPERANT UNITS 348
EPHESIANS iv. 16.
SUBORDINATE, NOT SUPERFLUOUS; OR, DEPRECIATED MEMBERSHIP 353
1 CORINTHIANS xii. 22.
THE WRATH-DISPELLING POWER OF A SOFT ANSWER 357
PROVERBS xv. 1.
A TWICE-TOLD TALE OF YEARS 361
ECCLESIASTES vi. 6.
DAYBREAK NO SOLACE: NIGHTFALL NO RELIEF 365
DEUTERONOMY xxviii. 36, 37.
BUYER’S BARGAIN AND BOAST 367
PROVERBS xx. 14.
GRAY-HAIRED UNAWARES 372
HOSEA vii. 9.
RESTRAINED ANGER 376
PROVERBS xvi. 32.
EVANESCENCE OF THE EARLY DEW 381
HOSEA vi. 3.
EARS TO HEAR 386
ST. LUKE viii. 8.
NOT ALONE IN THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS 389
PSALM xxiii. 4.
SECULAR ANNOTATIONS ON SCRIPTURE TEXTS.
_FELLOWSHIP IN ACHAN’S FALL._
JOSHUA xxii. 20.
When Achan the son of Zerah committed a trespass in the accursed thing,
wrath fell not alone upon Achan, but upon all the congregation of Israel;
“and that man perished not alone in his iniquity.” The text is one to
arrest the thoughtless, and to suggest even to the most thoughtful matter
for very serious consideration.
“Should one man sin, and would God be wroth with all the congregation?”
That deprecatory question had been put twenty years before Achan’s
trespass, by the congregation of Israel, in the matter of Korah, when
they fell upon their faces and pleaded with God, the God of the spirits
of all flesh. And some centuries later the confession of King David in
time of pestilence took this form: that he had sinned and done wickedly;
but those sheep—those subjects of his, involved in the penalty of his
transgression, and dying off like sheep in a flock to the right and left
of him, seventy thousand of them from morning to evening, from Dan even
to Beersheba,—what had they done?
If, indeed, says Dr. South, a man could be wicked and a villain to
himself alone, the mischief would be so much the more tolerable. But the
case, as he goes on to show, is much otherwise: the guilt of the crime
lights upon one, but the example of it sways a multitude; especially if
the criminal be of any note or eminence in the world. “For the fall of
such a one by any temptation (be it never so plausible) is like that
of a principal stone or stately pillar, tumbling from a lofty edifice
into the deep mire of the street; it does not only plunge and sink into
the black dirt itself, but also dashes or bespatters all that are about
it or near it when it falls.” It is by no very subtle and far-fetched
reasoning that a living divine essays to show that we may sin in the
persons of other men, and so may sin in other countries which we never
saw, and in years after we are in our graves. For may we not, he asks,
be partakers in other men’s sins of which at their commission we knew
not, indeed at whose commission we would shudder? May we not in the
moral world sometimes set the great stone rolling down the hill, with
little thought of the ruin it may deal below? “Ah, you may live after
you are dead, to do mischief; live in the evil thoughts you instilled,
the false doctrines you taught, the perverted character you helped to
form.” And just as a righteous exemplar, “being dead, yet speaketh,” and
is a living means of good ages after he has been in his grave, “so may
you, insignificant though you be, have left some impress of yourself upon
minds more powerful than your own, and so be exercising a power to do
harm to people you have never heard of, years after you are dead.” Thus
it is that far down into unknown time, and far away into the unknown
distance, the moral contagion of our sin may be proved to spread; so that
we may still be incurring guilt after the green turf is over us, and in
lands which we have never seen and shall never see. “The evil principle
we instilled, the evil example we set, may ripen into bitter fruit in
the murderous blow which shall be dealt a century hence upon Australian
plains!” Well may the note of exclamation follow: how strange, yet how
inevitable, the tie which may link our uneventful life with the stormy
passions of numbers far away! More wonderful than even the Atlantic cable
is declared to be that unknown fibre, along which, from other men’s sins,
responsibility may thrill even to our departed souls: “a chain whose
links are formed perhaps of idle words, of forgotten looks, of phrases
of double meaning, of bad advice, of cynical sentiment hardly seriously
meant; yet carried on through life after life, through soul after soul,
till the little seed of evil sown by you has developed into some deed of
guilt at which you shudder, but from participation in responsibility for
which you cannot clear yourself.” Every sin, we are in fine reminded, may
waken its echo; every sin is reduplicated and reiterated in other souls
and lives.
A distinguished French preacher, of the Reformed faith, has a striking
discourse on what he entitles the _solidarity_ of evil; and he too
dilates upon the mysterious links which connect together persons and acts
that appear to have nothing in common,—suggesting melancholy examples of
the contagion of guilt and its consequences, of the expansive power of
corruption and its almost boundless results.
Our most powerful female writer of fiction has emphatically taught,
if a striking story can teach, that there is no sort of wrong deed of
which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can’t isolate yourself,
and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men’s lives are
as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil
spreads as necessarily as disease. “I know, I feel the terrible extent of
suffering this sin of Arthur’s has caused to others,”—so the good rector
tells one who cherishes vengeance on the wrong-doer; “but so does every
sin cause suffering to others besides those who commit it.” The problem
how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences
of his own deed this speaker pronounces to be one that might well make
us tremble to look into it; the evil consequences that may lie folded
in a single act of selfish indulgence being a thought so awful that it
ought surely to awaken some feeling less presumptuous than a rash and
vindictive desire to punish.
In another of her books the same authoress takes pains to prove how
deeply inherent it is in this life of ours that men have to suffer for
each other’s sins; so inevitably diffusive is human suffering that we
can conceive no retribution which does not spread beyond its mark in
pulsations of unmerited pain.
There is a passage in one of Madame de Charrière’s letters in which,
avowing her full recognition of the fact that she must pay in person for
the costly experience of life, she expresses the futile wish that others
might not have to share in the costs, but owns with a sigh that the wish
_is_ futile, for one does nothing absolutely alone she says, and nothing
so happens to us as to entirely exclude the participation of others: “_On
ne fait rien tout seul, et il ne nous arrive rien à nous seuls._” We are
taught by modern science that the slightest movement, of the smallest
body, in the remotest region, produces results which are perpetual, which
diffuse themselves through all space, and which, though they may be
metamorphosed, cannot be destroyed.[1] Or again, as Mrs. Browning reminds
us,—
“Each creature holds an insular point in space:
Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound,
But all the multitudinous beings round,
In all the countless worlds, with time and place
For their conditions, down to the central base,
Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound,
Life answering life across the vast profound,
In full antiphony....”
If no good work that a man does is lost—the smallest useful work, as an
octogenarian essayist assures us, continuing to be useful long after the
man is dead and forgotten, so neither do bad actions die with the doer.
“Future generations suffer for the sin of their ancestors, and one great
crime or act of folly causes the misery of unborn millions.” So all
things, it is added, hang together in one unbroken chain, of which we see
a few links, but the beginning and the end we see not and never shall see.
Seneca was writing for all time when he said that no man’s error is
confined to himself, but affects all around him, whether by example, or
consequences, or both: “_nemo errat uni sibi_.” A latter-day philosopher
assigns to a place among the most insoluble riddles propounded to mortal
comprehension what he calls the fatal decree by which every crime is
made to be the agony of many innocent persons as well as of the single
guilty one. “Ah!” exclaims Hilda to guilty Miriam, in the story of
“Transformation,”—“now I understand how the sins of generations past
have created an atmosphere of sin for those that follow. While there is
a single guilty person in the universe, each innocent one must feel his
innocence tortured by that guilt. Your deed, Miriam, has darkened the
whole sky!” To apply the lines of a reflective poet,—
“’Tis not their own crimes only, men commit;
They harrow them into another’s breast,
And they shall reap the growth with bitter pain.”
Very forcibly Mr. Isaac Taylor warns us that in almost every event of
life the remote consequences vastly outweigh the proximate in actual
amount of importance; and he undertakes to show, on principles even of
mathematical calculation, that each individual of the human family holds
in his hand the centre lines of an interminable web-work, on which are
sustained the fortunes of multitudes of his successors; the implicated
consequences, if summed together, making up therefore a weight of human
weal or woe that is reflected back with an incalculable momentum upon
the lot of each. The practical conclusion is that every one is bound to
remember that the personal sufferings or peculiar vicissitudes or toils
through which he is called to pass are to be estimated and explained only
in an immeasurably small proportion if his single welfare is regarded,
while their “full price and value are not to be computed unless the drops
of the morning dew could be numbered.” So the most popular of domestic
story-tellers expatiates in an early work on the impossibility of wiping
off from us, as with a wet cloth, the stains left by the fault of those
who are near to us. Another of the tribe, but more “sensational” in
subject and style, is keen to show how the influence of a man’s evil deed
slowly percolates through insidious channels of which he never dreams;
how the deed of folly or of guilt is still active for evil when the
sinner who committed it has forgotten his wickedness. “Who shall say
where or when the results of one man’s evil-doing shall cease? The seed
of sin engenders no common root, shooting straight upwards through the
earth, and bearing a given crop. It is the germ of a foul running weed,
whose straggling suckers travel underground beyond the ken of mortal
eye, beyond the power of mortal calculation.” And so again the caustic
showman of “Vanity Fair,” in his last completed work, paused to explain
how a culprit’s evil behaviour of five and twenty years back, brought
present grief and loss of rest to three unoffending persons; and he
characteristically utters the wistful wish that we “could all take the
punishment for our individual crimes on our individual shoulders,” but
laments the futility of any such wish, recognising as he does so plainly
that when the culprit is condemned to hang, it is those connected with
him who have to weep and suffer, and wear piteous mourning in their
hearts long after he has jumped off the Tyburn ladder.
We conclude with a suggestive stanza of Mr. Robert Browning’s, worth
learning by heart in more senses than one: he is speaking of the soul
declaring itself by its fruit—the thing it does:—
“Be Hate that fruit, or Love that fruit,
It forwards the general deed of Man;
And each of the many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan,
Each living his own, to boot.”
_SILENT SYMPATHY._
JOB ii. 13.
Job’s friends have long since been a sort of bye-word. But be it not
forgotten that the friendship of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, to the
ruined and desolate man of Uz, evidences itself as very genuine in one
or two salient points, before it came to be, what it is apt to be now
exclusively considered, all talk. Before the talk there was prolonged
silence; and before the silence there was lamentation of undoubted
earnest. Coming from afar to mourn with him, and to comfort him,
from afar off they caught sight of him, but so altered—_heu, quantum
mutatus!_—that they lifted up their voice and wept; and they rent each
one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. And
then they “sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights,
_and none spake a word unto him_; for they saw that his grief was very
great.”
The sonnet of a Quaker poet has thus far vindicated the sincerity of
their friendship, and on the ground of their silent sympathy:
“However ye might err in after-speech,
The mute expression of that voiceless woe
Whereby ye sought your sympathy to show
With him of Uz, doth eloquently preach,—
Teaching a lesson it were well to teach
Some comforters, of utterance less slow,
Prone to believe that they more promptly know
Grief’s mighty depths, and by their words can reach.
_Seven days and nights_, in stillness as profound
As that of chaos, patiently ye sate
By the heart-stricken and the desolate.
And though your sympathy might fail to sound
The fathomless depth of his dark spirit’s wound,
Not less your silence was sublimely great.”
In his vivid picture of the desolation of a bereaved husband, Sir Richard
Steele goes on to say, “I knew consolation would now be impertinent;
and therefore contented myself to sit by him, and condole with him in
silence.” “_Les consolations indiscrètes_,” says Rousseau, “_ne font
qu’aigrir les violentes afflictions. L’indifférence et la froideur
trouvent aisément des paroles, mais la tristesse et LE SILENCE sont alors
le vrai langage de l’amitié_.” Gray writes to Mason, while yet uncertain
whether the latter is already a widower or not,—“If the last struggle be
over ... allow me (at least in idea, for what could I do were I present
more than this,) to sit by you in silence, and pity from my heart, not
her who is at rest, but you who lose her.” So it happened that Mason
received this little billet at almost the precise moment when it would be
most affecting.
Horace Walpole, again, writes to an afflicted correspondent,—“I say no
more, for time only, not words, can soften such afflictions, nor can any
consolations be suggested, that do not more immediately occur to the
persons afflicted. To moralize can comfort those only who do not want to
be comforted.” So Marcia replies to Lucia, in Addison’s tragedy:
“_Lucia._ What can I think or say to give thee comfort?
_Marcia._ Talk not of comfort, ’tis for lighter ills.”
Words are words, says Shakspeare’s Brabantio, and never yet heard he
that the bruised heart was relieved through the ear. When, towards the
close of Campbell’s metrical tale of fair Wyoming, on Susquehanna’s side,
“prone to the dust, afflicted Waldegrave hid his face on earth, him
watched, in gloomy ruth, his woodland guide; but words had none to soothe
the grief that knows not consolation’s name.” But the Oneyda chief was
not on that account Waldegrave’s least efficient comforter. What though
others around him, less reticent, and more demonstrative, found utterance
easy, and shaped their kind common-place meaning into kind common-place
words? “Of them that stood encircling his despair, he heard some friendly
words, but knew not what they were.” Wise-hearted, too, was Southey’s
young Arabian, in watching silently the frantic grief of the newly
childless old diviner: in pitying silence Thalaba stood by, and gazed,
and listened: “not with the officious hand of consolation, fretting
the sore wound he could not hope to heal.” It has been called the last
triumph of affection and magnanimity, when a loving heart can respect the
suffering silence of its beloved, and allow that lonely liberty in which
alone some natures can find comfort. A late author portrayed in one of
his tales a dull, common-place fellow enough, of limited intellect and
attainments, whose, however, was one of those kind and honest natures
fortunately endowed with subtle powers of perception that lie deeper than
the head. Accordingly he is described, in the capacity of an unofficious
condoler, as appreciating perfectly the grief of his friend; at his
side throughout the day, but never obtruding himself, never attempting
jarring platitudes of condolence: “in a word he fully understood the deep
and beautiful sympathy of silence.” So with Adela and Caroline in _The
Bertrams_,—interchanging those pressures of the hand, those mute marks of
fellow-feeling, “which we all know so well how to give when we long to
lighten the sorrows which are too deep to be probed by words.” But though
we all may know so well how to give these mute marks, we do not all and
always practice what we know. ’Tis true, ’tis pity; pity ’tis ’tis true.
Adam Bede’s outburst of maddened feelings, uttered in tones of appealing
anguish, when the loss of Hetty is first made clear to him, is noted in
silence by the discreet rector, who is too wise to utter soothing words
at present, as he watches in Adam that look of sudden age which sometimes
comes over a young face in moments of terrible emotion. As Bartle Massey
elsewhere describes this silent sympathizer, “Ay, he’s good metal; ...
says no more than’s needful. He’s not one of those that think they can
comfort you with chattering, as if folks who stand by and look on knew a
deal better what the trouble was than those who have to bear it.”
Madame de Sévigné frankly deposes of her capacity as regards wordy
consolation: “_Pour moi, je ne sais point de paroles dans une telle
occasion._” Mr. Tennyson submits what is applicable to any _telle
occasion_,
“That only silence suiteth best.
Words weaker than your grief would make
Grief more. ’Twere better I should cease.”
Miss Procter sings the praises of a true comforter in little Effie,—“just
I think that she does not try,—only looks with a wistful wonder why grown
people should ever cry.” It is such a comfort to be able to cry in peace,
adds that sweet singer (with _larmes dans la voix_):
“And my comforter knows a lesson
Wiser, truer than all the rest:—
That to help and to heal a sorrow,
Love and silence are always best.”
_THE TEMPTER’S “IT IS WRITTEN.”_
MATTHEW iv. 6.
“It is written,” said the Tempter, quoting Scripture for his purpose,
when it was his hour and the power of darkness, in the day of temptation
in the wilderness. The quotation was refuted on the spot, and the Tempter
was foiled. But his failure has not deterred mankind, at sundry times and
in divers manners, from venturing on the same appeal, with no very unlike
design. The wise as serpents (there was a serpent in Eden) who are not
also harmless as doves, have now and then essayed to round a sophistic
period, or clench an immoral argument, with an _It is written_.
Among the crowd of pilgrims who throng the pages of his allegory,
Bunyan depicts one Mr. Selfwill, who holds that a man may follow the
vices as well as the virtues of pilgrims; and that if he does both, he
shall certainly be saved. But what ground has he for so saying? is Mr.
Greatheart’s query. And old Mr. Honesty replies, “Why, he said he had
Scripture for his warrant.” He could cite David’s practice in one bad
direction, and Sarah’s lying in another, and Jacob’s dissimulation in a
third. And what they did, he might do too. “I have heard him plead for
it, bring Scripture for it, bring arguments for it,” etc., quoth old
Honesty with a degree of indignation that does credit to his name.
“The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul, producing holy witness,
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the core.”
Such is Antonio’s stricture on Shylock’s appeal to Jacob’s practice,
“When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban’s sheep”; and there is a parallel
passage in the next act, where Bassanio is the speaker:—
“In religion,
What damnèd error but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?”
Against divines, indeed, of every school and age, the reproach of citing
a text in support of doctrine or practice the reverse of divine, has been
freely cast, with more or less of reason. Orthodox and heterodox, each
has flung against the other his retort uncourteous.
“Have not all heretics the same pretence
To plead the Scriptures in their own defence?
How did the Nicene Council then decide
That strong debate? Was it by Scripture tried?
No, sure; to that the rebel would not yield:
Squadrons of texts _he_ marshall’d in the field.
...
With texts point-blank and plain he faced the foe;
And did not Satan tempt our Saviour so?”
A Dublin synod of the Irish Roman Catholic bishops, a few years since,
which distinguished itself by its enthusiasm for Pope Pius IX., against
the King of Italy, and by its arrogation of a divine right of practical
monopoly in overseeing the schools and colleges of Ireland, was made the
theme of comment by unsympathetic British critics; who remarked that
when the question of education is stirred in such quarters, the dullest
heretic can divine that the national system is to be denounced; and that
it is easy to guess at the text of Scripture to be quoted in support
of the pretensions of the Church. “The command to ‘go and teach all
nations’ vested in the successors of the Apostles a rightful monopoly
of instruction in Greek, mathematics, and civil engineering.” According
to the same elastic authority, the “Puritans,” we are reminded, were
justified in shooting and hanging their enemies, because Samuel hewed
Agag in pieces, or because Phineas arose and executed judgment. “There
never was a proposition which could not be proved by a text; and perhaps
the effect is more complete when the citation is taken from the Vulgate.”
Gray’s malicious lines against Lord Sandwich, a notorious evil-liver,
as candidate for the High Stewardship in the University of Cambridge,
include this stanza, supposed to be uttered by a representative D.D.,
of the old port-wine school, and a staunch supporter of his profligate
lordship:
“Did not Israel filch from th’ Egyptians of old
Their jewels of silver and jewels of gold?
The prophet of Bethel, we read, told a lie;
He[2] drinks—so did Noah:—he swears—so do I.”
Gray’s _jeu d’esprit_ was, throughout, not in the best of taste; but it
was vastly relished at the time, as an election squib. The reference
to spoiling the Egyptians is a well worked one in the history of
quotations. Coleridge has a story of a Mameluke Bey, whose “precious
logic” extorted a large contribution from the Egyptian Jews. “These
books, the Pentateuch, are authentic?” “Yes.” “Well, the debt then is
acknowledged: and now the receipt, or the money, or your heads! The Jews
borrowed a large treasure from the Egyptians; but you are the Jews, and
on you, therefore, I call for the repayment.” Such conclusions, from such
premises, and backed by such vouchers, are open to logicians of every
order, sacred and profane.
“Hence comment after comment, spun as fine
As bloated spiders draw the flimsy line;
Hence the same word that bids our lusts obey,
Is misapplied to sanctify their sway.
If stubborn Greek refuse to be his friend,
Hebrew or Syriac shall be forced to bend:
If languages and copies all cry, No!
Somebody proved it centuries ago.”
Burns was never any too backward in having his fling at a “minister”; and
there is exceptional (and perhaps exceptionable) gusto in his averment
that,
“E’en ministers, they have been kenn’d,
In holy rapture,
A rousing _whid_, at times, to vend,
And nail’t wi’ Scripture.”
There was a time in the life of Diderot when that freest of free-thinkers
made a living, such as it was, by writing sermons to order—half a dozen
of them, for instance, a missionary bespoke for the Portuguese colonies,
and is said to have paid for them very handsomely at fifty crowns each.
Mr. Carlyle is caustic in his commemoration of this incident in Denis
Diderot’s career. “Further, he made sermons, to order; as the Devil is
said to quote Scripture.” In Mr. Carlyle’s latest and longest history,
we find once and again the like allusion. Frederick William, and his
advisers, bent on a certain match for the Princess Wilhelmina, which the
queen, her mother, as steadfastly opposed, took to quoting Scripture by
way of subduing her majesty’s resistance. “There was much discourse,
suasive, argumentative. Grumkow quoting Scripture on her majesty, as the
devil can on occasion,” says Wilhelmina. “Express scriptures, ‘Wives,
be obedient to your husbands,’ and the like texts; but her majesty,
on the Scripture side, too, gave him as much as he brought.” And at a
later stage of the negotiation, the same Grumkow appears again, citing
the Vulgate to a confidential correspondent, in reference to their
political schemings. “But ‘_Si Deus est nobiscum_’—‘If God be for us, who
can be against us?’ For the Grumkow can quote Scripture; nay, solaces
himself with it, which is a feat beyond what the devil is competent
to.” Shakespeare embodies in Richard of Gloster a type of the political
intriguer of this complexion; as where that usurper thus answers the
gulled associates who urge him to be avenged on the opposite faction:
“But then I sigh, and with a piece of Scripture,
Tell them, that God bids us do good for evil.
And thus I clothe my naked villany
With old odd ends, stolen forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.”
An unmitigated scoundrel in one of Mr. Dickens’s books is represented as
overtly grudging his old father the scant remnant of his days, and citing
holy writ for sanction of his complaint. “Why, a man of any feeling ought
to be ashamed of being eighty—let alone any more. Where’s his religion,
I should like to know, when he goes flying in the face of the Bible like
that? Threescore and ten’s the mark; and no man with a conscience,
and a proper sense of what’s expected of him, has any business to live
longer.” Whereupon the author interposes this parenthetical comment, and
highly characteristic it is: “Is any one surprised at Mr. Jonas making
such a reference to such a book for such a purpose? Does any one doubt
the old saw that the devil ... quotes Scripture for his own ends? If he
will take the trouble to look about him, he may find a greater number
of confirmations of the fact in the occurrences of a single day than
the steam-gun can discharge balls in a minute.” Fiction would supply us
with abundant illustrations—fiction in general, and Sir Walter Scott in
particular. As where Simon of Hackburn, the martial borderer, backs his
hot appeal to arms, for the avenging a deed of wrong, by an equivocal
reference to holy writ. “Let women sit and greet at hame, men must do as
they have been done by; it is the Scripture says it.” “Haud your tongue,
sir,” exclaims one of the seniors, sternly; “dinna abuse the Word that
gate; ye dinna ken what ye speak about.” Or as where the Templar essays
to corrupt the Jewess by citing the examples of David and Solomon: “If
thou readest the Scriptures,” retorts Rebecca, “and the lives of the
saints, only to justify thine own licence and profligacy, thy crime
is like that of him who extracteth poison from the most healthful and
necessary herbs.” One other example. Undy Scott, that plausible scamp
of Mr. Trollope’s making, propounds an immoral paradox, to the scope of
which one of his dupes is bold enough to object. But how is the objector
disposed of? “‘Judge not, and ye shall not be judged,’ said Undy, quoting
Scripture, as the devil did before him.” Dupes can quote Scripture, too,
and perhaps that is more demoralizing still. For Cowper did not rhyme
without reason when he declared, that
“Of all the arts sagacious dupes invent,
To cheat themselves, and gain the world’s assent,
The worst is—Scripture warped from its intent.”
_ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR._
DANIEL iv. 27.
Great was Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, even as the tree that he saw in
his dream; for, by the avowal of the Hebrew prophet who interpreted that
dream, the king was indeed become strong, and his greatness was grown,
and reached unto the heaven, and his dominion unto the ends of the earth.
But sentence had gone forth, as against the tree, so against the king.
Nebuchadnezzar was to be degraded; despoiled of his kingdom, cast down
from his throne, and driven from men, to eat grass as oxen. This counsel,
however, the prophet urged upon the sovran, that he should break off his
sins by righteousness, and his “iniquities by showing mercy to the poor”;
if it might be a lengthening of his tranquillity, or a healing of his
error.
What error? That of which ex-king Lear accused himself, when he
owned, amid words of frenzy, all however with more or less of tragic
significance in them, that he had taken too little care of _this_,—of
sympathy with desolate indigence, and of readiness to relieve the
sufferings of the destitute and forlorn.
The storm is raging on the heath, and faithful Kent implores his aged
master to take shelter, such as it is, within a hovel hard by; some
friendship will it lend him against the tempest; the tyranny of the open
night’s too rough for nature to endure. But Lear would be let alone.
“Wilt break my heart?” he exclaims, in answer to Kent’s fresh entreaty:
Kent had rather break his own. Again the drenched, discrowned old man is
urged to enter the hovel on the heath. But he stays outside, to reason on
his past and present, till reason gives way. Kent may think it a matter
of moment that this contentious storm invades them to the skin; and so
it is to him. But Lear has deeper griefs to shatter him; and “where the
greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarce felt.” Let Kent go in,
by all means: the king enjoins it—at least the ex-king desires it: let
Kent seek his own ease—and perhaps Lear will follow him in. Meanwhile,
in draggling robes, drenched to the skin, chilled to the heart, Lear’s
thoughts perforce are turned to “houseless poverty,” to the indigent and
vagrant creatures once, and so lately, his subjects, equally exposed
to the downpour of the wrathful skies, of whom he had seldom, if ever,
thought till now. Poor naked wretches, he apostrophises them, wheresoever
they are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,—how shall their
houseless heads, and unfed sides, their looped and windowed raggedness,
defend them from seasons such as these? And then, in an outburst of
repentant self-reproach, he that had been King of Britain breaks forth
into the avowal,
“O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel;
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.”
Between the history of Lear and that of Gloster, in the same play, there
is a curious and significant parallel maintained throughout. And it is
observable that when Gloster too, another duped and outcast father, is
wandering in his turn on the same heath, and is accosted by “poor mad
Tom,”—the sightless, miserable father thus addresses the “naked fellow”
whose identity he so little suspects:
“Here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven’s plagues
Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched,
Makes thee the happier:—Heavens, deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly;
So distribution should undo the excess,
And each man have enough.”
Strictly a parallel passage to the one just cited from the lips of Lear,
even as the disastrous personal experiences of King of Britain and Duke
of Gloster were along parallel lines, as we have said.
The words of Amos, the herdman of Tekoa, include a denunciation of woe to
them that lie upon beds of ivory, and eat the lambs out of the flock,
and the calves out of the midst of the stall, and drink wine in bowls,
and anoint themselves with costly ointments, and chant to the sound of
the viol,—but are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. As the minor
prophet with his woe to them that are thus at ease in Zion, so a major
prophet declares this to have been the iniquity of a doomed race—pride,
fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness, with disregard of all
means to strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. Lazarus the beggar
was, as some scholars interpret the passage, “content to be fed” on the
crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table; in which case he would not
appear to have been refused the crumbs: indeed, had this been the case,
it would scarcely, they contend, have been omitted in the rebuke of
Abraham. “The rich man’s sins were ravenousness and negligence rather
than inhumanity.”[3] He took too little care of this—that beggary lay in
helpless prostration before his doorway, the while he clothed himself in
purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day.
La Bruyère observes that “la santé et les richesses ôtent aux hommes
l’expérience du mal, leur inspirent la dureté pour leurs semblables;”
and adds, that “les gens déjà chargés de leur propre misère sont ceux
qui entrent davantage, par leur compassion, dans celle d’autrui.” If
these by comparison become wondrous kind, it is their fellow-feeling that
makes them so. _Haud ignari mali, miseris succurrere discunt._ In another
chapter of his “Characters,” La Bruyère sketches the portrait of one he
styles Champagne, who “au sortir d’un long dîner qui lui enfle l’estomac,
et dans les douces fumées d’un vin d’Avenay ou de Sillery, signe un
ordre qu’on lui présente, qui ôterait le pain à toute une province, si
l’on n’y remédiait: il est excusable. Quel moyen de comprendre, dans
la première heure de la digestion, qu’on puisse quelque part mourir de
faim?” _Il est excusable_, on the principle of Horace Walpole’s similar
plea, or apology, for unheeding royalty. He writes to Miss Hannah More
that he used to hate that king and t’other prince—but that on reflection
he found the censure ought to fall on human nature in general. “They
are made of the same stuff as we, and dare we say what we should be in
their situation? Poor creatures! think how they are educated, or rather
corrupted, early, how flattered! To be educated properly, they should
be led through hovels [as Lear was on the heath—somewhat late in life],
and hospitals, and prisons. Instead of being reprimanded (and perhaps
immediately afterwards _sugar-plum’d_) for not learning their Latin or
French grammar, they now and then should be kept fasting; and, if they
cut their finger, should have no plaster till it festered. No part of a
royal brat’s memory, which is good enough, should be burthened but with
the remembrance of human suffering.” “_Il y a une espèce de honte d’être
heureux à la vue de certaines misères_,” writes La Bruyère again. Adam
Smith, however, made a dead set against what he calls those “whining and
melancholy moralists,” who he complains, are perpetually reproaching us
with our happiness, while so many of our brethren are in misery, who
regard as impious the natural joy of prosperity, which does not think of
the many wretches that are at every instant labouring under all sorts
of calamities, in the languor of poverty, in the agony of disease, etc.
“Commiseration for those miseries which we never saw, which we never
heard of, but which we may be assured are at all times infesting such
numbers of our fellow-creatures, ought, they think, to damp the pleasures
of the fortunate, and to render a certain melancholy dejection habitual
to all men.” Adam Smith opposes this “extreme sympathy” as altogether
absurd and unreasonable; as unattainable too, so that a certain affected
and sentimental sadness is the nearest approach that can be made to it;
and he further declares that this disposition of mind, though it could be
attained, would be perfectly useless, and could serve no other purpose
than to render miserable the person who possessed it. This, of course,
is assuming the wretchedness in question to be beyond the sympathiser’s
relief. Dr. Smith may be supposed to have had in view Thomson’s
celebrated passage:
“Ah! little think the gay licentious proud,
Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround;
They, who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth,
And wanton, often cruel, riot waste;
Ah! little think they, while they dance along,
How many feel this very moment death
And all the sad variety of pain.”
Many variations on that theme of sad variety the poet sings: moving
accidents by flood and fire,—pining want, and dungeon glooms,—the
many who drink the cup of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread of
misery—sore pierced by wintry winds, how many shrink into the sordid hut
of cheerless poverty (the hovel on the heath again), etc., etc., etc.
“Thought fond man
Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills
That one incessant struggle render life
One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate,
Vice in his high career would stand appalled,
And heedless rambling impulse learn to think;
The conscious heart of charity would warm,
And her wide wish benevolence dilate;
The social tear would rise, the social sigh,
And into clear perfection, gradual bliss,
Refining still, the social passions work.”
This may, perhaps, said Baron Alderson, in winding up a charge to a
grand jury, whom he exhorted at that winter season to show sympathy and
kindness to the distressed,—this, perhaps, may be one of the objects
for which God sends suffering, that it may tend to re-unite those whom
prosperity has severed. So Burns—
“O ye who, sunk in beds of down,
Feel not a want but what yourselves create,
Think for a moment on his wretched fate
Whom friends and fortune quite disown.
Ill-satisfied keen nature’s clam’rous call,
Stretch’d on his straw he lays himself to sleep,
While through the ragged roof and chinky wall,
Chill, o’er his slumbers, piles the drifty heap.
...
Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress:
A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!”
Again and again the question recurs, to quote from an able casuist on
casual charity, why one man should be literally dying of want, whilst
another is able to send him a cheque for £100 without thinking about it,
or knowing that the money is gone? If Dives, it is asked, feels bound to
give Lazarus so much, where does he draw the line? If the demand upon the
superfluities of the rich is to be measured by the wants of the poor,
why stop at £100 rather than £1000 or £10,000 or £100,000? “This is the
question which lies at the root of half the melancholy sarcasms and still
more melancholy wit of the present day. The writings of such men as Hood
are little more than embodiments of it in a variety of forms, ludicrous
or pathetic. It forms the burden of a whole class of literature, not the
less influential because it is somewhat vague in its doctrines, and rests
rather on sentiments than on dogmas.” Now this writer believes it to be
always the best to look such questions in the face, and to attempt at
least to give the true answer to them. And the answer, at least in part,
in this instance, he takes to be that the antithesis is only sentimental,
and not logical. The poverty of the very poor is not, he contends, either
a cause or an effect of the riches of the very rich, nor would it be
relieved by their permanent impoverishment. “That it is not a cause of
their riches, is obvious from the fact that if by any change pauperism
and misery were suddenly abolished, the rich would be all the richer.”
But not to follow out a line of argument that would take us too far
afield, we may advert to a corresponding essay, in the same _Review_,
if not by the same contributor,—in which a picture is drawn of a rich
man at church, who hears some stray verses in the second lesson, or some
eloquent menace from the pulpit, which makes him very uncomfortable about
the contrast between his own easy life and the massive wretchedness of
Spitalfields or Poplar. The uneasiness is supposed to rankle in him for
some time, spoiling his digestion, and making him very cross to his wife
and daughters. Not that he “for a moment dreams of literally obeying the
texts in the New Testament that have hit him hard; for he has a shrewd
notion that they imply a very different state of society from the busy
nineteenth century. He feels that he has no time for visiting the sick,
and that if he had, the sick would think him a great nuisance; and he
knows that when he got to the bedside, he would probably be at his wits’
ends for anything to say, and would end by twisting his watch-chain,
and remarking that it was a cold day.” The practical inference is, that
if he is to do any of the corporal works of mercy, he must do them by
commission;—and so, at last, the irritation in his conscience throws
itself out in the form of a liberal cheque upon his bankers. _He_, at
least, will vindicate himself, so far as that vicarious beneficence may
avail, from any possible charge of branded fellowship with such as the
poet of the Seasons depicts, in
“The cruel wretch
Who, all day long in sordid pleasure rolled,
Himself a useless load, has squandered vile
Upon his scoundrel train, what might have cheered
A drooping family of modest worth.”
Horace Walpole, on being complimented by letter on the patience with
which he bore an acute attack of his chronic malady, replies: “If people
of easy fortunes cannot bear illness with temper, what are the poor
to do, who have none of our comforts and alleviations? The affluent,
I fear, do not consider what a benefit-ticket has fallen to their lot
out of millions not so fortunate; yet less do they reflect that chance,
not merit, drew the prize out of the wheel.” Crabbe portrays this
non-reflecting complacency in one of his metrical tales:
“Month after month was passed, and all were spent
In quiet comfort and in rich content:
Miseries there were, and woes, the world around,
But these had not her pleasant dwelling found;
She knew that mothers grieved, and widows wept,
And she was sorry, said her prayers, and slept.
Thus passed the seasons, and to Dinah’s board
Gave what the seasons to the rich afford;
For she indulged,” etc.
Not so serenely does Bishop Jeremy Taylor imagine a gazer from the skies
to look down on the sorrows of this earth of ours, in the celebrated
paragraph beginning, “But if we could from one of the battlements of
heaven espy how many men and women lie fainting and dying,” etc. And,
by the way, there is another of Crabbe’s Tales, in which, too late,
a self-upbraiding spirit thus accuses itself for neglecting a ruined
wrong-doer, whose death she has just discovered:
“To have this money in my purse—to know
What grief was his, and what to grief we owe;
To see him often, always to conceive
How he must pine and languish, groan and grieve;[4]
And every day in ease and peace to dine,
And rest in comfort!—what a heart is mine!”
Richard Savage, as Mr. Whitehead pictures him, bitterly conversant with
cold and hunger, a houseless vagrant through the streets by night, and a
famishing lounger in them by day, apostrophises Mr. Overseer in his pursy
prosperity, much as (_mutatis mutandis_) Lear apostrophises pomp. “Turn
out, fat man of substance, and bob for wisdom and charity on the banks
of Southwark. They are best taken at night, when God only sees you—when
the east wind is abroad, making you shake like the sinner who was hanged
for breaking into your dwelling-house. ‘The air bites shrewdly, it is
very cold,’ sayest thou? It is so. But tell me whether, on the fourth
night, when thou liest stretched on thy blessed bed, thy heart is not
warmer than it was wont to be—whether thou dost not pray prayers of long
omission—whether thou wilt not, in the morning, bethink thee of the poor,
and relieve them out of thy abundance? Sayest thou, no? God help thee!”
As Van den Bosch tells the big-wigs of Ghent,
“Ah, sirs, you know not, you, who lies afield
When nights are cold, with frogs for bedfellows;
You know not, you, who fights and sheds his blood,
And fasts and fills his belly with the east wind.”
Diderot rose one Shrove Tuesday morning, and groping in his pocket, found
nothing wherewith to dine that day—which he spent in wandering about
Paris and its precincts. He was ill when he got back to his quarters,
went to bed, and was treated by his landlady to a little toast and wine.
“That day,” he often told a friend, in after life, “I swore that, if
ever I came to have anything, I would never in my life refuse a poor
man help, never condemn my fellow-creature to a day as painful.” As the
sailor says, after the wreck, in one of Mr. Roscoe’s tragedies: “We may
be wrecked a dozen times, for what our betters care; but being aboard
themselves, they see some spice of danger in it, and that breeds a
fellow-feeling.” And, proverbially, a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous
kind.
Mr. Ruskin demands whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would
be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the suffering
which accompanies it in the world. “Luxury is indeed possible in the
future—innocent and exquisite; luxury for all, and by the help of all;
but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruelest
man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold.”
Gibbon records to the honour of at least one Pontiff’s temporal
government of Rome, that he—Gregory the Great—relieved by the bounty
of each day, and of every hour, the instant distress of the sick and
needy—his treasurers being continually summoned to satisfy, in his
name, the requirements of indigence and merit. “Nor would the pontiff
indulge himself in a frugal repast, till he had sent the dishes from
his own table to some objects deserving of his compassion.” A _non
possumus_ this, in its beneficent _nisi prius_ scope, more appreciable
by Protestants at least than that of some other Holy Fathers. A
sovran’s interest in the sufferings of his or her subjects is always of
exceptional interest in the eyes of fellow-subjects. Leigh Hunt knew
this, when he pictured, in her early happy wifehood, our Sovran Lady the
Queen of these realms,
“Too generous-happy to endure
The thought of all the woful poor
Who that same night lay down their heads
In mockeries of starving beds,
In cold, in wet, disease, despair,
In madness that will say no prayer;
With wailing infants some; and some
By whom the little clay lies dumb;
And some, whom feeble love’s excess,
Through terror, tempts to murderousness.
And at that thought the big drops rose
In pity for her people’s woes;
And this glad mother and great queen
Weeping for the poor was seen,
And vowing in her princely will
That they should thrive and bless her still.”
Madame de Chevreuse, in a popular French romance, is made to say to,
and _at_, Anne of Austria, that kings are so far removed from other
people, from the “vulgar herd,” that they forget that others ever stand
in need of the bare necessaries of life. She likens them to the dweller
on African mountains, who, gazing from the verdant table-land, refreshed
by the rills of melted snow, cannot comprehend that the dwellers in
the plains below him are perishing from hunger and thirst in the midst
of their lands, burnt up by the heat of the sun. When, in the same
romance—by courtesy historical; only the proportion of history to romance
in it is much about that of Falstaff’s bread bill to his running account
for sack—one of Anne of Austria’s sons, the reigning king, young Lewis
the Fourteenth, is substituted in the Bastille for his ill-starred
brother, and so comes to taste of suffering _in propriâ personâ_,—the
royal prisoner tries to remember at what hour the first repast is served
to the captives in that fortress—but his ignorance of this detail
occasions a feeling of remorse that smites him like the keen thrust of a
dagger: “that he should have lived for five and twenty years a king, and
in the enjoyment of every happiness, without having bestowed a moment’s
thought
[O, I have ta’en too little thought of this!]
on the misery of those who had been unjustly deprived of their liberty.
The king blushed for very shame. He felt that Heaven, in permitting this
fearful humiliation, did no more than render to the man the same torture
as was inflicted by that man upon so many others.”—It is in a glowing
description of one of the great fêtes at Versailles under the auspices
of this, the Grand Monarque, that M. Arsène Houssaye delivers himself
of this pensive aside: “Et la musique de Lulli achève d’enivrer tout ce
beau monde, qui ne pense pas un seul instant que près de là, à la grille
même du château des merveilles, une pauvre femme prie et pleure, tout
affamée, pour ses enfants. Qu’importe! passe ton chemin, et reviens plus
tard. Comment t’appelles-tu, bonne femme?—Je m’appelle la France: _je
reviendrai_.”
Part of the education of the royal heir-apparent of the Incas consisted
in a course of gymnastic training, with competitive trials of
skill—during which, for a period of thirty days, “the royal neophyte
fared no better than his comrades, sleeping on the bare ground, going
unshod, and wearing a mean attire,—a mode of life, it was supposed, which
might tend to inspire him with more sympathy with the destitute.” It is
to royalty that Jeanie Deans is pleading, when she exclaims, “Alas! it is
not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves, that we think on other
people’s sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then.... But
when the hour of trouble comes—and seldom may it visit your leddyship—and
when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low—lang and late
may it be yours—O my leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells,
but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly.”
An English traveller in Russia, discussing the difficulty with which
news of starving peasants reaches the ears of the czar, and tracing
the roundabout track by which, at last, when many have died, and
many more are dying, a stifled wail penetrates through the “official
cotton-stuffed ears of district police auditoria, district chambers
of domains, military chiefs of governments, and imperial chancelleries
without number,” and comes soughing into the private cabinet of the
czar at the Winter Palace or Peterhoff,—goes on to say: “The empress,
good soul, sheds tears when she hears of the dreadful sufferings of the
poor people so many hundred versts off. The imperial children, I have
no doubt, wonder why, if the peasants have no bread to eat, they don’t
take to plum-cake; the Emperor is affected, but goes to work,” etc.
Which last expression, by the way, reminds us of a _quasi_ quotation by
Mr. Carlyle of Shakespeare’s text in juxtaposition with mention of the
greatest of czars: “Descend, O Donothing Pomp; quit thy down-cushions;
expose thyself to learn what wretches feel, and how to cure it! The
czar of Russia became a dusty toiling shipwright; ... and his aim was
small to thine.” There was a miserable day in the Highland wanderings of
Prince Charles when, with Ned Burke and Donald Macleod for companions,
after roving about all night, excessively faint for want of food, he was
obliged to subsist on meal stirred in brine—there being no fresh water
within reach. The prince is said to have expressed himself thankful for
even this nauseous food—“salt-water drammock”—and to have declared, on
the occasion, that if ever he mounted a throne, he should not fail to
remember “those who dined with him to-day.” When Flora Macdonald and
Lady Clanranald, not long afterwards, came to the royal outcast,—on
entering the hut they found him engaged in roasting the heart and liver
of a sheep on a wooden spit; a sight at which some of the party could
not help shedding tears. “Charles, always the least concerned at his
distressing circumstances, though never forgetting the hopes inspired by
his birth, jocularly observed that it would be well perhaps for all kings
if they had to come through such a fiery ordeal as he was enduring.” At a
subsequent period we find him living for days together on a few handfuls
of oatmeal and about a pound of butter—referring to which he afterwards
told a Highland gentleman that he had come to know what a quarter of a
peck of meal was, having once subsisted on such a quantity for the better
part of a week. Another time we find him spending the night in an open
cave, on the top of a high hill between the Braes of Glenmorriston and
Strathglass,—a cave too narrow to let him stretch himself, and in which
he lay drenched to the skin, with no possibility of getting a fire to dry
him. “Without food, and deprived of sleep by the narrowness and hardness
of his bed, the only comfort he could obtain was the miserable one of
smoking a pipe.” Hardly was Lear himself more thoroughly exposed to feel
what wretches feel, on that night beside the hovel on the heath.
In that paradoxical essay of his, on saying grace before meat, Charles
Lamb remarks that the indigent man, who hardly knows whether he shall
have a meal the next day or not, sits down to his fare with a present
sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into
whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some
extreme theory, have entered. According to the essayist, the heats
of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion: the incense which
rises round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts it for his own. “The
very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of
proportion between the end and means. The Giver is veiled by his gifts.
You are startled at the injustice of returning thanks—for what?—for
having so much, while so many starve. It is to praise the gods amiss.”
Taking for his text the apprenticeship of good Abbot Samson at St.
Edmund’s shrine, Mr. Carlyle moralises on how much would many a Serene
Highness have learnt, had he travelled through the world with water-jug
and empty wallet, _sine omni expensâ_, and returned only to sit down
at the foot of St. Edmund’s shrine to shackles and bread and water.
Patriotism itself, a political economist has remarked, can never be
generated by a passive enjoyment of good; the evil tendency of which
he bids us see by merely looking to a city like London; where the rich
who live together in streets of fine houses many miles long, and have
every comfort provided for them without their interference, and need
nothing from the poor but what they buy for money, and conclude that the
same State which cares for them will care equally for the poor,—such
rich men, it is alleged, have every inducement to become isolated from
all but the few with whom it is pleasant to live. We may choose, says
Professor Kingsley, to look at the masses in the gross as subjects for
statistics—and of course, where possible, for profits. “There is One
above who knows every thirst, and ache, and sorrow, and temptation of
each slattern, and gin-drinker, and street boy. The day will come when
He will require an account of these neglects of ours—not in the gross.”
Mrs. Gaskell ably describes the fear of Margaret Hale, in “North and
South,” lest, in her West-end ease, she should become sleepily deadened
into forgetfulness of anything beyond the life that was lapping her round
with luxury. “There might be toilers and moilers there in London, but
she never saw them; the very servants lived in an underground world of
their own, of which she knew neither the hopes nor the fears; they only
seemed to start into existence when some want or whim of their master
and mistress needed them.” Mr. Thackeray presents Ethel Newcome in the
fairest light when he shows her studious to become acquainted with her
indigent neighbours—giving much time to them and thought; visiting from
house to house without ostentation; awe-stricken by that spectacle
of poverty which we have with us always, of which the sight rebukes
our selfish griefs into silence, the thought compels us to charity,
humility, and devotion. “Death never dying out; hunger always crying;
and children born to it day after day,—our young London lady, flying
from the splendours and follies in which her life had been passed, found
herself in the presence of these; threading darkling alleys which swarmed
with wretched life; sitting by naked beds, whither by God’s blessing
she was sometimes enabled to carry a little comfort and consolation; or
whence she came heart-stricken by the overpowering misery, or touched by
the patient resignation, of the new friends to whom fate had directed
her.” No longer _ignara mali, miseris succurrere discit_. An essayist of
Mr. Thackeray’s school, on the topic of parliamentary trains, breaks
out, or off, into the apostrophe: “Ah, judges of Amontillado sherry;
crushers of walnuts with silver crackers; connoisseurs who prefer French
to Spanish olives, and are curious about the yellow seal; gay riders in
padded chariots; proud cavaliers of blood-horses,—you don’t know how
painfully and slowly, almost agonisingly, the poor have to scrape and
save, and deny themselves the necessaries of life, to gather together
the penny-a-mile fare.” Lord Jeffrey eagerly asserted the even painful
interest with which one of Mr. Dickens’s Christmas books affected him:
“sanative, I dare say, to the spirit, but making us despise and loathe
ourselves for passing our days in luxury, while better and gentler
creatures are living such lives as make us wonder that such things can be
in a society of human beings, or even in the world of a good God.” Lord
Lytton has compared the stray glimpses one gets of want and misery, to
looking through a solar microscope at the monsters in a drop of water,
when the gazer wonders how things so terrible have hitherto been unknown
to him: “Lapped in your sleek comforts, and lolling on the sofa of your
patent conscience ... you are startled and dismayed” at the sight:
you say within yourself, “Can such things be? I never dreamed of this
before! I thought what was invisible to me was non-existent in itself—I
will remember this dread experiment.” The like is the moral of Hood’s
poem of the Lady’s Dream. From grief exempt, she had never dreamt of
such a world of woe as appals her in apocalyptic visions of the night;
never dreamt till now of the hearts that daily break, and the tears that
hourly fall, and the many, many troubles of life that grieve this earthly
ball—disease, and hunger, and pain, and want; but now she dreams of them
all—of the naked she might have clad, the famished she might have fed,
the sorrowing she might have solaced; of each pleading that, long ago,
she scanned with a heedless eye.
“I drank the richest draughts;
And ate whatever is good—
Fish, and flesh, and fowl, and fruit
Supplied my hungry mood;
But I never remembered the wretched ones
That starve for want of food.
I dressed as the noble dress,
In cloth of silver and gold,
With silk, and satin, and costly furs,
In many an ample fold;
But I never remembered the naked limbs
That froze with winter’s cold.
The wounds I might have healed!
The human sorrow and smart!
And yet it never was in my soul
To play so ill a part
But evil is wrought by want of Thought
[So Lear’s “O, I have ta’en _too little thought_ of this!”]
As well as want of Heart!
She clasped her fervent hands,
And the tears began to stream;
Large, and bitter, and fast they fell,
Remorse was so extreme,
And yet, O yet, that many a dame
Would dream the Lady’s Dream!”
An _Edinburgh_ Reviewer of mortality in trades and professions, dwelling
on the fatal conditions under which very many classes earn their daily
bread, and sometimes not so much as that,—observes that the great middle
and upper classes, accustomed to be furnished with all the appliances of
easy life and luxury, seldom give a thought as to the manner in which
their wants are supplied. “Accustomed to sip the honey, it never strikes
us that perhaps its product involves in some cases the life of the
working-bee. The lady, who, from the silken ease of her fauteuil, surveys
her drawing-room, may learn a lesson of compassion for the poor workmen
in nearly every article that lies before her.” To take one example out
of the many upon which Dr. Wynter dilates—the case of the silverer of
looking-glasses: “If the charming belle, as she surveys her beauty in the
glass, could but for a moment see reflected this poor shattered human
creature, with trembling muscles, brown visage, and blackened teeth, she
would doubtless start with horror; but, as it is, the slaves of luxury
and vanity drop out of life unobserved and uncared for, as the stream of
travellers disappeared one by one through the bridge of Mirza.”
“O let those cities that of plenty’s cup,
And her prosperities, so largely taste,
With their superfluous riots, hear these tears!
The misery of Tharsus may be theirs.”
The moral of the eastern tale of Nourjahad is practical and pertinent. He
delivers himself up to luxury and riot. He forgets that there are wants
and distresses among his fellow-creatures. He lives only for himself,
and his heart becomes as hard as the coffers which hold his misapplied
treasures. But before it is too late he is awakened to remorse, and looks
back with shame and horror on his past life. What shall he do to expiate
his offences? One thing at least is within his power, and that will he do
at once: expend his riches in the relief of want—nor rest until he has
found out every family in Ormuz whom calamity has overtaken, that he may
restore them to prosperity. Henceforth he spends his days in his closet,
laying plans for the benefit of his fellow-creatures. Ben Jonson’s
Sordido promises the like amendment:—
“Pardon me, gentle friends, I’ll make fair ’mends
For my foul errors past....
My barns and garners shall stand open still
To all the poor that come, and my best grain
Be made alms-bread, to feed half-famished mouths.
Though hitherto amongst you I have lived
Like an unsavoury muck-hill to myself,
Yet now my gathered heaps, being spread abroad,
Shall turn to better and more fruitful uses.
... O how deeply
The bitter curses of the poor do pierce!
I am by wonder changed; come in with me
And witness my repentance: now I prove
No life is blest that is not graced with love.”
So again with the rich man in one of Crabbe’s Borough sketches from life;
that rich man, to wit, who
“built a house, both large and high,
And entered in and set him down to sigh;
And planted ample woods and gardens fair,
And walked with anguish and compunction there;
The rich man’s pines to every friend a treat,
_He_ saw with pain and _he_ refused to eat;
His daintiest food, his richest wines, were all
Turned by remorse to vinegar and gall:
The softest down by living body pressed
The rich man bought, and tried to take his rest;
But care had thorns upon his pillow spread,
And scattered sand and nettles in his bed:
Nervous he grew—would often sigh and groan,—
He talked but little, and he walked alone;
Till by his priest convinced, that from one deed
Of genuine love would joy and health proceed,
He from that time with care and zeal began
To seek and soothe the grievous ills of man;
And as his hands their aid to grief apply,
He learns to smile and he forgets to sigh.
Now he can drink his wine and taste his food,
And feel the blessings Heaven has dealt are good;
And since the suffering seek the rich man’s door,
He sleeps as soundly as when young and poor.”
_WIND, EARTHQUAKE, FIRE, AND STILL SMALL VOICE._
1 KINGS xix. 11, 12.
While Elijah stood upon the mount before the Lord, there arose a great
and strong wind that rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks;
but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but
the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but
the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
We are not told that the Lord was not in the still small voice. We find
that He was. And with that voice He addressed Elijah, reasoned with him,
admonished, sustained, and directed him. May it not be said, in applying
and adapting the narrative, which things are an allegory? The import of
the narrative sublimely anticipates the homely fable of sun and wind.
Wind, earthquake, and fire, are mighty agents; but they may pass by
without tangible result as regards real influence on the spirit of man;
whereas the gentle influence of a still small voice speaks home to it at
once, and it responds to the strain, and is subdued by the spell.
The drift of the present annotations, in their applied sense, finds
expression in Ben Jonson’s reminder:
“There is
A way of working more by love than fear:
Fear works on servile natures, not the free.”
In Landor’s Parable of Asabel, the angel’s gentleness wrought upon that
turbulent, refractory spirit, “even as the quiet and silent water wins
itself an entrance where tempest and fire pass over.” It is written that
other angels did look up with loving and admiration into the visage
of this angel on his return; and he told the younger and more zealous
of them, that whenever they would descend into the gloomy vortex of
the human heart, under the softness and serenity of their voice and
countenance its turbulence would subside.
Plutarch tells us of Fabius Maximus, that he thought it hard that, while
those who breed dogs and horses soften their stubborn tempers, and bring
down their fierce spirits by care and kindness, rather than with whips
and chains, he who has the command of men should not endeavour to correct
their errors by gentleness and goodness, but treat them in even a harsher
and more violent manner than gardeners do the wild fig-trees, pears, and
olives, whose nature they subdue by cultivation, and which by that means
they bring to produce very agreeable fruit.[5]
We read of the distinguished Spanish author and statesman, Fermin
Caballero, that while under the care of a kind and judicious instructor,
he, as a boy, made rapid advance in the study of classical literature;
but that on being removed from this tutor, and subjected to harsh and
grinding discipline, he lapsed into idleness and obstinacy beyond all
control. Not the least wise of the maxims to be culled from the pages
of Terence is that in which _satius esse credit Pudore et liberalitate
liberos retinere, quam metu_. Southey insists that no man was ever more
thoroughly ignorant of the nature of children than John Wesley, as when
he enjoins: “Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod, and
to cry softly; from that age make him do as he is bid, if you whip him
ten times running to effect it.” If Wesley had been a father himself,
urges that tenderest of fathers, Robert the Rhymer, “he would have known
that children are more easily governed by love than by fear.” And as
with children, so with men, who are but children of a larger growth; and
especially so with women, if we may take the word of one of Shakspeare’s
most winsome women for it:
“You may ride us
With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs, ere
With spur we heat an acre.”
So with Landor’s Filippa, on whom harsh treatment and compulsory measures
are simply thrown away:
“Rudeness can neither move nor discompose her:
A word, a look, of kindness, instantly
Opens her heart and brings her cheek upon you.”
And as with men and women, so with peoples, who are made up of men and
women. And yet, although, as the author of the “Wealth of Nations”
expresses it, management and persuasion are always the easiest and safest
instruments of government, as force and violence are the worst and most
dangerous; such, it seems, is the natural insolence of man, that he
almost always disdains to use the good instrument, except when he cannot
or dare not use the bad one. Not that nations are without diversities
of character, and so of susceptibility to diverse modes of government.
Gibbon apologises, as it were, for Diocletian’s utter destruction of
those proud cities, Busiris and Coptos, and for his severe treatment
of Egypt in general, by the remark, that the character of the Egyptian
nation, insensible to kindness, but extremely susceptible to fear, could
alone justify this excessive rigour. The tone is that of the courtier
Crispe, to Phocas, in Corneille’s “Heraclius:”
“Il faut agir de force avec de tels esprits ...
La violence est juste où la douceur est vaine.”
And Coke maintains that if they are the best whom love induces, they are
the most whom fear restrains: _Si meliores sunt quos ducit amor, plures
sunt quos corrigit timor_. La Fontaine’s fable of the fishes and the
flute-playing shepherd, intimates the sheer futility of wasting sweet
sounds on ears not to be so caught. There are men, sententiously quoth
Dr. Tempest, in the “Last Chronicle of Barset,” who are deaf as adders to
courtesy, but who are compelled to obedience at once by ill-usage.
Educationists must provide for the contingency of having to deal with
abnormal natures of this crabbed and distorted kind. But as exceptions
only. The Jesuits are confessedly masters of the arts of education; and
the rule of the Jesuits is to lead not to drive, their pupils; to allure
and win, not to coerce and constrain them. Winsome womankind is mistress
of the like arts. Those of the sex who _are_ winsome, it has been
said, with their plastic manners and non-aggressive force, always have
their own way in the end. “They coax and flatter for their rights, and
consequently they are given privileges in excess of their rights; whereas
the women who take their rights, as things to which they are entitled
without favour, lose them and their privileges together.” Kitely’s advice
is good, in “Every Man in his Humour,” and of general application:
“But rather use the soft persuading way,
Whose powers will work more gently, and compose
The imperfect thoughts you labour to reclaim;
More winning, than enforcing the consent.”
The first bishop sent from Iona for the Northumbrian Church was Corman,
a man described by Dean Milman as of austere and inflexible character,
who, finding more resistance than he expected to his doctrines, in a full
assembly of the nation sternly reproached the Northumbrians for their
obstinacy, and declared that he would no longer waste his labours on so
irreclaimable a race. A gentle voice was heard: “Brother, have you not
been too harsh with your unlearned hearers? Should you not, like the
apostles, have fed them with the milk of Christian doctrine, till they
could receive the full feast of our sublimer truths?” All eyes, it is
added, were turned on Aidan, a humble but devout monk; and by general
acclamation that discreet and gentle teacher was saluted as bishop. The
same historian describes Aldhelm of Malmesbury, in minstrel’s garb,
arresting the careless crowd of church-goers on a bridge they must pass,
and having fully enthralled their attention by the sweetness of his
song, anon introducing into it some of the solemn truths of religion;
thus succeeding in winning to the faith many hearts, which he would have
attempted in vain to move by severer language, or even by the awful
excommunication of the Church.[6] When Fénélon was intrusted by Lewis
the Fourteenth with a mission to Poitou, to convert the Protestants,
he refused the aid of dragoons, and resorted to suavity of persuasion
alone as an instrument of conversion. Of the Protestant missions in the
west of Ireland, complaint has been made of their being conducted too
offensively, like raids upon heathendom: the Romanist, who might possibly
open his bosom to the warm rays of charity, only folds the cloak of his
hereditary faith more closely round him, when assailed by the bitter
wind of a propagandism which seeks its way to the heart by violence and
insult.[7]
It is at once, on the one part pleasant, on the other painful, to find
the Lord Treasurer Burleigh, who had ever been the fast friend of
Whitgift, frequently expressing his disapprobation of the primate’s
severity against non-conformists, and his wish “that the spirit
of gentleness might win, rather than severity.” And being here on
Elizabethan ground, let us note Mr. Froude’s reference to the diverse
procedure of Cecil and Throgmorton in their several dealings with the
queen,—she being one of the many strong-willed people, on whom menaces
and reproaches operate only as a spur. Cecil understood best Elizabeth’s
disposition. “By ‘practices,’ by ‘bye-ways,’ as he afterwards described
it, by affecting to humour what he was passionately anxious to prevent,
he was holding his mistress under delicate control; and he dreaded
lest his light leading-strings should be broken by a ruder touch.” As
with the queen, so with her people. When Catherine de Medici expressed
astonishment to Sir Thomas Smith, at a certain deference paid by his
sovereign to the nation she ruled, “Madam,” he replied, “her people be
not like your people; they must be trained by _douceur_ and persuasion,
not by rigour and violence.” The greatest of Russian empresses emulated
in this respect the greatest of English queens. Indeed, her tendency
to indulgence was imputed to Catharine II. as a fault, advantage being
taken of her constant reluctance to punish. But how far greater things
did she, on the whole, achieve with her subjects, exclaims Mr. Herman
Merivale, “thus gently led, than those of her predecessors and successors
who employed on them in such abundance the more forcible methods of
government!”
Mr. Freeman, in the course of showing that Harold’s way of bringing in
the proud Danes of the North to his obedience was not exactly the same as
William’s way, describes him as determining, with that noble and generous
daring which is sometimes the highest prudence, to trust himself in the
hands of the people who refused to acknowledge him. “These his enemies,
who would not that he should reign over them, instead of being brought
and slain before him, were to be won over by the magic of his personal
presence in their own land.” To apply what the Gaulish ambassador says of
a great Roman in Jonson’s tragedy,
“This magistrate hath struck an awe into me,
And by his sweetness won a more regard
Unto his place, than all the boisterous moods
That ignorant greatness practiseth, to fill
The large, unfit authority it wears.”
The Antwerp authorities had reason and experience on their side when they
sought to persuade the Prince of Parma, in 1585, that the hearts of, not
the Antwerpers only, but of the Hollanders and Zealanders, were easily
to be won at that moment: give them religious liberty, and “govern them
by gentleness rather than by Spanish grandees,” and a reconciliation
would speedily be ensured. Two years later, but then two years too
late, we find the prince averring that he liked “to proceed rather by
the ways of love than of rigour and effusion of blood.” This was in
answer to Queen Elizabeth, who, at a previous juncture, angrily derided
any “slight and mild kind of dealing with a people so ingrate,” and
was all for corrosives instead of lenitives for such festering wounds.
Rulers, who fail to secure what they wish by gentle means, are apt very
soon to resort to the less excellent way; like Chilperic, the “Nero of
France,” coaxing the Jew Priscus to turn Christian; first employing
argument, then trying blandishments, and anon taking to more powerful
reasoning by throwing the Jew into prison. Tytler remarks of the “violent
instructions” enforced by Henry VIII. on his envoy to James V., that had
the overbearing Tudor adopted a suaver tone, a favourable impression
might have been made; but the King o’ Scots was “not to be threatened
into a compliance with a line of policy which, if suggested in a tone of
conciliation, his judgment might have approved,” and his unwounded sense
of self-respect have consented to carry into effect.
Simon the glover, in Scott’s story of mediæval Perth, is well described
as watchful over the tactics his daughter employs towards Henry Smith,
“whom he knew to be as ductile, when influenced by his affections, as
he was fierce and intractable when assailed by hostile remonstrances
or threats.” _Par un chemin plus doux_, says a shrewd counsellor in
Racine, _vous pourrez le ramener_; whereas _les menaces le rendront plus
farouche_. Archbishop Whately deprecates the bullying and browbeating
system in vogue with certain barristers, and declares it to be a mistake
as a means of eliciting truth: he cites his own observation of the
marked success of the opposite mode of questioning, and maintains that,
generally speaking, a quiet, gentle, and straightforward examination
will be the most adapted to elicit truth; the browbeating and blustering
which are likeliest to confuse an honest, simple-minded witness, being
just what the dishonest one is the best prepared for. “The more the storm
blusters, the more carefully he wraps round him the cloak which a warm
sunshine will often induce him to throw off.”
We are told of Dr. Beattie, in his relations as a professor with his
class, that his sway was absolute, because it was founded in reason
and affection; that he never employed a harsh epithet in finding fault
with any of his pupils; and that when, instead of a rebuke, which they
were conscious they deserved, they met merely with a mild reproof, it
was conveyed in such a manner as to throw, not only the delinquent, but
sometimes the whole class into tears. Fielding’s boy-hero is at once in
tears when the kind squire takes him in hand, instead of the harsh tutor;
his “guilt now flew in his face more than any severity could make it.
He could more easily bear the lashes of Thwackum than the generosity of
Allworthy.” Mrs. Fry used to bear eager record of the docility she had
found, and the gratitude she had experienced, from female prisoners,
though the most abandoned of their sex: kind treatment, even with
restraint obviously for their good, was so new to them, that it called
forth, as Sir Samuel Romilly says, “even in the most depraved, grateful
and generous feelings.” True to the life is the picture Mr. Reade has
drawn of the effect on the actress, of a young wife coming to her as a
supplicant, instead of inveighing against her,—coming with faith in her
goodness, and sobbing to her for pity: “a big tear rolled down her cheek,
and proved her something more than an actress.” In another of his books
he illustrates the truth that men can resist the remonstrances that wound
them, and so irritate them, better than they can those gentle appeals
which rouse no anger, but soften the whole heart. “The old people stung
him; but Mercy, without design, took a surer way. She never said a word;
but sometimes, when the discussions were at their height, she turned
her dove-like eyes on him, with a look so loving, so humbly inquiring,
so timidly imploring, that his heart melted within him.” So with Janet
Dempster, in George Eliot’s story of clerical life, who “was not to
be made meek by cruelty; she would repent of nothing in the face of
injustice, though she was subdued in a moment by a word or a look that
recalled the old days of fondness.” In fine, we may conclude with the
conclusion of old Master Knowell, in the Elizabethan play:
“There is a way of winning more by love,
And urging of the modesty, than fear:
Force works on servile natures, not the free.
He that’s compelled to goodness, may be good,
But ’tis but for that fit; where others, drawn
By softness and example, get a habit.”
_HAMAN HANGED ON HIS OWN GALLOWS._
ESTHER vii. 10
Harbonah was one of the chamberlains of that king Ahasuerus, who reigned
from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty
provinces. And Harbonah it was that said before the king,—when Haman, the
son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the Jews’ enemy, had gone one step too far
in his enmity to the Jews, and had let his vaulting ambition overleap
itself in his insolent confidence in royal favour,—Harbonah it was that
prompted royal vengeance with the suggestive reminder,—“Behold also, the
gallows fifty cubits high, which Haman had made for Mordecai, who had
spoken good for the king, standeth in the house of Haman.” Then the king
said—catching at once at the chamberlain’s suggestion—“Hang him thereon.”
“So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai.”
Somewhat musty is the adage that no law is more equitable than that by
which the deviser of death perishes by his own device: _nec lex est
æquior ulla, quam necis artificem arte perire suâ_. Musty it might be
even in Harbonah’s days; but the chamberlain, in the excitement of so
signal an example, would feel that time cannot stale, nor custom wither,
the force and import of that retributive law.
Mr. de Quincey, in his memorable narrative of the revolt of the Tartars,
or flight of the Kalmuck Khan and his people from the Russian territories
to the frontiers of China (1771), relates in conclusion how Zebek-Dorchi,
the author and originator of this great Tartar _exodus_, perished after a
manner specially gratifying to those who compassed his ruin; the Chinese
morality being exactly of that kind which approves in everything the _lex
talionis_. “Finally, Zebek-Dorchi was invited to the imperial lodge,
together with all his accomplices; and under the skilful management
of the Chinese nobles in the emperor’s establishment, the murderous
artifices of these Tartar chieftains were made to recoil upon themselves,
and the whole of them perished by assassination at a great imperial
banquet.” Iterated and reiterated in holy writ is the retributive law
that the wicked shall fall by his own wickedness; that transgressors
shall be taken in their own naughtiness; that he that seeketh mischief it
shall come unto him. The presidents and princes under King Darius, who
sought occasion against Daniel, and persuaded their reluctant sovereign
to cast the prophet into the den of lions, who however wrought him no
manner of hurt,—upon _them_ the _lex talionis_ vindicated its literal
severity when they in their turn were cast into the lions’ den, and the
lions had the mastery of them, and brake all their bones in pieces or
ever they came at the bottom of the den.
The early ballads of almost every literature delight in these retributive
surprises. Genuine was the zest of our fathers for such a retort as that
of William of Cloudesly on the Justice who is having him measured for his
grave:—
“‘I have seen as great a marvel,’ said Cloudesly,
‘As between this and prime
He that maketh a grave for me
Himself may lie therein.’”
So fond is popular history of teaching this sort of philosophy by
examples, that examples to the purpose are widely accepted which are
yet not historical. Cardinal Balue, under Louis XI., is pointed out
in his iron cage, as a malignant inventor punished in and through his
own invention; but Michelet has exposed the fallacy of supposing Balue
the inventor of those iron cages which had long been known in Italy.
Still he had the “merit” of being their importer into France; and the
_lex talionis_ has its application to him. One remembers of course the
Regent Morton hugged to death by the “maiden” he had been the means of
introducing into Scotland. The French doctor, Guillotin, is even now
not uncommonly believed to have perished in the reign of terror by the
instrument invented by and named after him; whereas he quietly died in
his bed, many, many years later than that. But the Revolution history
is well stored with instances like that of Châlier, condemned to death
by the criminal tribunal at Lyons,—the guillotine, which he had sent
for from Paris to destroy his enemies, being first destined to sever
his own head from his body. A bungling executioner prolonged the last
agonies of this man, who in fact was hacked to death, not decapitated.
He tasted slowly, as Lamartine says, of the death, a thirst for which
he had so often sought to excite in the people; “he was glutted with
blood, but it was his own.” Alison recognises in the death of Murat a
memorable instance of the moral retribution which often attends upon
“great deeds of iniquity, and by the instrumentality of the very acts
which appeared to place them beyond its reach.” He underwent in 1815
the very fate to which, seven years before, he had consigned a hundred
Spaniards at Madrid, guilty of no other crime than that of defending
their country; and this, as Sir Archibald adds, “by the application
of a law to his own case, which he himself had introduced, to check
the attempts of the Bourbons to regain a throne which he had usurped.”
No man, Lord Macaulay affirms, ever made a more unscrupulous use of
the legislative power for the destruction of his enemies than Thomas
Cromwell; and it was by an unscrupulous use of the legislative power
that he was himself destroyed. Those who tauntingly reminded Fenwick,
when attainted in 1696, that he had supported the bill which attainted
Monmouth, were warned that they might perhaps themselves be tauntingly
reminded in some dark and terrible hour, that they had supported the bill
which attainted Fenwick. “God forbid that our tyrants should ever be able
to plead, in justification of the worst that they can inflict upon us,
precedents furnished by ourselves!” Again, it is in recording how, late
in life, a horrible calumny settled upon Cicero, that Mr. de Quincey,
without lending a moment’s credit to the foul insinuation, nevertheless
is free to recognise the equity of this retribution revolving upon one
who, he asserts, had so often slandered others in the same malicious
way. “At last the poisoned chalice came round to his own lips, and at a
moment when it wounded the most acutely.” _Sæpe_, as Seneca has it, _in
magistrum scelera redierunt sua_.
For
“in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.”
Plutarch rejoices in showing in Hercules an avenger who adapted the
special mode of vengeance to the distinctive deserts of the wrong-doer.
He punished with the very mode of punishment devised by those who were
now made to suffer it. Antæus he killed in wrestling, and Termerus by
breaking his skull,—it being the _specialité_ of Termerus to destroy
the passengers he met by dashing his head against theirs. Theseus was
the imitator of Hercules in this retributive system; he punished Sinis,
a bandit,—who used to kill travellers by binding them to the boughs of
two pine-trees, which were then allowed to swing back and separate—by
making an end of him in the self-same way; Procrustes again he stretched
on his own bed. Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum, infamous for his
cruelty, and specially for the device devised for him by Perillus of a
brazen bull in which he burnt his victims—this Phalaris first tried the
device on this Perillus; and when Phalaris was deposed an indignant mob
practised upon _him_ the self-same torture to which he had subjected
so many. And ever memorable among other tales of antiquity,—old wives’
fables if you will, but then have not all fables a moral?—is that of
Diomedes, who was devoured by the horses he had himself taught to feed
on the flesh and blood of men. “Ashes always fly back in the face of
him that throws them,” is a proverb in the Yoruba language, quoted by
Archbishop Trench as equivalent to our “Harm watch, harm catch,” and
perhaps to the Spanish, “He that sows thorns, let him not walk barefoot.”
An overruling Power disposes of what the malignity of man proposes, and
“Thus doth it force the swords of wicked men
To turn their own points on their masters’ bosoms.”
The psalmist felt that he was praying in accordance with the Divine will,
when he prayed that the ungodly might fall into their own nets together,
while he ever escaped them. So again with his prayer that the mischief
of their own lips might fall upon the heads of them that compassed him
about. For it was a matter at once of faith and of experience with the
psalmist, that the evil deviser and evil-doer, travailing with mischief,
conceiving sorrow, and bringing forth ungodliness, who had graven and
digged up a pit, was apt to fall himself into the destruction that he
made for other. “For his travail shall come upon his own head, and his
wickedness shall fall on his own pate.” Owen Feltham delights to recall,
from the stores of ancient and mediæval story, how Bagoas, a Persian
nobleman, having poisoned Artaxerxes and Artamenes, was detected by
Darius, and forced to drink poison himself; how Diomedes, as we have
already seen, for the beasts he had fed on human flesh was by Hercules
made food; and how Pope Alexander VI., having designed the poisoning of
his friend Cardinal Adrian, by his cup-bearer’s mistake of the bottle,
took the draught himself, “and so died by the same engine which he
himself had appointed to kill another”—a sort of enginery glanced at in
Ben Jonson:—
“I have you in a purse-net,
Good master Picklock, with your worming brain,
And wriggling engine-head”
too clever by half. Luther, in his Table-talk, welcomes the import of the
Jewish story of Og, king of Bashan, who they say had lifted a great rock
to throw at his enemies, “but God made a hole in the middle, so that it
slipped down upon the giant’s neck, and he could never rid himself of
it.” The fourth book of Southey’s “Thalaba” closes with a shriek from
Lobaba the sorcerer, which this final stanza sufficiently explains:
“What, wretch, and hast thou raised
The rushing terrors of the wilderness,
To fall on thine own head?
Death! death! inevitable death!
Driven by the breath of God,
A column of the desert met his way.”
Nor, among the lyrical pieces of the same poet, be forgotten that ballad
of the Inchcape rock, which tells how the bell put up by the abbot of
Aberbrothok to warn ships of their peril, was taken down by a sea pirate,
Sir Ralph the Rover, who in the words of an old Scottish topographer, “a
yeare thereafter perished upon the same rocke, with ship and goodes, in
the righteous judgment of God.” Many and many
“stories have been told of men whose lives
Were infamous, and so their end. I mean
That the red murderer has himself been murdered;
The traitor struck with treason; he who let
The orphan perish came himself to want:
Thus justice and great God have ordered it!
So that the scene of evil has been turned
Against the actor; pain paid back with pain;
And poison given for poison.”
Prescott’s narrative of the decline and fall of Luna, minister under John
II. of Castile, is pointed with this moral to adorn the tale; that “by
one of those dispensations of Providence which often confound the plans
of the wisest, the column which the minister had so artfully raised for
his support served only to crush him.” _Sæpe intereunt aliis meditantes
necem_; and that by the very means mediated.
“For ’tis the sport, to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard,”
says Hamlet, in vindictive anticipation of such an issue, or rather
upshot. The guilty king, his uncle, suggests misgivings lest his arrows,
by a certain mischance, might
“have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aimed them;”
and arrows, so returning, are by poetical justice apt to do the foiled
bowman a mischief. That king’s fellow-conspirator, Laertes, is thus
punished, and owns it:—
“_Osric._ How is’t, Laertes?
_Laertes._ Why as a woodcock to my own springe, Osric;
I am justly killed with mine own treachery.”
And so is the king himself; and he, Laertes testifies,—
“is justly served:
It is a poison tempered by himself”
for Hamlet, which Claudius has just drank of, and drinking died. The
tragedy of the prince of Denmark does indeed abound in instances of what
Horatio calls
“Accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
And deaths put on by cunning and forced cause;
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on the inventors’ heads.”
_TO-DAY’S SUFFICING EVIL, AND TO-MORROW’S FORECAST CARE._
ST. MATTHEW vi. 34.
With a divine calm fall those words from the Sermon of the Mount—spoken
as never man spake—which bid us take “no thought for the morrow; for the
morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the
day is the evil thereof.”
Pagan philosophy had, and natural theism has, its approximation to
the same point of view. Horace is all for letting the mind enjoy the
enjoyable present, and for leaving no room or resting-place for the sole
of the foot of Black Care, raven and unclean bird that she is. The morrow
may be hers, but to-day at least is his, and the morrow shall take care
for the things of itself:
“Lætus in præsens animus quod ultra est
Oderit curare.”
David Hume, again, meets the doctrine that we should always have before
our eyes, death, disease, poverty, blindness, calumny, and the like,
as ills which are incident to human nature, and which may befall us
to-morrow,—by the answer, that if we confine ourselves to a general and
distant reflection on the ills of human life, such a vague procedure can
have no effect to prepare us for them; and that if, on the other hand, by
close and intense meditation we render them present and intimate to us,
we realise the true secret for poisoning all our pleasures, and rendering
us perpetually miserable. He grieves more than need be, who begins to
grieve before he need, is one of Seneca’s sententious sayings: _Plus
dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet quam necesse est_. One of Mrs.
Gore’s women of the world—who might probably be counted by the hundred—is
sprightly and smart in her rebuke of her husband and his sister for their
delight in perplexing the brightest moments of existence by all the
agonies of second sight, and whom she represents as quite indignant when
they find her sympathy waiting the actual occurrence of evil. “I hate,”
she says, “to turn back my head towards the dark shadow that follows me,
or direct my telescope towards a coming storm.” And herein was she wise,
if not with all the wisdom of those Christian morals, of which we have so
impressive an expositor in Sir Thomas Browne. “Leave future occurrences
to their uncertainties,” writes the fine old physician, Religiosus
Medicus, “think that which is present thy own; and, since ’tis easier to
foretell an eclipse than a foul day at some distance, look for little
regular below. Attend with patience the uncertainty of things, and what
lieth yet unexerted in the chaos of futurity.” Shakspeare’s noble Roman,
at the dawn of the day of battle on which so much depends, is natural man
enough to utter the aspiration:
“O, that a man might know
The end of this day’s business, ere it come!”
But he is also stoic philosopher enough to check that prospective
yearning, with the reflection,
“But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known.”
Swift opens his Birthday Address to Stella with the assurance,
“This day, whate’er the fates decree,
Shall still be kept with joy by me:
This day, then, let us not be told,
That you are sick and I grown old;
Nor think on our approaching ills,
And talk of spectacles and pills;
To-morrow will be time enough
To hear such mortifying stuff.”
For once, however, it is only in the opening verses that the dean
is jocose; and he soon turns aside from his strain of levity to bid
Stella accept some serious lines “from not the gravest of divines.”
Schleiermacher, in one of his rather gushing letters,—for he, too, though
nothing of a Swift, and though of real weight in divinity, was not in all
senses the gravest of divines,—implores his “dearest Jette” not to look
so much into the future. He cannot beg this too earnestly and too often,
he says,—so depressed is Jette apt to be by anticipation of things to
come, and from a perverse habit of condensing advent difficulties. “It is
easy to see through _one_ pane of glass, but through ten placed one upon
another we cannot see. Does this prove that each one is not transparent?
or are we ever called upon to look through more than one at a time?
Double panes we only have recourse to for warmth; and just so it is with
life. We have but to live _one_ moment at a time. Keep each one isolated,
and you will easily see your way through them.” So again writes good
Frederick Perthes to his wife, whose fearful and hopeful longings, he
tells her, are indeed guarantees for the great future beyond the grave,
but whom he urges to bear in mind that a vigorous grasp of the present
is our duty so long as we are upon earth. It is the present moment, he
reminds her, that supplies the energy and decision that fit us for life;
retrospect brings sadness, and the dark future excites fears, so that we
should be crippled in our exertions were we not to lay a vigorous grasp
upon the present. And
“Labour with what zeal you will,
Something still remains undone;
Something uncompleted still
Waits the rising of the sun.
By the bedside, on the stair,
At the threshold, near the gates,
With its menace or its prayer,
Like a mendicant it waits;
Waits, and will not go away;
Waits, and will not be gainsaid:
By the cares of yesterday
Each to-day is heavier made;
Till at length the burden seems
Greater than our strength can bear;
Heavy as the weight of dreams
Pressing on us everywhere.
And we stand from day to day,
Like the dwarfs of times gone by,
Who, as Northern legends say,
On their shoulders held the sky.”
Quite exceptional is the temperament impersonated by Wordsworth in one
who seemed a man of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows.
Longfellow has his midnight reflection on To-morrow; himself a watcher
and contemplative, his little ones asleep: and thus the _pensées_ end:
“To-morrow! the mysterious, unknown guest,
Who cries to me, ‘Remember Barmecide,
And tremble to be happy with the rest.’
And I make answer, ‘I am satisfied;
I dare not ask; I know not what is best;
God hath already said what shall betide.’”
There is never, observes Madame d’Arblay, in her diary, such a
superfluity of actual happiness as to make it either rational or
justifiable to feed upon _expected_ misery. “That portion of philosophy
which belongs to making the most of the present day, grows upon me
strongly; and, as I have suffered infinitely from its neglect, it is what
I most encourage, and, indeed, require.” Kindly ordained, she takes it,
is the concealment of
“the day of sorrow;
And enough is the present tense of toil—
For this world, to all, is a stiffish soil—
And the mind flies back with a glad recoil
From the debts not due till to-morrow.”
It is one of Scott’s young heroes who opens a letter of troublous tidings
with the confession that, until now, he had rarely known what it was to
sustain a moment’s real sorrow; what he called such was, he now felt
assured, only the weariness of mind which, having nothing actually
present to complain of, turns upon itself, and becomes anxious about the
future—disregarding the Scriptural monition that sufficient unto the day
is the evil thereof. Is there, Armstrong asks,
“an evil worse than fear itself?
And what avails it that indulgent Heaven
From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come,
If we, ingenious to torment ourselves,
Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own?
Enjoy the present; nor, with needless cares
Of what may spring from blind misfortune’s womb,
Appal the surest hours that life bestows:
Serene, and master of yourself, prepare
For what may come; and leave the rest to Heaven.”
Prevision and imagination, as Rousseau says, multiply the evils of our
lot: “_Pour moi_,” he professes—however the profession may have squared
with the practice—“_j’ai beau savoir que je soufrirai demain, il me
suffit de ne pas souffrir aujourd’hui pour être tranquille_.” It is
certainly a frenzy, quoth old Montaigne, to go now and whip yourself,
because it may so fall out that fortune may one day decree you a
whipping, and to put on your furred gown at Midsummer, because you will
stand in need of it at Christmas. It was one of Madame de Sévigné’s
maxims in life to “regarder l’avenir comme une obscurité, dont il peut
arriver des biens et des clartés à quoi l’on ne s’attend pas.” Milton’s
Adam laments the mournful privilege of “visions ill foreseen.” Better had
he lived ignorant of future! so had borne his part of evil only, each
day’s lot enough to bear. So again, in Milton’s Masque, the elder brother
bids the younger be not over-exquisite to cast the fashion of uncertain
evils:
“For grant they be so, while they rest unknown,
What need a man forestall his date of grief,
And run to meet what he would most avoid?”
And once more, Milton himself, in one of those Sonnets which stand in
the like relation of merit to his great epic that Shakspeare’s do to
his great dramas, admonishes his scholar, Cyriack Skinner, that heaven
disproves the care,
“though wise in show,
That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.”
“Melancholy commonly flies to the future for its aliment,” says Sydney
Smith, “and it must be encountered,” he adds, “by diminishing the range
of our views.” The great remedy for melancholy, he insists in another
place, is to “take short views of life.” Are you happy now? Then why
destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at
all? For “every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them
shadows of your own making.” One of his correspondents he emphatically
counsels to dispel that prophetic gloom which dives into futurity, to
extract sorrow from days and years to come, and which considers its
own unhappy visions as the decrees of Providence. “We know nothing of
to-morrow, our business is to be good and happy to day.” In effect, like
Maucroix,
“Il rit de ces prudents qui, par trop de sagesse,
S’en vont dans l’avenir chercher de la tristesse
Et des soucis cuisants.”
Once and again in his autobiography does the most influential, perhaps,
of French philosophers avow his resolve _á vivre désormais au jour la
journée_, to take short views of life, and regard distant objects as at
once illusive and elusory. “Usons de chaque jour sans trop de prévoyance
du lendemain,” says another. And it was an old French poet, fourscore and
upwards, who in 1700 wrote the four verses which since then have been
often cited:
“Chaque jour est un bien que du ciel je reçois,
Je jouis aujourd’hui de celui qu’il me donne;
Il n’appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu’a moi,
Et celui de demain n’appartient a personne.”
Dr. Boyd recognises as sound philosophy in Sydney Smith, the advising
us, whether physically or morally, to “take short views.” One of his
illustrations to the purpose is, that it would knock you up at once if,
when the railway carriage moved out of the station at Edinburgh, you
began to trace in your mind’s eye the whole route to London. Never do
that, he says; think first of Dunbar, then of Newcastle, then of York,
and, putting the thing thus, you will get over the distance without
fatigue of mind. What little child, he asks, would have heart to begin
the alphabet, if, before he did so, you put clearly before him all
the school and college work of which it is the beginning? “The poor
little thing would knock up at once, wearied out by your want of skill
in putting things. And so it is that Providence, kindly and gradually
putting things, whiles us onward, still keeping hope and heart, through
the trials and cares of life.” Every dog has its day, quaintly observes
A. H. K. B. on another occasion; but the day of the rational dog is
overclouded in a fashion unknown to his inferior fellow-creatures; it
is overclouded by the anticipation of the coming day which will not be
his. And the essayist reminds us accordingly how “that great though
morbid man, John Foster,” could not heartily enjoy the summer weather,
for thinking how every sunny day that shone upon him was a downward step
towards the winter gloom—each indication that the season was advancing,
though only to greater beauty, filling him with a sort of forecast
regret. “I have seen a fearful sight to-day,” he would say, “I have
seen a buttercup.” And we know, of course, adds his critic, “that in his
case there was nothing like affectation; it was only that, unhappily for
himself, the bent of his mind was so onward-looking, that he saw only a
premonition of December in the roses of June.” Waife, in Lord Lytton’s
story, checks his grandchild’s query when, happy, and unaccustomed to
happiness, and therefore distrusting its continuance, she wistfully
exclaims, “It cannot last, can it?” “’Tis no use in this life, my dear,”
Waife tells her, “no use at all disturbing present happiness by asking,
‘Can it last?’ To-day is man’s, to-morrow his Maker’s.” Life being a
succession of stages, urges another practical philosopher, we should
think of one stage at a time. Most people, he judiciously reminds us,
can bear one day’s evil; what breaks men down is the trying to bear on
one day the evil of two days, twenty days, a hundred days. “We can bear
a day of pain, followed by a night of pain, and that again by a day of
pain, and thus onward. But we can bear each day and night of pain, only
by taking each by itself. We can break each rod, but not the bundle.”
And the sufferer, in real great suffering, is well described as turning
to the wall in blank despair, when he looks too far on. To cite another
illustration of A. K. H. B.’s, we should, for certain purposes, look
not at the entire chain, but at each successive link of it; we know, of
course, that each link will be succeeded by the next; but we should think
of them one at a time.
Do not say, _wait the end_, is a maxim of Paul Louis Courier’s, who
declares that, saving the respect due to the ancients, nothing is more
false than that rule. “The evil of to-morrow shall never deprive me
of the good of to-day,” is one of the brilliant Frenchman’s resolves.
Another brilliant but highly bilious Frenchman testifies from observation
and experience to the necessity, in the long run, of living from day to
day, without indulgence either in unavailing regrets or anxious forecast,
“on s’aperçoit qu’il faut vivre au jour le jour, oublier beaucoup, enfin
éponger la vie à mésure qu’elle s’écoule.” But it may too truly be said
of this philosopher that he wrote, and lived, as one having no hope, and
without God in the world.
Horace was in his placid _Il Penseroso_ mood when he counselled the
acceptance of each new-born day as possibly one’s last, and appropriating
it accordingly:
“Inter spem curamque, timores inter et iras,
Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum:
Grata superveniet quæ non sperabitur hora.”
We might suggest suggestive parallels by the score, as this from a play
of Leigh Hunt’s,
“One day—could you not try one day and then
Enjoy or fear another as it suited?
Ay, one—one—one. Try but one day, and then
Trust me if one day would not give you strength,”
for morrows in store. Or this, from a poem of Owen Meredith’s:
“Be quiet! Take things as they come;
Each hour will draw out some surprise.
With blessing let the days go home:
Thou shalt have thanks from evening skies.”
_MEDICAMENTAL MUSIC._
1 SAMUEL xvi. 23.
In the days when Saul loved David greatly, and found comfort in the
constant presence of his favourite, it sometimes “came to pass that when
the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and
played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil
spirit departed from him.”
That there is something more than ordinary in music, Bishop Beveridge, in
his “Private Thoughts,” infers from this fact—that David made use of the
harp for driving away the evil spirit from Saul, as well as for bringing
the good spirit upon himself. The gentle prelate therefore recognises
in music a sort of secret and charming power, such as naturally dispels
“those black humours which the evil spirit is apt to brood upon,” and
such too as composes the mind into a more regular, sweet, and docile
disposition, thereby rendering it “the fitter for the Holy Spirit
to work upon, the more susceptive of Divine grace, and more faithful
messenger to convey truth to the understanding.” And he cites his
personal experience—_experto crede_—in favour of this view.
Anatomizing melancholy, old Burton adds to the instance of David that
of Elisha, who when he was troubled by importunate kings, called for a
minstrel, “and when he played, the hand of the Lord came upon him.” Of
course the erudite anatomist heaps up corroborative instances of all
kinds and ages, mythological, classical, mediæval; and he quotes many of
those obscure and obsolete authorities whom it has been the cheap policy
of many a bookmaker to cite from Burton’s _thesaurus_ second-hand.
Spenser opens a canto of his “Faerie Queene” with a tribute to the powers
of minstrelsy as exercised by Orpheus,—
“Or such as that celestial psalmist was,
That when the wicked fiend his lord tormented,
With heavenly notes, that did all others pass,
The outrage of his furious fit relented.”
Or again, to quote a parallel passage from a later poet of the didactic
school, whom, perhaps simply because he (Dr. Armstrong) was didactic,
some people think as essentially prosy as Spenser is on all sides allowed
to be quintessentially poetical:—
“Such was the bard, whose heavenly strains of old
Appeased the fiend of melancholy Saul.”
Buretti declares music to have the power of so affecting the whole
nervous system as to give sensible ease in a large variety of disorders,
and in some cases a radical cure. Particularly he instances sciatica as
capable of being relieved by this agency. Theophrastus is mentioned by
Pliny as recommending it for the hip gout; and there are references on
record by old Cato and Varro to the same effect. Æsculapius figures in
Pindar as healing acute disorders with soothing songs.
“Music exalts each joy, allays each grief,
Expels diseases, softens every pain,
Subdues the rage of poison and of plague:
And hence the wise of ancient days adored
One power of Physic, Melody, and Song.”
Over Luther, as Sir James Stephen has remarked, there brooded a
constitutional melancholy, sometimes engendering sadness, but more often
giving birth to dreams so wild that, if vivified by the imagination of
Dante, they might have passed into visions as awful and majestic as those
of the “Inferno.” Various were the spells to which Luther had recourse,
to cast out the demons that haunted him; and of these remedial agencies
the most potent perhaps was music. “He had ascertained and taught
that the spirit of darkness abhors sweet sounds not less than light
itself; for music (he says), while it chases away the evil suggestions,
effectually baffles the wiles of the tempter. His lute, and hand, and
voice, accompanying his own solemn melodies, were therefore raised to
repel the vehement aggressions of the enemy of mankind.”
A story is told of Farinelli, the famous singer, being sent for express
to Madrid, to try the effect of his magical voice on the king of Spain,
who was then buried in the profoundest melancholy—proof against every
appeal to exertion, living without signs of life in a darkened chamber,
the unresisting prey of dejection beyond relief. But relief came with
Farinelli. The vocalist was desired by the physicians to sing in an outer
room, which for a day or two he did, without any apparent effect upon
the royal patient. But at length it was noticed that the king seemed
partially roused from his stupor, and became an evident listener; next
day tears were seen starting from his eyes; the day after he ordered the
door of his chamber to be left open; and at last “the perturbed spirit
entirely left our modern Saul, and the medicinal voice of Farinelli
effected what no other medicine could.” Well known in modern verse is the
poet’s picture of a despairing sufferer, whom nought avails to move until—
“At last a slave bethought her of a harp:
The harper came, and tuned his instrument;
At the first notes, irregular and sharp,
On him her flashing eyes a moment bent,
Then to the wall she turned as if to warp
Her thoughts from sorrow through her heart re-sent.
...
Anon her thin wan fingers beat the wall
In time to his old tune ...
... And in a gushing stream
The tears rushed forth from her o’erclouded brain,
Like mountain mists at length dissolved in rain.”
Nor be forgotten the impressive instance of Schiller’s Wallenstein, in
his hour of darkness, tranquillised by Thekla’s voice and lute:—
“Come here, my girl. Seat thee by me,
For there is a good spirit on thy lips.
Thy mother praised to me thy ready skill;
She says a voice of melody dwells in thee,
Which doth enchant the soul. Now such a voice
Will drive away from me the evil demon
That beats his black wings close above my head.”
William Godwin makes his savage Tyrell amenable to well warbled melody.
Readers of Scott will remember how a frenzied Highlander is soothed into
self restraint by the minstrelsy of Annot Lyle. Goethe makes the first
bar of an air by Gretchen suffice to lull the sorrows of young Werter,
who protests that “instantly the gloom and madness which hang over me are
dispersed, and I breathe freely again.” Another Charlotte—our English
Richardson’s—is less successful in her manipulation of medicinal melody,
when essaying to subdue an angry spirit by the spells of song: “I go to
my harpsichord; music enrages him. He is worse than Saul; for Saul could
be gloomily pleased with the music even of the man he hated,” But this is
antedating Saul’s aversion; in those days Saul loved David greatly.
Dr. Croly, in an eloquent paragraph of his elaborate eastern romance,
records how carefully music, “of all pleasures the most intellectual,
that glorious painting to the ear, that rich mastery of the gloomier
emotions of our nature,” was studied by the Jewish priesthood, and with
a skill that influenced the habits of the country. “How often,” exclaims
Salathiel, “have my fiercest perturbations sunk, at the sounds that once
filled the breezes of Judæa! How often, when my brain was burning, and
the blood ran through my veins like molten brass, have I been softened
down to painless tears by the chorus from our hills, the mellow harmony
of harp and horn, blending with the voices of the youths and maidens of
Israel!”
It is characteristic, as Herr Kohl observes, of music-loving Bohemia,
that in the lunatic asylum of its capital, music should be considered one
of the chief aids and appliances for the improvement of the patients. In
addition to the garden concerts, in which all assist who can, there is
chamber music—quartets, trios, etc.,—every morning and evening in the
wards; and a musical director takes high rank in the official staff of
the establishment.
Elizabeth Charlotte of Orleans, mother of the Regent, describes in one
of her letters a Madame de Persillie, well born and well bred, but a
dangerous lunatic; who however, if you could but slip a guitar into her
hand when the fury-fit came on, would become calm again as soon as she
began to play. “I pity her greatly,” writes the good-natured duchess
(whose homely German nature never became properly assimilated to the
French court); “she was very fond of me, and used to address me as _Mon
aimable_; but whenever she came to see me I always had a guitar quite
ready for her.” It was but common prudence to be thus prepared for the
worst; and when the worst came to the worst, then a guitar was best.
Schleiermacher exclaims in one of his letters, “Surely, if there was
any good in Saul’s innermost soul it must have been an _adagio_ that
exorcised the evil spirit.” The evil spirit in question is introduced
by name, Malzah, in a recent Canadian drama, and is made to avow the
accomplished fact of exorcism in the following strain:—
“Music, music hath its sway:
Music’s order I obey,
I have unwound myself at sound
From off Saul’s heart, where coiled I lay.”
Which snaky or serpentine similitude is akin to a passage in Mr.
Browning’s “Paracelsus”—distant as the kinship between the two poems may
be in other respects:
“My heart! they loose my heart, those simple words;
Its darkness passes, which nought else could touch;
Like some dank snake that force may not expel,
Which glideth out to music sweet and low.”
Again and again in Shakspeare is the remedial agency of music resorted
to by afflicted royalty. At one time it is Queen Katharine, fading and
heartsore, who bids one of her women cease working, and sing—
“Take thy lute, wench; my soul grows sad with troubles;
Sing, and disperse them if thou canst.”
And the singer’s theme is how “in sweet music is such art, killing care
and grief at heart.” At another time it is dying Harry IV., who prays his
attendants, as they bear him to an inner room—
“Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends!
Unless some dull[8] and favourable hand
Will whisper music to my weary spirit.”
And once more, we have Lear’s physician prescribing music for the safer
awakening of the distraught old man from that long sleep which was only
not his last.
_FREE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS._
ROMANS vi. 20.
In being, and so long as they continued, slaves of sin (δοῦλοι τής
ἁμαρτίας), the recipients of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans are
forcibly described by him as having been, _ipso facto_, free from
righteousness (ἐλεύθεροι τῇ δικαιοσύνῃ). But what fruit had they in the
freedom of which they were now ashamed?
“He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside.”
They knew that to whom men yield themselves servants to obey, his
servants they are to whom they are obedient, whether of sin unto
death, or of loyal service unto righteousness. There is a freedom from
righteousness, which is servitude to sin; and there is that service of
God which, though a service, or rather because a service, is perfect
freedom.
Gray, in the best known of his odes (best known by heart) devises this
expressive phrase,
“Constraint, that sweetens liberty.”
It refers to schoolboys, enjoying all the more their playground freedom
for the previous and succeeding restraints and constraints of the
schoolroom. All work and no play makes a dull boy; but so does all play
and no work. In this sense, as in so many others, does the paradox hold
good that half is more than the whole (πλέον ἥμισυ παντός), and even a
schoolboy can find by experience that a half holiday may be more than a
whole one.
Wordsworth sounds the depths of this philosophy in his magnificent Ode to
Duty. He is fatigued by freedom; he would be no longer the sport of every
random gust; he would no longer stray in smooth walks, but would serve
Duty more strictly if he might:—
“Through no disturbance of my soul,
Or strong compunction in me wrought,
_I supplicate for thy control_;
But in the quietness of thought:
_Me this uncharted freedom tires_;
I feel the weight of chance desires;
My hopes no more must change their name,
I long for a repose that ever is the same.”
Whose service is perfect freedom—that is God’s service only. The true
character of that service (in Greek Testament phrase, _slavery_) is
aptly indicated by St. Paul to the Ephesians, where he speaks of _with
good will doing service_—μετ’ εὐνοίας ΔΟΥΛΕΥΟΝΤΕΣ, ὡς τῷ Κυρίῳ καὶ οὐκ
ἀνθρώποις. The law of the Spirit of life makes free from the law of
sin and death, that the righteousness of spiritual law may be fulfilled
in those who sometime were free from righteousness. Freedom from
righteousness is, in fact, identical with that bondage of corruption from
which they are delivered into the glorious liberty of the children of
God. He that is so called, being free, is yet Christ’s servant, δοῦλος.
And, as a servant, whatsoever he doeth he is to do heartily, as to the
Lord, and not to men—τῷ γὰρ Κυρίῳ Χριστῷ ΔΟΥΛΕΥΕΙ. Goethe’s biographer
tells us how he would assert, against the encyclopedists, that “whatever
frees the intellect, without at the same time giving us command over
ourselves, is pernicious;” or would utter one of his profound and
pregnant γνῶμαι such as _Nur das Gesetz kann uns die Freiheit geben_,
i.e., only within the circle of law can there be true freedom. “We are
not free when we acknowledge no higher power, but when we acknowledge it,
and in reverence raise ourselves by proving that a Higher lives in us.”
We may wrest to our purpose the lines of Schiller, in _Wallensteins Tod_:
“Nay, let it not afflict you that your power
Is circumscribed. Much liberty, much error!
The narrow path of duty is securest.”
Liberty of will is likened by Jeremy Taylor to the motion of a magnetic
needle towards the north, full of trembling and uncertainty till it be
fixed in the beloved point: “it wavers as long as it is free, and is
at rest when it can choose no more.” What is liberty? asks M. Jules
Simon; and answers, The power of doing or not doing. But, he proceeds
to inquire, can this liberty exist independent of law?—_cette liberté
peut-elle subsister sans règle?_ Nay, liberty without rule, or law,
so far from ennobling him who possesses it, degrades him. Liberty is
not given to us to withdraw us from the authority of law, but that
we may obey it in recognising its great First Cause. Unrestrained
liberty is our ruin; liberty subjected to law, and that an immovable
law, is the instrument and the token of our true greatness. Wordsworth
philosophically affirms that “all men may find cause, when life is at
a weary pause, and they have panted up the hill of duty with reluctant
will,” to
“Be thankful, even though tired and faint,
For the rich bounties of constraint;
Whence oft invigorating transports flow,
That choice lacked courage to bestow.”
The truth admits of exemplification in a thousand minor details of
every-day life. Mrs. Gaskell relates how she heard Charlotte Brontè
declare, in reference to the “exact punctuality and obedience to the
laws of time and place” enforced by her somewhat despotic aunt on the
motherless family at Haworth parsonage, that no one but themselves could
tell the value of this control in after life: “with their impulsive
natures it was positive repose to have learnt obedience to external
laws.” In the last of her own fictions—and, though unfinished, the ripest
and best—Mrs. Gaskell herself suggestively observes of a patient who,
when a medical adviser is at length called in, finds it a great relief to
be told what to do, what to eat, drink, and avoid, that “such decisions
_ab extra_ are sometimes a wonderful relief to those whose habit has
been to decide, not only for themselves, but for every one else;” and
that occasionally the relaxation of the strain which a character for
infallible wisdom brings with it does much to restore health. M. de
Vigny, in one of his highly finished _historiettes_, speculates on the
nature and power of the instinct which seems to urge mankind, as by a
kind of necessity, to seek pleasure in obedience, and to feel a desire
to depose, as it were, their free agency and consequent responsibility
in other hands; as if thereby a burden was laid down, too weighty to be
voluntarily supported; and how this sensation of relief seems to give a
secret feeling of complacency, and a freedom to the act of obedience,
which reconcile it to the pride of human nature. Soldiers, observes Sir
Walter Scott, are always most pleased when they are best in order for
performing their military service; and licence or inactivity, however
acceptable at times, are not, when continued, so agreeable to men of the
camp as strict discipline and a prospect of employment. “I have heard men
talk of the blessings of freedom,” says Wamba to himself, when suddenly
freed from sharing the captivity of his master; “but I wish any wise
man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.” So Elia,
in his essay on The Superannuated Man, to whom life being now one long
holiday has no holiday henceforth; where he expatiates on the sight of
“busy faces to recreate the idle man, who contemplates them ever passing
by—the very face of business a charm by contrast to his relaxation from
it.” Many an individual experience can put its own private interpretation
on the averment of one of Rousseau’s correspondents—_Ce lien si redouté
me delivre d’une servitude beaucoup plus redoubtable_.
Of significant application again is De Quincey’s denial of the truth of
Lessing’s æsthetical assertion, that the sense of necessary and absolute
limitation is banished from the idea of a fine art. On the contrary,
he maintains this sense is indispensable as a means of resisting (and
therefore realizing) the sense of freedom: “the freedom of a fine art
is found not in the absence of restraint, but in the conflict with it.”
So in literature. That certain rules of composition sustain themselves
at all is due, according to Mr. W. Caldwell Roscoe, to the fact that
creative genius of a high order is not impatient of forms, but rather
loves, on the contrary, to have certain limits defined for it, and to be
freed to some extent from “the weight of too much liberty.” Shakspeare,
he adds, did not fret because tragedies are limited to five acts, nor
Milton quarrel with the formal conditions of an epic poem. Here again
shall we find in Wordsworth a passage to the point:—
“In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased, if some souls (for such there needs must be),
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.”
The biographer of Edward Irving tells us how deeply he was affected when
the decision of the presbytery against him removed him from the range
of their control, so that, “notwithstanding all his independence, the
profound loyalty of his soul was henceforth baulked of its healthful
necessities.” He felt himself with a pang to be cast unnaturally free
of restraint—“that lawful, sweet restraint, ... to which the tender
dutifulness so seldom wanting to great genius naturally clings.”[9]
Habits of instant and mechanical obedience are affirmed by Sir Henry
Taylor to be those that give rest to the child, and spare its health and
temper. Men are but children of a larger growth; and though as regards
obedience to a Father which is in heaven, “mechanical” obedience may not
be the word, yet is cheerfully implicit obedience the thing; obedience is
the privilege of the child.
“For obedience is nobler than freedom. What’s free?
The vexed straw on the wind, the frothed spume on the sea.
The great ocean itself, as it rolls and it swells,
In the bonds of a boundless obedience dwells.”
The next section takes up the same theme under another heading, and with
a fresh set of variations.
_THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM._
ST. MATTHEW xi. 29, 30.
It is in tones of winning promise and invitation that men are offered
the wearing of Christ’s yoke. Let all who are weary and heavy laden come
to Him: come, that they may take His yoke upon them. There is a seeming
paradox in the invitation. Should not the weary be invited by promised
freedom from all yoke-bearing? Should not the heavy-laden be attracted by
a pledge of entire immunity from burdens grievous to be borne, whether
heavy or light? Not so. Christ’s yoke is easy, but it is a yoke. The
burden he imposes is light, but a burden of some sort He does impose.
Being made free from sin, men become the servants—servitors, slaves
even, δοῦλοι, of righteousness. But in so being made free from sin, and
becoming servants, δοῦλοι, to God, they have their fruit unto holiness,
and the end everlasting life. And the yoke of privilege promised by
Christ differs from the irksome bonds and rigid constraint of scribes and
rabbis; a yoke which, says St. Peter, neither we nor our fathers were
able to bear, inasmuch as it implies and involves a purely spiritual
service—that we should serve (δουλεύειν) in newness of spirit, and not in
the oldness of the letter. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye
shall be free indeed.”
Keble says of men, in the “Christian Year,” that,
“Freely they own, or heedless prove,
The curse of lawless hearts, the joy of self-control.”
The joy of self-control. For what Wordsworth expressively calls
“unchartered freedom,” as revelled in by those who ignore a holy and
happy-making law of duty, is not in the long run, a boon, but a bane.
True, that, as Cowper has it,
“’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,
And we are weeds without it. All constraint,
Except what wisdom lays on evil men,
Is evil.”
But the constraint that sweetens liberty is excepted; the control that
enfranchises from servitude to self, and exalts to a liberty which
monarchs cannot grant: “’Tis liberty of heart, derived from Heaven,”
“and held by charter;” “a clean escape from tyrannizing lust.” “Grace
makes the slave a freeman;” for “He is the freeman whom the truth makes
free, and all are slaves beside.” Byron was drawing on his own bitter
experience when he wrote the lines,
“Lord of himself—that heritage of woe,
That fearful empire which the human breast
But holds to rob the heart within of rest.”
Imlac, the sage, describes, in “Rasselas” the placid flow of life enjoyed
by a devout brotherhood, whose “time is regularly distributed; one duty
succeeds another, so that they are not left open to the distraction of
unguided choice, nor lost in the shades of listless inactivity. There
is a certain task to be performed at an appropriated hour,” and the
constraint is to them a pledge of happiness, hallowed as it is with a
Divine sanction, and promissory of “an ampler ether, a diviner air” to
come, in which they shall breathe more freely, and inhale more deeply,
the breath of life.
Freedom is not the being free to do nothing, or to do just what one
likes, and when, and how, without why or wherefore. _La liberté n’est pas
oisiveté_, says La Bruyère; and then he proceeds to say what liberty is:
“C’est le choix de travail et de l’exercice: être libre, en un mot, n’est
pas ne rien faire, c’est être seul arbitre de ce qu’on fait, ou de ce
qu’on ne fait point. Quel bien en ce sens que la liberté!” But how much
worthier of that note of admiration the gospel definitions, explicit or
implicit, of _ce que c’est la liberté_!
There is a touching suggestiveness in what Frederick Perthes says in a
letter after the death of his wife. All his doings and plannings for four
and twenty years past had been solely, he declares, in reference to her.
“But now all this is over. I am no longer bound; I can do what I will,
and next to the yearning after her, I am most oppressed in my solitude
by the consciousness of freedom.” Fain would he be in those dear bonds
again; to apply a passage in one of Shakspeare’s minor poems, he
“In her fillet still would bide,
And, true to bondage, would not break from thence.”
Or as Ferdinand says of Miranda, in the “Tempest,”
“All corners else o’ the earth
Let liberty make use of; space enough
Have I in such a prison.”
In this sense may be applied in earnest what Butler writes in sport, of
an independent spirit who
“Disdains control, and yet can be
Nowhere, but in a prison, free.”
So the sculptor in Hawthorne’s tale of “Transformation,” intent on
winning winsome Hilda for his own, “would try if it were possible to
take this shy, yet frank and innocently fearless creature captive, and
imprison her in his heart, and make her sensible of a larger freedom
there than in all the world besides.” “I have read somewhere,” says a
simple maiden in one of Lord Lytton’s fictions, “that the slave is gay in
his holiday from toil; if you free him, the gaiety vanishes, and he cares
no more for the dance under the palm-tree.” Don Alphonse, in Madame de
Rémusat’s “Lettres Espagnoles,” writes to his sister an account of the
courtiers’ embarrassment on being released by the king from ceremonial
attendance, and allowed to do each one as he liked. “L’improvisation en
tout est chose assez difficile, et particulièrement celle de la liberté.
Il faut que je confesse que nous n’avons su que faire de la nôtre.” The
moral of the fable may be read in Landor’s lines, supposed to be indited
by the caged nightingales so tenderly tended by Agapenthe, and brought to
Athens for her from Thessaly, and who bid the reader think not
“That we would gladly fly again
To gloomy wood or windy plain.
Certain we are we ne’er should find
A care so provident, so kind....
O may you prove, as well as we,
That e’en in Athens there may be
A sweeter thing than liberty.”
Apply, again, to the general subject the special fact, by way of
illustration, that restrictions and shackles are essential to rhythmic
writing, and voluntary thraldom the natural condition of poetry. The
Chevalier de la Faye, in his “Apology” for the supposed difficulties of
rhyme in our Cisalpine dialects (one Italian poet being “distinguishable
among his fellow-captives by the light aërial nature of his fetters,”)
suggests an ingenious parallel to the _jets d’eau_ that ornament the
gardens of the Tuileries, Versailles, and St. Cloud, in a copy of verses
which have been thus Englished by Father Prout:—
“From the rhyme’s restrictive rigour
Thought derives its impulse oft,
Genius draws new strength and vigour,
Fancy springs and shoots aloft.
So, in leaden conduits pent,
Mounts the liquid element,
By pressure forced to climb:
And he who feared the rule’s restraint
Finds but a friendly ministrant
In Reason’s helpmate, Rhyme.”
Pithy and pertinent too are Mr. Coventry Patmore’s lines on those who
“Live by law, not like the fool,
But like the bard, who freely sings
In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule,
And finds in them, not bonds, but wings.”
They who so live are in every sense the happier, without an “except
these bonds,” but because of them. They find in them not bonds, but
wings; and thenceforth have free course, and go on their way rejoicing.
They, like the repentant rebels in Shakspeare’s “King John,” and by the
same river metaphor,
“Leaving their rankness and irregular course,
Stoop low within those bounds they had o’erlook’d,
And calmly run on in obedience.”
What they are no longer free to do, is to do ill. And that freedom is
as perfect servitude as the service of God is perfect freedom. In fine,
and in the words (but expanding the meaning) of one of Samuel Butler’s
metrical reflections:—
“Law does not put the least restraint
Upon our freedom, but maintain’t;
Or if it does, ’tis for our good,
To give us freer latitude;
For wholesome laws preserve us free
By stinting of our liberty.”
_THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY._
PROVERBS xvii. 28.
It is written among the Proverbs of Solomon, that “Even a fool, when he
holdeth his peace, is counted wise.” Even the fool that shutteth his lips
is esteemed a man of understanding. The wise king declares in another
place, that a fool’s mouth is his destruction, and that his lips are
the snare of his soul. Let him keep his mouth closed, and his folly is
an unknown quantity; out of sight, out of mind. Let him keep his lips
shut, and wisdom shall be imputed unto him. Of him lookers-on will say, a
discreet man that. For they are only lookers-on, not listeners. To listen
would break the spell. As it is, they are apt to count him as deep as he
is still. Do not still waters run deep?
Sir Thomas Browne—himself a silent man, but no fool; quite the other
way—bids us, in one of his stately sentences, think not silence the
wisdom of fools; but if rightly timed, the honour of wise men, who have
not the infirmity, but the virtue of taciturnity, and speak not out of
the abundance, but the well-weighed thoughts of the heart. “Such silence
may be eloquence, and speak thy worth above the power of words.” Would
the author of “Vulgar Errors,” however, have sanctioned for one moment
the reference of the proverb on reticent foolishness to that limbo?
On the contrary, the drift of his argument is wholly in favour of the
proverb; for, if the silence of the wise is wisdom, as he contends, much
more is a tongue-tied condition expedient in the fool.
_Stultitiam dissimulare non potes nisi taciturnitate_, says the Latin
adage: there is no way to conceal folly but by holding your tongue.
There is something at once of pathos and almost of humorous reproach, in
the appeal of the Man of Uz, in his extremity, to his too didactic and
complacently dogmatical friends: “Oh that ye would altogether hold your
peace! and it should be your wisdom.”
Montaigne exclaims, “To how many blockheads of my time has a cold and
taciturn demeanour procured the credit of prudence and capacity!” Note
the counsel of Carlo to Sogliardo, in one of Ben Jonson’s heaviest
comedies: “When anything is propounded above your capacity, smile at
it, make two or three faces, and ’tis excellent; they’ll think you’ve
travelled; though you argue a whole day in silence thus, and discourse
in nothing but laughter, ’twill pass.” Elsewhere rare Ben cites
approvingly the “witty saying,” about one who was taken for a great and
weighty man so long as he held his peace: “This man might have been a
counsellor of state, till he spoke; but having spoken, not the beadle
of the ward.” Denouncing in his strong dialect the vapid verbiage of
shallow praters, Mr. Carlyle exclaims, “Even Triviality, Imbecility,
that can sit silent, how respectable is it in comparison!” Michelet says
of the Spanish grandees of Charles the Fifth’s time, that the haughty
silence they maintained, scarce deigning even a syllable of reply,
served them admirably to conceal their dearth of ideas. Silence and
imperturbability, according to the author of “The Gentle Life,” are the
two requisites for a man to get on in the world.
If there are two things not to be hidden—love and a cough—there is a
third, contends Nello, the barber of Florence, and that is ignorance,
when once a man is obliged to do something besides wagging his head.
Charles Lamb shrewdly observes that a man may do very well with a very
little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in a mixed company; everybody
being so much more ready to produce his own than to call for a display
of your acquisitions. But in a _tête-à-tête_, he adds, there is no
shuffling; the truth will out.
The Abbé de Choisy hugged himself on the success of a discreet silence
during his residence in Batavia, where he had special reasons to beware
of committing, and of exposing, himself. “Often when I utter not a word,
they suppose it is because I don’t choose to talk; whereas the real
motive for my silence is a profound ignorance, such as it is best to
keep concealed from the gaze of mortals.” Molière’s sprightly chevalier,
Dorante, counsels a fatuous marquis not to talk of what he knows nothing
at all about—bidding him hope that in virtue of a scrupulously observed
silence, he and the like of him may haply come to be regarded as clever
fellows. “Et songez qu’en ne disant mot, on croira peut-être que vous
êtes d’habiles gens.” A story is told of Zeuxis, how he reproved a
certain Megabyzus, high priest of great Diana of the Ephesians, who
discoursed of pictures in the painter’s studio with so reckless an
audacity of ignorance, that the very lads who were grinding colours
there could not refrain from giggling; whereupon quoth Zeuxis to his
too-eloquent friend, “As long as you kept from talking, you were the
admiration of these boys, who were all wonder at your rich attire, and
the number of your servants; but now that you have ventured to expatiate
upon the arts, of which you know simply nothing, they are laughing at
you outright.” Plutarch tells the same story of Apelles. Again to draw
upon Molière: a fool who keeps his folly tongue-tied, is not to be
distinguished from a savant who hold his peace:
“Un sot qui ne dit mot ne se distingue pas
D’un savant qui se tait.”
Not to be distinguished, possibly, from a savant who talks, and talks to
the purpose too.
There are two opposite ways, on Washington Irving’s showing, by which
some men get into notice—one by talking a vast deal and thinking a
little, and the other by holding their tongues and not thinking at
all. By the first, he says, many a vapouring, superficial pretender
acquires the reputation of a man of quick parts; by the other, many a
vacant dunder-pate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be
complimented, by a discerning world, with all the attributes of wisdom.
Silent, quiet people, as Miss Jewsbury incidentally remarks, have a
charmed mystery about them which gives them a great advantage over more
demonstrative mortals; “nobody knows exactly what they think, nor the
impression made on them by anything; all within them has the prestige of
an oracle; the extent of what they indicate is unknown; and what little
is uttered goes so far.” The best, perhaps, as well as the best-known
of all stories illustrative of our theme, is that of Coleridge admiring
a certain dinner-guest, so impregnable in his sublime reserve, so
inexorably proof against every temptation to join in the table-talk, such
a model (in appearance) of dignified superiority—until there was carried
in that unlucky dish of apple-dumplings, the very first glance at which
roused Sir Oracle to the enthusiastic outburst, “Them are the jockeys for
me!” Goldsmith had, long before, recorded a somewhat parallel passage
of disenchantment. His travelled Chinese, Lien Chi Altangi, is present
at a dinner-party of dignitaries and dons in whose company and from
whose converse he expects to find a feast of reason as well as turtle,
and a flow of soul as well as claret. Their silence before dinner is
served, rather puzzles and disappoints the eager expectant; who, however,
accounts for and excuses it by the reflection, that men of wisdom are
ever slow of speech, and deliver nothing unadvisedly. “Silence,” says
Confucius, “is a friend that will never betray.” The dons and dignitaries
were now by the mandarin’s surmise, inventing maxims, or hard sayings,
for their mutual instruction, when some one should think proper to begin.
“My curiosity was now wrought up to the highest pitch; I impatiently
looked round to see if any were going to interrupt the mighty pause;
when at last one of the company declared that there was a sow in his
neighbourhood that farrowed fifteen pigs at a litter.” Broken at once was
the spell, and disillusion was the Chinaman’s doom.
Pope, being satirist of the first class, as well as poet of (say) the
second, took care, in his imitative stanzas on Silence, not to be all
sentiment and rhapsodical rapture on that subject. Hence, one or his
stanzas begins, “Silence, the knave’s repute;” and another declares
Dulness to be her bosom-friend:
“And in thy bosom lurks in Thought’s disguise;
Thou varnisher of fools, and cheat of all the wise.”
The moral of one of Gay’s fables is to the purpose—that one, namely, in
which a young dog, ignorant of game, gives tongue as lustily as if he
knew all about it, and gets well lashed for his pains. To the astounded
puppy’s remonstrance the whip-bearing huntsman replies:—
“Had not thy forward noisy tongue
Proclaim’d thee always in the wrong,
Thou might’st have mingled with the rest,
And ne’er thy foolish nose confess’d;
But fools, to talking ever prone,
Are sure to make their follies known.”
So a French satirist of the last century bids _le sot_ remember, that by
simply holding his tongue, he will acquire not a little respect—hopeless
as the reminder in such a case may be; for you might as well counsel the
coward not to tremble, as the fool not to expose himself in words, words,
words:
“Souvenez-vous qu’un sot doit garder le silence,
Il serait respecté beaucoup plus qu’il ne pense;
Mais vouloir le contraindre à ne jamais parler,
C’est, sans espoir, défendre au poltron ne trembler.”
Could it but be enforced, the one injunction to be laid upon the fool
might be condensed into an applied line from Molière, where Orgon bids
Dorine hold her tongue, and regard that as a standing order:—
“Taisez-vous. C’est le mot qu’il vous faut toujours dire.”
All silent people, Lord Lytton affirms, can seem conventionally elegant.
And he tells the story of a groom married to a rich lady, and in
consequent trepidation as to the probability of being ridiculed by the
guests in his new home and her old one, to whom an Oxford clergyman
gave this bit of advice: “Wear a black coat, and hold your tongue.” The
groom took the hint, and, we are assured, was always considered the
most gentlemanly man in the county. Elsewhere, again, the same author
relates his meeting with a diplomatist of weighty name, a stock example
of political success, but of whom he could make nothing whatever, except
indeed that he was a preposterous numskull. When, therefore, the Prime
Minister, some days later, spoke to our author of this “superior man,” he
got for a reply, “Well, I don’t think much of him. I spent the other day
with him, and found him insufferably dull.” “Indeed!” said the minister,
with something of horror in his tone; “why then, I see how it is. Lord
⸺ has been positively talking to you!” Had he but altogether held his
peace, it had been his wisdom.
According to La Bruyère, everything tells in favour of the man who talks
but little; the presumption is that he is a superior man; and if, in
point of fact, he is not a sheer blockhead, the presumption then is
that he is very superior indeed. His comparative freedom from folly is
positively presumed to exist in the superlative degree. In another place
the same observant philosopher describes in his best style the sort of
people who, by a grand talent for silence, win golden opinions from all
sorts of men; they look wise, and now and then enforce and re-enforce
the look by a timely shrug of the shoulders, or significant shake of the
head; but the assumed depth of wisdom don’t really go two inches down;
scratch the surface, and you come to the bottom at once.
For, as Shakspeare has it,
“There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond;
And do a wilful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dress’d in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit.
...
O, my Antonio, I do know of those,
That therefore only are reputed wise,
For saying nothing; who, I am very sure,
If they should speak, would⸺”
_not_ be reputed wise, but the uttermost opposite, whatever that may be
called.
_PENAL PREVISION._
1 SAMUEL xxvii. 19, 20.
Why had Saul disquieted Samuel, to bring him up from the place of the
dead, by the midnight agency of the “wise woman” of Endor? Because he
would fain pry into futurity, and learn from supernatural sources his
coming fate. The desired foresight was vouchsafed him. By to-morrow he
and his sons were to be with the dead-and-gone seer, whose spirit he had
rashly invoked. The prevision had its present penalty. “Then Saul fell
straightway all along on the earth, and was sore afraid, because of the
words of Samuel.” The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, and
only those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children.
The tree of foreknowledge of good and evil may offer fruit that is
pleasant to the sight, and seemingly to be desired to make one wise; but
it is fatal food, not to be eaten of, nor to be touched, by any but the
venturesome profane.
Indulged to his cost with previsions of what should befall his posterity,
Milton’s Adam, at sight of the Flood and its ravages, breaks out into the
exclamation,
“O visions ill foreseen! Better had I
Lived ignorant of future! so had borne
My part of evil only, each day’s lot
Enough to bear.”
Warned by so distressful an experience, he would have no man seek
henceforth to be foretold what shall befall him or his children; “evil he
may be sure, which neither his foreknowing can prevent; and he the future
evil shall, no less in apprehension than in substance, feel grievous to
bear.” It has been asked what would become of men, were their future
absolutely foreknown by them: would they not become in imagination, and
therefore in reality, the passive slaves of an inevitable fate, with all
hope extinguished, all fear intensified, awaiting in terror the foreseen
evil, and looking with indifference on the promised good, darkened as it
would be by the shadow of intervening calamities, and stripped of the
bright colouring of hope? And yet,
“With eager search to dart the soul,
Curiously vain, from pole to pole,
And from the planets’ wandering spheres
To extort the number of our years,
And whether all those years shall flow
Serenely smooth, and free from woe,
Or rude misfortune shall deform
Our life with one continual storm;
Or if the scene shall motley be
Alternate joy and misery,—
Is a desire which, more or less,
All men feel, though few confess.”
So at least affirms the author of the “Rosciad,”—who in another of his
writings puts the query:
“Tell me, philosopher, is it a crime
To pry into the secret womb of time;
Or, born in ignorance, must we despair
To reach events, and read the future there?”
Assuredly, says Cicero, the ignorance of evils to come is of more
advantage than the knowledge of them: _certe ignoratio futurorum malorum
utilior est quam scientia_. And Horace, in a celebrated passage:
“Prudens futuri temporis exitum
Caliginosâ nocte premit Deus:
Ridetque, si mortalis ultra
Fas trepidat.”...
_Caliginosa nox_ forms a thick black curtain.
“What hangs behind that curtain?—would’st thou learn?
If thou art wise, thou would’st not.”
A thoughtful mind, sententiously observes Miss Clarissa Harlowe, is not
a blessing to be coveted, unless it has such a happy vivacity with it
as her friend Miss Howe’s: a vivacity which enables one to enjoy the
present, without being anxious about the future. It is, according to
Goldsmith, the happy confidence in bright illusions that gives life
its true relish, and keeps up our spirits amidst every distress and
disappointment. “How much less would be done, if a man knew how little he
can do! How wretched a creature would he be, if he saw the end as well
as the beginning of his projects! He would have nothing left but to sit
down in torpid despair, and exchange enjoyment for actual calamity.” The
warrior in Mr. Roscoe’s tragedy argues judiciously when he says,
“What is’t to me, that I should vex my soul
In dim forebodings of what is to be?
It is enough I know, and ache to know,
What on this bridge of time I have to do,
Not overlook the abysm till my head fail.”
Fortunately for us mortals, Mr. Froude says, necessary as any future
may be, and inevitable as by our own actions we may have made it, it is
kindly kept from us wrapt up in clouds, and we are not made wretched
about it by anticipation. “O my fortune,” prays Agrippina, in one of
Jonson’s Roman tragedies, “let it be sudden thou preparest against me;
strike all my powers of understanding blind, and ignorant of destiny to
come!”
Seek to know no more, is in vain the joint appeal of the three witches
to Macbeth, beside the magic caldron in the cave; but as to the future
of Banquo’s issue he _will_ be satisfied. Cranmer, predicting a glorious
reign for the infant Elizabeth, parenthesises a sigh on the common lot—
“Would I had known no more! but she must die.”
Shakspeare’s King Henry the Fourth, again, in one place utters the
aspiration, “O Heaven! that one might read the book of fate!” Hardly an
aspiration, however, as the context shows; a privilege to be deprecated
rather; for could there be foreseen all the changes and chances of one’s
mortal life, “how chances mock, and changes fill the cup of alteration
with divers liquors,”
“O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth,—viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,—
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.”
Mr. de Quincey describes an Installation of the Knights of St. Patrick at
which he was present, during the Lord-Lieutenancy of Lord Cornwallis—the
narrator’s companions on that occasion being Lord and Lady Castlereagh,
who “were both young at this time, and both wore an impressive appearance
of youthful happiness; neither, happily for their peace of mind, able to
pierce that cloud of years, not much more than twenty, which divided them
from the day destined in one hour to wreck the happiness of both.” Vision
ill foreseen it were to know the times and the seasons, the manner how,
and the place where.
“O tell me, cried Ereenia, for from thee
Nought can be hidden, when the end will be.
Seek not to know, old Casyapa replied,
What pleaseth Heaven to hide.
Dark is the abyss of Time.
But light enough to guide your steps is given;
Whatever weal or woe betide,
Turn never from the way of truth aside,
And leave the event, in holy hope, to Heaven.”
The hermit in Scott’s “Talisman,” who, after failing to read aright the
fate of others, has to own himself uncertain whether he may not have
miscalculated his own,—withdraws from the action of the story with the
reflection that God will not have us break into His council-house, or
spy out His hidden mysteries. “We must wait His time with watching and
prayer—with fear and with hope. I came hither the stern seer—the proud
prophet, skilled, as I thought, to instruct princes, and gifted even
with supernatural powers, but burdened with a weight which I deemed no
shoulders but mine could have borne. But my bands have been broken! I go
hence humble in mine ignorance,” etc. In Scott’s other and less popular
Tale of the Crusaders, Eveline deprecates the Lady of Baldringham’s
offer to show her niece how the balance of fate inclines, and shrinks
from the asserted privilege “enjoyed” by their house of looking forward
beyond the points of present time, and seeing in the very bud the thorns
or flowers which are one day to encircle their head. “For my own sake,
noble kinswoman,” answered Eveline, “I would decline such foreknowledge,
even were it possible to acquire it without transgressing the rules of
the Church. Could I have foreseen what has befallen me within these last
unhappy days, I had lost the enjoyment of every happy moment before that
time.” So again reasons the Italian adept, Baptista Damiotti, in one of
Sir Walter’s shorter tales, when dismissing the two agitated ladies who
have been consulting his magic mirror. “Few,” he added, in a melancholy
tone, “leave this house as well in health as they entered it. Such being
the consequence of seeking knowledge by mysterious means, I leave you
to judge of the condition of those who have the power of gratifying
such irregular curiosity.” Cowper observes in one of his letters that
man often prophesies without knowing it; but that did he foresee, what
is always foreseen by him who dictates what he supposes to be his own,
he would suffer by anticipation as well as by consequence; and wish
perhaps as ardently for the happy ignorance to which he is at present so
much indebted, as some have foolishly and inconsiderately done, for a
knowledge that would be but another name for misery. Even in the ecstasy
of rapturous foresight the Seer exclaims,
“Visions of glory, spare my aching sight,
Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul!”
When Harold and Haco, “pale king and dark youth,” in Lord Lytton’s
historical novel, would read the riddle of the future, and “climb
to heaven through the mysteries of hell,” the witch bids them—poor
“worms”—crawl back to the clay—to the earth: “One such night as the hag
ye despise enjoys as her sport and her glee, would freeze your veins, and
sear the life in your eyeballs,” etc., etc. What says the wizard, again,
in Tasso?
“But that I should the sure events unfold
Of things to come, or destinies foretel,
Too rash is your desire, your wish too bold.”
Cagliostro, professing to foresee the fate of La Perouse, is
importunately asked by his fellow-guests at that memorable dinner-party
commemorated by M. Dumas, why then he did not forewarn and save that
brave man before setting out. At the very least, why not have told him to
“beware of unknown isles”—that he might at any rate have had the chance
of avoiding them? But, “I assure you no, count,” is the mystic’s reply;
“and, if he had believed me, it would only have been the more horrible,
for the unfortunate man would have seen himself approaching those isles
destined to be fatal to him, without the power to escape from them.
Therefore he would have died, not one, but a hundred deaths, for he would
have gone through it all by anticipation. Hope, of which I should have
deprived him, is what best sustains a man under all trials.” “Yes,” says
Condorcet, the sceptical and sententious, “the veil which hides from us
our future, is the only real good which God has vouchsafed to man.” And
what again, to the same purport, says the Hermit Monk to Alpine’s Lord:—
“Roderick, it is a fearful strife
For man endowed with mortal life,
Whose shroud of sentient clay can still
Feel feverish pang and fainting chill, ...
’Tis hard for such to view, unfurl’d,
The curtain of the future world.
Yet witness every quaking limb,
My sunken pulse, mine eyeballs dim,
My soul with harrowing anguish torn,—
This for my chieftain have I borne!”
And therefore, says Sir Thomas Browne, in his moralisings on the
undesirableness of all such foresight, “and therefore the wisdom of
astrologers, who speak of future things, hath wisely softened the
severity of their doctrines; and even in their sad predictions, while
they tell us of inclination not coaction from the stars, they kill us
not with Stygian oaths and merciless necessity, but leave us hopes of
evasion.” _Tant mieux_ for those who, like Hudibras,
... “still gape to anticipate
The cabinet-designs of fate,
Apply to wizards to foresee
What shall, and what shall never be;”
like Hudibras, bursting with the wish,
“Oh, that I could enucleate
And solve the problem of my fate;
Or find, by necromantic art,
How far the destinies take my part!”
Vanity and vexation of spirit, these visionary previsions all. Sacred,
therefore, be, in Thomson’s phrase, the veil that kindly clouds a light
too keen for mortals,
... “for those that here in dust
Must cheerful toil out their appointed years.”
In a feeling paragraph on the pains of a first separation, Miss Ferrier
observes, or rather asks, if in the long and dreary interval that ensues,
it were foreseen what griefs were to be borne, what ties severed, what
hearts seared or broken—“who of woman born could bear the sight and live?
But ’tis in mercy these things are hidden from our eyes.” Looking back
upon a certain year’s accumulated troubles, Mrs. Gaskell’s Margaret Hale
“wondered how they had been borne. If she could have anticipated them,
how she would have shrunk away and hid herself from the coming time!” And
yet day by day, it is explained, had of itself, and by itself, been very
endurable—small, keen, bright little spots of positive enjoyment having
come sparkling into the very middle of sorrows. Margaret Hale does but
exemplify in prose what Home’s Lady Randolph enunciates in sonorous verse:
“Had some good angel oped to me the book
Of Providence, and let me read my life,
My heart had broke when I beheld the sum
Of ills which one by one I have endured.”
Whereupon the lady’s faithful Anna remarks:
“That God, whose ministers good angels are,
Hath shut the book, in mercy to mankind.”
Not but that this doctrine has found special recusants, if too generally
taken, or, in their own instance, too particularly applied. “I have
somewhere read,” says Caleb Williams, “that Heaven in mercy hides from us
the future incidents of our life. My own experience does not well accord
with this assertion.” And mentioning one critical occasion, he adds,
that this once at least he should have been saved from insupportable
labour and indescribable anguish, could he have foreseen what was then
impending.—Sometimes the natural complaint is like that of Duke Ferdinand
in John Webster’s tragedy:
“Oh, most imperfect light of human reason,
That mak’st us so unhappy to foresee
What we can least prevent!”
Sometimes a solace is found in such a reflection as this:
“Then did I see how that presentient shroud
Of grief, which raiseth many a fond complaint
In mortal bosoms, is a friendly cloud.
Storms fall less heavily which men fore-paint.
And the struck spirit utterly would faint,
Hurl’d from full joy.”
To be ignorant of evils to come, as well as forgetful of past, Sir Thomas
Browne hails as a merciful provision of nature, “whereby we digest the
mixture of our few and evil days.” In another of his works the fine old
physician would have us, in the heyday of prosperity, “think of sullen
vicissitudes,” but beat not our brains to foreknow them. “Be armed
against such obscurities, rather by submission than fore-knowledge. The
knowledge of future evils modifies present felicities, and there is more
content in the uncertainty or ignorance of them. This favour our Saviour
vouchsafed unto Peter, when he foretold not his death in plain terms,
and so by an ambiguous and cloudy delivery damped not the spirit of His
disciples. But in the assured fore-knowledge of the deluge, Noah lived
many years under the affliction of a flood, and Jerusalem was taken unto
Jeremy before it was besieged.” Holy George Herbert is scarcely more
quaint in verse than Sir Thomas Browne in prose:
“Only the present is thy part and fee.
And happy thou,
If, though thou didst not beat thy future brow,
Thou couldst well see
What present things required of thee.
They ask enough; why shouldst thou further go?
Raise not the mud
Of future depths, but drink the clear and good.
Dig not for woe
In times to come; for it will grow.
Man and the present fit; if he _provide_
He breaks the square.
This hour is mine: if for the next I care,
I grow too wide,
And do crusade upon death’s side:
For death each hour environs and surrounds.
He that would know
And care for future chances, cannot go
Unto those grounds,
But thro’ a churchyard which them bounds.”
The assured knowledge of the exact minute of one’s death may be treated
religiously as a privilege, after the manner of appeals by gaol-chaplains
to condemned-cell criminals; as where the clergyman of the Tolbooth
Church bade Wilson and Robertson, convicted Porteous rioters, not despair
on account of the suddenness of the summons, “but rather to feel this
comfort in their misery, that, though all who now [in that church] lifted
the voice, or bent the knee in conjunction with them, lay under the
same sentence of certain death, _they_ only had the advantage of knowing
the precise moment at which it should be executed upon them.” But how
does Professor Henry Rogers treat the question, in its practical aspect,
in his so-called “Vision about Prevision”? The seer, or foreseer, in
that _fantasiestück_, when asked, concerning those who consult him as
to the future, whether some at least do not wish to know the hour of
their death—that they may duly prepare for it? answers, “That least of
all. Not a soul will hear his tale told to the end; they won’t let us
unveil to them the hour or the mode of their dissolution.... They prefer
having a veil thrown over the closing scene of their life. Like other
play-goers, they do not like death to be actually exhibited on the stage,
and willingly let the curtain fall ere the catastrophe.” Well, but the
seer himself: he at any rate is above that weakness: he at any rate has
inquired into the secret of his end? “For what purpose?” is his reply:
is not that knowledge the very misery of prisoners in the condemned
cell? are they not accounted miserable precisely because they are to
die just that day month? will not hundreds, who pity them for that very
circumstance, in fact die before them? and yet are not these accounted
happy in comparison, because they know it not?
“E’en the great shadow, Death, lost half its gloom
In kind oblivion of impending doom,”
says one philosophical poet. Another, and a greater, in a poem on
presentiments, has this among many stanzas addressed to them:
“’Tis said, that warnings ye dispense,
Emboldened by a keener sense;
That men have lived for whom,
With dread precision, ye made clear
The hour that in a distant year
Should knell them to the tomb.
Unwelcome insight!”⸺
_that_ is the comment, that the note of exclamation, with which
Wordsworth commences the stanza next ensuing. When death has invaded the
quiet rectory in Miss Tytler’s Huguenot story, we have each servant
mysteriously and fanatically delivering her experience in the matter of
corpse-candles, death-spells, death-watches, etc., so that one might have
learned for all one’s life afterwards to look on one’s death as a dark
fate, haunting and hovering over one’s own person and those of beloved
friends, from which there is no escape, not even by prayer and fasting;
might have learned to “look out for it in dim prognostications, to
watch for it, and anticipate its cruel blows in incipient madness.—‘Our
Bibles say we know not the day nor the hour,’ said Grand’mère; ‘but He
knows—that is enough.’” One of La Bruyère’s _pensées sur la mort_ is,
that “ce qu’il y a de certain dans la mort, est un peu adouci par ce qui
est incertain: c’est un indéfini dans le tems, qui tient quelque chose
de l’infini, et de ce qu’on appelle éternité.” Byron indeed utters the
remonstrant query,
“Ah! why do darkening shades conceal
The hour when man must cease to be?”
But his sigh was little in the spirit of the Psalmist’s prayer to be made
to know his end, and the measure of his days, what it was.
_BEATIFIC VISION AND OVERSHADOWING CLOUD._
ST. LUKE ix. 34.
To the three favoured apostles it was granted by their Master to be
eye-witnesses of His majesty, when they were with Him on the holy
mount. They saw the fashion of His countenance altered, and His raiment
become white and glistering. They saw with Him in glory Moses, whose
burial-place no man knew, and Elijah, who was translated that he should
not see death. And Peter said it was good to be there, and he desired
to make that mount of transfiguration a dwelling-place, and to prolong
the splendours of that beatific vision. Three tabernacles he proposed to
rear, in that eager impetuosity which so often marked his character;
at present scarcely knowing what he said, but conscious of a privileged
apocalypse, and deprecating its speedy withdrawal. But “while he thus
spake, there came a cloud, and overshadowed them; and they feared as they
entered into the cloud.”
So it was again at a later day, and upon another mount, when the risen
Master was asked by His assembled apostles would He at this time restore
again the kingdom to Israel? Brief was the reply, and no sooner uttered
than, while they beheld—gazed wistfully, hopingly, longingly, on the
Presence they had so lately lost, and were now eager to retain—while they
beheld, “He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.”
* * * * *
The overshadowing cloud to mar the sunshine is one of the commonest of
common-places in man’s experience. Perpetually being verified in prosaic
reality, all too real, is the poet’s image—
“Across the sunbeam, with a sudden gloom,
A ghostly shadow flitted,”
_Medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid._ The very exuberance of
human happiness tends to suggest its opposite.
Gibbon felt simply as a man when he felt what he has described in a
memorable passage relating to his sense of gratified triumph at the
conclusion of his _magnum opus_. It was between the hours of eleven and
twelve, he records, on a calm night in June, that he wrote the last lines
of his last page in a summer-house in his garden at Lausanne. After
laying down his pen, he took several turns in a covered walk of acacias,
which commanded a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains.
The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon
was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. “I will not
dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and,
perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled,
and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had
taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and
that whatsoever might be the future date of my history the life of the
historian must be short and precarious.” It is the common lot. It is but
another reading of the complaint in Prior’s pastorals—
“Yet thus beloved, thus loving to excess,
Yet thus receiving and returning bliss,
In this great moment, in this golden Now,
...
A melancholy tear afflicts my eye,
And my heart labours with a sudden sigh;
Invading fears repel my coward joy,
And ills foreseen the present bliss destroy.”
Or as elsewhere the same poet gloomily exclaims, and fruitlessly
supplicates—
“O impotent estate of human life,
Where hope and fear maintain eternal strife!
Where fleeting joy does lasting doubt inspire,
And most we question what we most desire!
Amongst Thy various gifts, great Heaven, bestow
Our cup of love unmixed; forbear to throw
Bitter ingredients in; nor pall the draught
With nauseous grief.”
Hardly can it be called, though the author of “The Ring and the Book”
does call it,—
... “strange how, even when most secure
In our domestic peace, a certain dim
And flitting shade can sadden all; it seems
A restlessness of heart, a silent yearning,
A sense of something wanting, incomplete.”
A thought comes over us sometimes in our career of pleasure, Lord Lytton
remarks, or in the exultation of our ambitious pursuits, a thought comes
over us like a cloud, that around us and about us Death, Shame, Crime,
Despair, are busy at their work. He tells us what he has read somewhere
of an enchanted land where the inmates walked along voluptuous gardens,
and built palaces, and heard music, and made merry; while around and
within the land were deep caverns, where the gnomes and the fiends dwelt;
and ever and anon their groans and laughter, and the sounds of their
unutterable toils or ghastly revels, travelled to the upper air, mixing
in an awful strangeness with the summer festivity and buoyant occupation
of those above. And this he claims to be a picture of human life.
Always there is a black spot in our sunshine, exclaims Mr. Carlyle; and
he tells us what it is, “the shadow of ourselves.”
At a seeming crisis of assured prosperity the heroine of a French _roman_
is made to exclaim, “The future is all our own—the radiant future,
without cloud or obstacle, pure in the immensity of its horizon, and
extending beyond the reach of sight.” But while she thus speaks her
features suddenly assume an expression of touching melancholy, as she
adds, in a voice of profound emotion, “And yet—at this very hour—so many
unfortunate creatures are suffering pain!” So with the young hero in one
of Mr. Hannay’s fictions: “In that moment he felt that he had attained
a new stage of life; yet, an instant’s reaction seized him, as in every
fruition through one’s progress in time comes that curious moment’s
speck, the touch of an unseen hand, that seems to tell you, ‘Too much
joy is not for you here.’ It passed away, having just dashed his triumph
as it always does.” At a later stage in this adventurer’s career the ebb
of his spirits is made the text of a paragraph comparing them to a ship
in the tropics, where a light wind comes, and dies again, and leaves you
becalmed, or the horizon blackens suddenly and death seems impending
in the unhealthy air. “Few things are more touching than that peculiar
melancholy which sometimes comes over one in theatres or at feasts, and
reminds us of the dark element in nature and the heart ... which chills
the philosopher and the pleasure-taker.... When the light southerner of
old got a glimpse of it he called for his lyre and his garlands; but
roses will not charm it away from the deep heart of the child of the
Teuton, and he sees its awful shadow trembling in the wine.” The English
Opium-eater somewhere professes to derive from the spectacle of dancing,
where the motion is continuous and the music not of a trivial character
but charged with the spirit of festal pleasure, “the very grandest form
of passionate sadness which can belong to any spectacle whatever.”
Wordsworth is treating of presentiments when he says that—
“The laughter of the Christmas hearth
With sighs of self-exhausted mirth
They feelingly reprove.”
And of such is Currer Bell too treating in a passage that tells of the
writer’s fancy budding fresh and her heart basking in sunshine; only
these feelings “were well kept in check by the secret but ceaseless
consciousness of anxiety lying in wait on enjoyment, like a tiger
crouched in a jungle. The breathing of that beast of prey was in my ear
always.” Ἐξ ἡδονῆς γὰρ φύεται τὸ δυστυχεῖν.
“Who knows what that low sullen murmur means,
The river’s fall sends up to blast life’s fairest scenes?”
The happiest, as Pope’s Homer has it, “taste not happiness sincere,
but find the cordial draught is dashed with care.” What biography of
successful ambition but has its parallel passage to one in Prescott’s
history of the conqueror of Peru: “Amidst this burst of adulation the cup
of joy commended to Pizarro’s lips had one drop of bitterness in it that
gave its flavour to all the rest”! As M. Ampére’s Cleopatra owns,—
“Oui, parmi les plaisirs, la joie et les festins,
Je médite du sort les arrêts incertains.”
How apt, at a bright banquet, is the thought of death to flash across the
mind, is trite among the truisms of experience. It was at Belshazzar’s
feast, while they drank wine out of the golden vessels of the temple, and
praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and
of stone, when the revelry was at its height and the revellers at their
best, that in the same hour there came forth fingers of a man’s hand,
and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of
the king’s palace; and then was king Belshazzar greatly troubled, and
his countenance was changed in him, and his lords were astounded. In
Hawthorne’s allegory of the Maypole at Merry Mount, the lord and lady
of the May are abruptly overcome with a shadow of sadness, just when
the minstrelsy of pipe, cittern, and viola is pealing forth in such a
mirthful cadence that the boughs of the maypole quiver to the sound;
and just then too, as if a spell had loosened them, down comes a little
shower of withering roseleaves from the maypole. There is sometimes, says
Fielding, a little speck of black in the brightest and gayest colours of
fortune, which contaminates and deadens the whole.
“In every joy there lurks
An impulse of decay;
With silent speed it works,
While all without is gay:”
—with silent speed, like the worm at Jonah’s gourd. “Fleurs, vous aussi,”
so Béranger apostrophizes them,
... “vous avez vos souffrances.
Le ver est là; le vent peut accourir.”
_Le ver_, as the worm prepared for Jonah’s gourd; _le vent_, as the
vehement east wind to wither Jonah’s strength.
“While blooming love assures us golden fruit,
Some inborn poison taints the secret root;
Soon fall the flowers of joy.”
But Jonah’s gourd must have a section apart.
_THE SPREADING GOURD AND THE SPEEDING WORM._
JONAH iv. 6-8.
As Elijah the Tishbite sat down in the wilderness under a juniper-tree,
heavy-hearted, and fleeing for his life from the grasp of Jezebel, yet
requesting for himself that he might die; as he said, “It is enough; now,
O Lord, take away my life,” yet anon found rest and refreshment under
the juniper-tree, and did eat and drink, and lay down again, and went
in the strength of that rest and that meat, forty days and forty nights,
unto Horeb the mount of God; so Jonah the son of Amittai, displeased
exceedingly, and very angry, prayed in bitterness the same prayer, “O
Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to
die than to live.” Did he well to be angry? Did Elijah well to despair?
Under a juniper-tree Elijah recovered strength, took heart, and became of
good courage. For Jonah there was preparing a gourd. A gourd; and a worm
to make short work of the gourd.
Jonah left the city in wrath, and made him a booth, and sat under it in
the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city—the city
which he had doomed and God had spared. Under the burning sun he awaited
the judgment of Nineveh. “And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made
it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to
deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.
“But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote
the gourd that it withered.”
And when the sun arose, there arose too another thing of God’s preparing.
As He had prepared the gourd, and prepared the worm to smite the gourd,
so, at sunrise, “God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon
the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die.” And
not only so, but again expressed the wish, with the old bitterness and
even increasing wrath. Did he well to be angry for the gourd? “I do well
to be angry, even unto death,” he exclaimed. The gourd was so gladdening
a creation, it made even that morose spirit exceeding glad. But scarcely
had he time to congratulate himself on this relief, in complacent
assurance of its continuance, when the sheltering gourd was eaten to the
heart by a speeding worm, and what came up in a night, perished in a
night; and this also was vanity, vanity and vexation of spirit.
A perverse fate seems to lie in wait for man,
“And though he in a fertile climate dwell,
Plague him with flies: though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such charges of vexation on’t,
As it may lose some colour.”
In the words of another of Shakspeare’s dramas, “joy cannot show itself
modest enough without a badge of bitterness.” _Inter delicias semper
aliquid sævi nos strangulat_, says the Latin adage; the _aliquid sævi_
answering to the _aliquid amari_ of Lucretius, _quod in ipsis floribus
angat_; or again to the _aliquid solliciti_ of Ovid,
... “Nulla est sincera voluptas;
Sollicitique aliquid lætis intervenit.”
Why, Byron asks himself, in his diary (at Ravenna), why, at the very
height of desire and human pleasure, does there mingle a certain sense
of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what _is_—a
retrospect of the past, leading to a prognostication of the future?
Mrs. Browning has penned a suggestive sonnet to which the title is
superscribed of Pain in Pleasure:
“A thought lay like a flower upon my heart,
And drew around it other thoughts like bees
For multitude and thirst of sweetnesses,—
Whereat rejoicing, I desired the art
Of the Greek whistler, who to wharf and mart
Could lure those insect swarms from orange-trees,
That I might hive me with such thoughts, and please
My soul so, always. Foolish counterpart
Of a weak man’s vain wishes! While I spake,
The thought I called a flower, grew nettle-rough—
The thoughts called bees, stung me to festering,
Oh, entertain (cried reason, as she woke,)
Your best and gladdest thoughts but long enough,
And they will all prove sad enough to sting.”
As Shakspeare words it in one of _his_ sonnets,
“Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud,”
and every gourd has its worm. So again Cowper:
“Here every drop of honey hides a sting;
Worms wind themselves into our sweetest flowers.”
On the same text moralizes the meditative sire of the Cid, in Corneille’s
tragedy:
“Jamais nous ne goûtons de parfaite allégresse:
Nos plus heureux succès sont mêlés de tristesse;
Toujours quelques soucis en ces événements
Troublent la pureté de nos contentements.”
_Semper amari aliquid._ It is like Johnson’s reflections on his first
transports at Ranelagh. When first he entered those festive gardens,
it gave, he tells Boswell, an expansion and gay sensation to his mind,
such as he never experienced anywhere else. But, as Xerxes wept when he
reviewed his immense army, and considered that not one of that great
multitude would be alive a hundred years afterwards, so it went to the
doctor’s heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant
circle but was afraid to go home and think; that “the thoughts of each
individual there would be distressing when alone.” Boswell approves the
reflection as “experimentally just,” and appends a commonplace of his
own, upon the feeling of langour, which succeeds the animation of gaiety,
being itself a very severe pain.
It was in the mid hey-day of military triumph that Paulus Æmilius
astonished his encircling admirers by, first, a prolonged silence, and
next, a sombre homily on the vicissitudes of fortune, and of human
affairs. What time for confidence can there be to man, he asked,
when in the very instant of victory he must necessarily dread the
power of fortune, and the very joy of success must be mingled with
anxiety—_aliquid solliciti_—from a reflection on the course of unsparing
fate, which humbles one man to-day, and to-morrow another! Gladdening is
the gourd, with its pleasant promise of protection against the arrow that
flieth by day from a burning sun; but only him can it make, like Jonah,
exceeding glad, who knows not, or makes a point of forgetting, what a
worm can do, between a setting and a rising sun.
The night thoughts of man in general are one with the Night Thoughts of
Young in particular, when he exclaims,
“How sad a sight is human happiness
To those whose thoughts can pierce beyond an hour!
—Know, smiler! at thy peril thou art pleased:
Thy pleasure is the promise of thy pain.”
This is the state of man, by the experience of Shakspeare’s Wolsey:
to-day he puts forth the tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blossoms, and
bears his blushing honours thick upon him. He is exceeding glad, even as
the prophet of his gourd; but a worm is preparing, or if not, a frost;
and next day, or at latest
“The third day, comes a frost, a killing frost;
And,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a ripening,—nips his root,
And then he falls.”
The worm may speed in its mission, or otherwise; but the fulfilment of
its mission is only a question of time. There is a
... “little rift within the lute,
That by-and-by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.
“The little rift within the lover’s lute
Or little pitted speck in garner’d fruit,
That, rotting onward slowly moulders all.”
Slowly, sometimes, but surely. Not so slowly as surely.
Remembering both the “foolish pride” of Jonah in his gourd, and his
“impious discontentment” at the decree which smote it, which of us but
might, for ourselves, do worse than adopt the words and the spirit of one
verse at least of Pope’s Universal Prayer,
“Save me alike from foolish pride
And impious discontent
At aught Thy wisdom hath denied,
Or aught Thy bounty lent.”
_SELF-PRAISE._
PROVERBS xxvii. 2.
“Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger,
and not thine own lips.” Our English adage, “Self-praise is no
recommendation,” has its analogue in the Latin: _Laus in proprio ore
sordescit_—“A man’s own laudation of himself is unseemly.” Another bit of
good old Latin admonition is, to enlarge rather upon the praises of one’s
friends, than upon one’s own: _Amicorum, magis quàm tuam ipsius laudem,
prædica_; which seems to be, however, but a literal transcript of the
second line in a couplet from the Greek Anthology:
Ὑπὲρ σεαυροῦ μὴ φράσης ἐγκώμια·
Φίλων ἔπαινον μᾶλλον ἢ σαυτοῦ λέγε.
Syrus, again, utters the caution, “That whoso praiseth himself will
soon find some one to laugh at him”—_Qui seipsum laudat, cito derisorem
inveniet_. It was Æsop’s derisive counsel to an unreadable author, who
did all his own praising and puffing, and therefore did it well—well, at
least, in quantity, if not in quality—to stick by all manner of means to
that home-brewed system; for it was the poor creature’s only chance of
ever tasting the sweets of praise at all.
“Ego, quod te laudas, vehementer probo,
Namque hoc ab alio nunquam continget tibi.”
In one of the wordy encounters between Shakspeare’s Beatrice and
Benedick, the lady imputes signal unwisdom to the signor, when she tells
him “There’s not one wise man in twenty that will praise himself.”
Benedick scouts this as an old, old apophthegm, quite out of date; for,
says he, “if a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies,
he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings, and the widow
weeps.” And how long is _that_? Why, an hour in clamour (the bell),
and (the widow) a quarter in rheum. Therefore, he infers, “it is most
expedient for the wise to be the trumpeter of his own virtues, as I am to
myself. So much for praising myself (who, I myself will bear witness, is
praiseworthy).” Shakspeare often expatiates, with dramatic diversities
of phase and aspect, of character and incident, upon this worldly-wise
theme, by the worldly-wise held worthy of all acceptation, of every man
his own trumpeter. To a few examples out of these many we may recur anon.
Swift is writing after his own humour when he says, in the work he seems
to have admired the most of his voluminous _opera omnia_, but to which
some refer as the distinct cause of his never getting a bishopric—“That
as for the liberty he has thought fit to take of praising himself
upon some occasions or none, he is sure it will need no excuse, if a
multitude of great examples be allowed sufficient authority; for it is
to be noted,” he goes on to say, that praise was originally a pension
paid by the world; but the moderns, finding the trouble and charge too
great in collecting it, “have lately bought out the fee simple; since
which time the right of presentation is wholly in ourselves.” But it is
in the simpler states and stages of society, according to a latter-day
essayist on social subjects, that the man who values himself highly has
little scruple in confessing as much. “Savages have no more reticence
in parading their good points than peacocks.” North American Indians,
and the like, sublimely ignore any such courses of conduct as that, Not
he that approveth himself is commended. Their faith and practice run
counter to this kind of self-discipline. Chateaubriand gives an example
of the style of chant in which a jubilant warrior, Sioux or Iroquois,
proclaims his doughty prestige:—“Brave and renowned were my forefathers.
My grandsire was the wisdom of his tribe, and the thunder of war. My
father was a pine-tree in strength. My great-grandmother gave birth to
five men of war; my grandmother was alone worth a council of sachems;
my mother makes first-rate soup. As for myself, I am stronger and wiser
than all my ancestors.” Later Americans, _not_ of the redskin family, are
charged with a scarcely inferior knack of extolling themselves in all
the simplicity of an ignorance which knows nothing higher or better, and
with being frankly astonished at their own successes. Among them, it is
alleged by caustic Cis-atlantic criticism, nobody is thought the worse of
for praising himself; whereas among ourselves, “the practice is out of
date; a man cannot here puff himself off with impunity—without in fact,
being taken for a fool; and therefore, if he have ordinary sagacity,
he will keep within bounds.” But not the less, it is allowed, must the
thought of the heart find some outlet; men draw wide distinctions between
pride and vanity, but both have at least this in common, that they like
to feel and be acknowledged “first;” and both, it is added, “agree in
the instinct to gain their end by a side-wind—to boast themselves by
implication, if circumstances will not permit the more agreeable incense
of positive praise and adulation.”
Plutarch does not blame Cato (the elder) for perpetually boasting and
exalting himself, although the old censor somewhere pronounces it absurd
for a man either to praise or to disparage himself. But Plutarch _does_
“think the man who is often praising himself, not so complete in virtue
as the modest man, who does not even want others to praise him.” He takes
frequent note of the habit of self-commendation in some of his heroes,
and of the absence of it in others. Cato, “who was never sparing in his
own praises, and thought boasting a natural attendant on great actions,”
was nothing like so grievous an offender in this respect, to Plutarch’s
thinking, as Cicero, whose writings, says he, “were so interlarded with
encomiums on himself that, although his style was elegant and delightful,
his discourses were disgusting and nauseous to the reader; for the
blemish stuck to him like an incurable disease.” Comparing this greatest
of Roman orators with the greatest of the Greek, Plutarch observes of
their respective writings, that Demosthenes, when he touches on his own
praise does it with an inoffensive delicacy, never, indeed, giving way to
it at all unless he has some important matter in view; whereas Cicero,
habitually and systematically, “speaks in such high terms of himself
that it is plain he had a most intemperate vanity.” Modern critics not
a few, German, English, and French, have made the most—not to say made
the best—of this foible of Cicero’s. In particular, Mr. de Quincey makes
merry over it, without mercy, at the father of his country’s expense.
Isaac Barrow points the moral of the text which these heterogeneous
annotations are meant to illustrate, with a special warning against
Cicero’s infirmity. “If a man have worthy qualities and do great deeds,
let them speak for him,” urges that masterly divine; they will of
themselves extort commendation; his silence about them, his seeming to
neglect them, will enhance their worth in the opinion of men. “Prating
about them, obtruding them upon men, will mar their credit, inducing men
to think them done, not out of love to virtue, but for a vain-glorious
design. Thus did Cicero, thus have many others, blasted the glory of
their virtuous deeds.” It is quaintly said by Owen Feltham, that whoso
makes boast of the good he truly has, obscures much of his own worth,
in drawing it up by so unseemly a bucket as his own tongue. “Though the
vaunts be true, they do but awaken scoffs; and instead of a clapping
hand, they find a look of scorn.” When a soldier bragged too much of a
great scar in his forehead, he was asked by Augustus if he did not get
it when he turned his back on the enemy. So, “If I have done anything
well”—this is one of Feltham’s “Resolves,”—“I will never think it worth
while to tell the world of it.”
“O sir, to such as boasting show their scars,
A mock is due,”
says Shakspeare’s Troilus to Ulysses—modest, valiant Trojan, to shrewd,
circumspect Greek. So another Trojan to another Greek, in the same
play—which Coleridge reckoned almost the most wonderful of Shakspeare’s
all—Æneas, namely, to Agamemnon; or rather, indeed, Æneas to himself, in
Agamemnon’s hearing:—
... “But peace, Æneas,
Peace Trojan; lay thy finger on thy lips!
The worthiness of praise disdains his worth,
If that the praised himself bring the praise forth:
But what the repining enemy commends,
That breath fame follows; that praise, sole pure, transcends.”
And in yet another scene, Agamemnon, King of Men, pithily and pointedly
tells that stalwart dullard—big, blustering, boisterous Ajax—who, for the
life of him, cannot see the pith or point of it, that “whatever praises
itself but in the deed, devours the deed in the praise.” Ajax suspects
not the general to mean that _he_, son of Telamon, is his own praise, his
own chronicle.
One more excerpt from our myriad-minded poet:—“Then we wound our modesty,
and make foul the clearness of our deservings, when of ourselves we
publish them.” The wise saw drops from the sententious lips of the sage
old steward of the Countess of Roussillon in what is probably as little
read and slightly relished as any of Shakspeare’s plays.
* * * * *
Years ago there used to perambulate the streets of London, a prodigy of
a hat, some seven feet high, the trade-mark advertisement of a hatter
in the Strand. This gigantic puff Mr. Carlyle once made the text for
some characteristic strictures on the puffery of the age. Every man his
own trumpeter: that he alleged was, to an alarming extent, the accepted
rule. “Make loudest possible proclamation of your hat.” Against which
doctrine our strenuous _censor morum_ objected, that nature requires
no man to make proclamation of his doings and hat-makings; but, on the
contrary, forbids all men to make such. There is not, he contends, a
man, or hat-maker born into the world but feels, or has felt, that he
is degrading himself if he speak of his excellences, and prowesses, and
supremacy in his craft. His inmost heart says to him, “Leave thy friends
to speak of these: if possible, thy enemies to speak of these; but at all
events, thy friends.”
_PAINTED FACE, TIRED HEAD, & EXPOSED SKULL._
2 KINGS ix. 30, 35.
Jezebel’s painting her face and tiring her head, is so immediately
followed, in the narrative of her death and non-burial, by there being
found no more of her left than the skull, besides the feet and the palms
of the hands, that the connection is grimly suggestive of certain stanzas
in the “Vision of Sin:”
“You are bones, and what of that?
Every face, however full,
Padded round with flesh and fat,
Is but modell’d on a skull.
“Death is king, and Vivat Rex!
Tread a measure on the stones,
Madam—if I know your sex
From the fashion of your bones.”
Byron muses on a skull[10] from among scattered heaps, as now a shattered
cell which even the worm disdains; he ponders on its broken arch, its
ruined wall, its chambers desolate, and portals foul; yet,
... “this was once Ambition’s airy hall,
The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul:
Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,
The gay recess of Wisdom and of Wit
And Passion’s host, that never brook’d control.”
It is Yorick’s skull that Hamlet is apostrophizing when he says, “Now
get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick,
to _this_ favour she must come.” _Tôt ou tard_, as _le bon réligieux_
in “Atala” reminds his fair young listener, _quelle qu’eût été votre
felicité, ce beau visage se fút changé en cette figure uniforme que le
sépulcre donne à la famille d’Adam_. The good king Réné had painted on
the walls of one of the rooms in the Celestine monastery at Avignon, a
skeleton—it was that of a once surpassing beauty who had won his heart.
How would the moral have lost its point had the head of the skeleton
been replaced, like that in the painter’s room in the Strada Vecchia
of Rome, so graphically described in “Dutch Pictures,” by a mask, or
cardboard “dummy” of a superlatively inane cast of beauty—the blue eyes
and symmetrical lips (curved into an unmeaning and eternal simper),
the pink cheeks, and silken doll’s tresses, “contrasting strangely
with the terribly matter-of-fact bones and ligaments beneath—the moral
to my lady’s looking-glass.” Gwillim, the Pursuivant, as quoted, not
approvingly, in Southey’s “Doctor,” counsels all gentlewomen that are
proud of their beauty to consider that they “carry on their shoulders
nothing but a skull wrapt in skin, which one day will be loathsome to be
looked on.” The old French poet Villon, _aux charniers des Innocents_,
speculates in a manner that to one critic recalls the graveyard scene in
“Hamlet,” on the destiny of _corps féminin, qui tant est tendre, poli,
suave, gracieux_—for how can he help his thoughts running thitherward
“quand il considère ces têtes entassées en ces charniers”? Who, indeed,
as Keats once asked,
“Who hath not loiter’d in a green churchyard,
And let his spirit, like a demon mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
To see skull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;
Pitying each form that hungry Death has marr’d,
And filling it once more with human soul?”
In such a spot Blair lingers, to apostrophize beauty, as a pretty
plaything, a dear deceit, which the grave discredits. The charms
expunged, the roses faded, and the lilies soiled, what has beauty more
to boast of? Will the lovers of it flock round it now, to gaze and do it
homage?
“Methinks I see thee with thy head low laid,
While, surfeited upon thy damask cheek,
The high-fed worm, in lazy volumes roll’d,
Riots unscared. For this was all thy caution?
For this thy painful labours at the glass,
T’ improve those charms, and keep them in repair,
For which the spoiler thanks thee not?”
So that much less known, but much more powerful, writer, Thomas Lovell
Beddoes, muses in Death’s cabinet, the Campo Santo of Ferrara, on the
“unfashionable worm,” respectless of, alike, the crown-illumined brow
and the cheek’s bewitchment, as he creeps to his repast—on what? “No
matter how clad or nicknamed it might strut above, what age or sex,—it
is his dinner-time.” The final residuum of such repasts becomes an
unrecognisable skull, about which some chance possessor of it shall, in
after days, perhaps, indulge in cynical conjectures and speculations in a
tone and to a tune like this:
“Did she live yesterday, or ages back?
What colour were the eyes when bright and waking?
And were your ringlets fair, or brown, or black,
Poor little head! that long has done with aching?”
Mercury, in Lucian’s dialogue, shows Menippus the skulls of several
world-famous beauties; and the philosopher falls to moralizing upon that
of Helen. “Was it for this,”[11] he exclaims, “that a thousand ships
sailed from Greece, so many brave men died, and so many cities were
destroyed?” Menippus was so far of the Ralph Nickleby type, “not a man to
be moved by a pretty face,” with a grinning skull beneath it: men like
him profess to look and work below the surface, and so to see the skull,
and not its delicate covering.
Where, asks the author of “Esmond,” are those jewels now that beamed
under Cleopatra’s forehead, or shone in the sockets of Helen? With Mr.
Thackeray in another place, again, we take the skull up, and think of
the glances that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that
shone in those vacant sockets, and cheeks dimpling with smiles that once
covered that ghastly yellow framework. “They used to call those teeth
pearls once. See! there’s the cup she drank from, the gold chain she
wore on her neck, the vase which held the rouge for her cheeks, her
looking-glass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a feast we
find a gravestone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones.” And has not
Macaulay his “Sermon in a Churchyard”? wherein one practical improvement
of the subject, as conventional pulpiteers phrase it, runs thus:—
“Dost thou beneath the smile or frown
Of some vain woman bend thy knee?
Here take thy stand, and trample down
Things that were once as fair as she.
Here rave of her ten thousand graces,
Bosom, and lip, and eye, and chin,
While, as in scorn, the fleshless faces
Of Hamiltons and Waldegraves grin.”
_THE CARCASE OF JEZEBEL ON THE FACE OF THE FIELD._
2 KINGS ix. 37.
In the portion of Jezreel—by a retributive local coincidence—were to lie
the mangled remains of Jezebel—what the dogs should leave of her. “And
the carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in
the portion of Jezreel; so that they shall not say, This is Jezebel.”
_This_, Jezebel? how could _this_ be identified with the superb wife and
superior of the king of Israel, as she was in her prime of life and pride
of place? or even with the faded form of her that, newly a widow, but
energetic and manœuvring to the last, and defiant in her fall, painted
her face, and tired her head, and looked out at the window as Jehu
entered in at the gate? Imperious Jezebel, thrice puissant and insatiably
presuming, transformed into a heap of bone dust—reduced to her lowest
terms as mere organic matter—resolved into just so much manure upon the
face of the field.
“Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O that the earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw.”
So muses and speculates Hamlet, on the theme of “to what base uses we
may return, Horatio,” when his imagination traces the noble dust of
Alexander, till he find it stopping a bunghole. ’Twere to consider too
curiously to consider so, Horatio may object. Not a jot, is Hamlet’s
answer to the objection; for look you, Alexander died, was buried, was
resolved into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam. “And why of
that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?”
_Quod erat demonstrandum._
The Prince of Denmark was in the like mood when, in other company, he
talked, to the same purpose, of how a man may fish with the worm[12] that
hath eat of a king; and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
Well may Juvenal bid the meditative moralist, _expende Annibalem_,
and expound the text that _Mors sola fatetur quantula sint hominum
corpuscula_. But it needs a Shakspeare to reduce these to their lowest
terms, in the style of Hamlet with imperious Cæsar,—a _reductis ad
absurdum_ indeed.
Sydney Smith somewhere girds at the idea of doctrinaire legislators
making irrevocable laws for men who toss their remains about with spades,
“and use the relics of these legislators, to give breadth to brocoli,
and to aid the vernal eruption of asparagus.” Hawthorne once designed
a symbolical tale of a young man being slain and buried in the flower
garden of his betrothed, and the earth levelled over him. That particular
spot, which she happens to plant with some peculiar variety of flowers,
produces them of admirable splendour, beauty, and perfume; and thus the
classic fantasy is realized, of dead people transformed to flowers.
Sir Thomas Browne—how pregnant his hints are!—touches on Mummy as having
become merchandize: Mizraim curing wounds, and Pharaoh being sold for
balsams.
The heroic dust, as Chateaubriand calls it, of the heart of Duguesclin,
stolen during the Revolution, was on the point of being pounded up
by a glazier to mix his paints. So again we read of the slaughtered
hosts during the retreat from Moscow: “Some industrial companies have
transported themselves into the desert with their furnaces and their
caldrons; the bones have been converted into animal black; whether it
come from the dog or from the man, the varnish is equally valuable,
and is as brilliant when drawn from obscurity as from glory.” Cornelia
Knight mentions a Parmese canon, who one day, while the French were
in occupation of Piacenza, found the church in possession of three
surgeons, or surgeons’ mates, of that army, “busily skinning” the dead
body of a French soldier. “Horrified at the sight, he asked the meaning
of this ghastly proceeding, and was told that some scientific men had
discovered that the human skin made excellent leather,” and that it had
been therefore ordered that all dead bodies should be skinned, for the
purpose of providing boots and shoes for the soldiers. Ziska’s skin-deep
drum-destiny was at least a seeming nobler, if not essentially a more
useful one.
Xenophon makes his pattern-prince desirous of having his body turned to
beneficial uses after death, by being incorporated with mother earth;
positively enjoining his sons not to enshrine it in gold or silver, but
to bury it in the ground as soon as the life was gone out of it. Little
would trouble him the anticipated contingency of such a _peut-être_ as
Burns surmises, in the case of a recently deceased acquaintance—like
Xenophon, a sportsman to the core:—
“There low he lies, in lasting rest;
Perhaps, upon his mould’ring breast
Some spitefu’ moorfowl bigs her nest,
To hatch and breed.”
Cyrus, like the essentially practical statesman in Mrs. Gore’s tale,
would presumably have detected no irony in Hamlet’s assignment of
purpose to the ashes of imperious Cæsar: “It seemed a relief to his mind
that emperors, when turned to clay, could be turned to account.” No
more objection to that, than to such a circumstance as “The Traveller”
deplores, that
... “in those domes where Cæsar once bore sway,
Defaced by time, and tottering in decay,
There in the ruin, heedless of the dead,
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed.”
Have we not heard Liebig indignantly complain of our importing immense
quantities of bones from abroad, thereby draining the fair foreign
fields of their very life-blood—scouring as we are said to do foreign
battle-plains, that the bony reliques of warriors who fought a good fight
in their day, may now be of further avail to make our bread? An English
satirist of German sentimentalism pictures a contemplative young Teuton,
at dinner time, pausing over his _sauer kraut_, as he calls to mind that
the churchyard wherein his ancestor was decently deposited, has been
converted into a kitchen garden; and the conviction flashes upon him that
what was a distinguished man is now on the table in the form of cabbage.
Have we not, again, heard Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans,
indignantly brand, as the outcome of current materialism, such a
“practical suggestion” as that of a certain M. Moleschott, that, in the
interest of humanity, “the honour of the dead should be abolished,” and
all cemeteries desecrated after being used a twelvemonth, that the bones
contained in them may “supply to plants the power of creating fresh men”?
It is, I think, in one of Mr. Dicey’s letters from the East that mention
is made of the writer’s seeing at Sakhara a half score of camels pacing
down from the mummy pits to the bank of the river, laden with nets in
which were human bones, some two hundredweight in each net on each side
of the camel; while among the pits were to be seen people busily engaged
in searching out, sifting, and sorting the bones with which the ground
is almost encrusted. The cargoes were to be sent on to Alexandria, and
thence shipped to manure manufacturers in England. It is a strange
fate, as the tourist reflects, to preserve one’s skeleton for thousands
of years in order that there may be fine Southdowns and Cheviots in a
distant land; and he stops to muse on the idea of a _gigot_ that consists
in great part of the dwellers in Memphis.
That is a graphic picture the historian of the United Netherlands paints,
of the artificial earthworks devised in extremity during the siege of
Ostend, in 1604, when there was no earth left for the defenders to
use, nearly everything solid having been scooped away in the perpetual
delving. The very sea-dykes had been robbed of their material, so that
the coming winter might find besiegers and besieged all washed together
into the German Ocean, and it was hard digging and grubbing among the
scanty cellarages of the dilapidated houses. But there were plenty of
graves, Mr. Motley proceeds to relate; and now, not only were all the
cemeteries within the precincts shovelled and carted in mass to the
inner fortifications, but rewards being offered of ten stivers for each
dead body, great heaps of disinterred soldiers were piled into the new
ramparts. “Thus these warriors, after laying down their lives for the
cause of freedom, were made to do duty after death.”
Who, exclaims Owen Feltham, would have thought when Scanderbeg was laid
in his tomb, that the Turks would afterwards break into it, and wear his
bones for jewels? But _telle est la vie_—or rather, in such a connection,
_la mort_.
The Rev. John Eagles, avowing an inclination to join in Shakspeare’s
anathema on the movers of bones, adverts incidentally to the alleged fact
of Swift’s larynx having been stolen, and being now in possession of the
purloiner in America,—of an itinerant phrenologist now hawking about
Pope’s skull,—and of Mathews’s thigh-bone circulating from house to house.
Coupling such corporeal vicissitudes _post mortem_ with the text with
which we started, of Jezebel’s scattered remains on the face of the
field, we call to mind Ben Jonson’s description (only too historically
true) of the dispersed fragments of him that the other day had been
virtually master of Rome, and so of the wide world. Contending hands have
appropriated all that is left of him: some have ravished an arm, others a
thigh; this spoiler has the hands, and that the feet; “these fingers, and
these toes; that hath his liver, he his heart....
“The whole, and all of what was great Sejanus,
And, next to Cæsar, did possess the world,
Now torn and scatter’d, as he needs no grave;
Each little dust covers a little part;
So lies he nowhere, and yet often buried.”
“_CONSIDER THE LILIES._”
ST. MATTHEW vi. 28.
Vulgar utilitarianism—for there is a vulgar and shallow phase of it, as
well as a scientific and a misrepresented one—can surely find little to
its fancy (but then it has no fancy) the invitation, or monition, even
though uttered in the Sermon on the Mount, of “Consider the lilies.” Why
consider them, it would fain object, seeing that they toil not, neither
do they spin? But that is the very reason for considering them. They are
clothed from above with surpassing beauty, without taking thought for
themselves; so clothed, not for utilitarian ends, except in the large
sense that the _dulce_ too is _utile_, that a thing of beauty is a joy
for ever; and _that_ is undeniably to be of some “use” in the world.
Herein lies the simple answer to the query in the laureate’s poem,—
“Oh, to what uses shall we put the wildweed flower that simply blows?
And is there any moral shut within the bosom of the rose?
But any man that walks the mead, in bud, or blade, or bloom, may find,
According as his humours lead, a meaning suited to his mind.”
And liberal applications lie in art as nature. The Warwickshire justice
tells Shakspeare, after hearing him recite his stanzas on a sweetbriar,
“Thou mightest have added some moral about life and beauty: poets never
handle roses without one.” But then Justice Shallow is the critic. The
author of the “Citation and Examination” in which the criticism is
uttered, has an imaginary dialogue between Vittoria Colonna and Michel
Angelo—the former of whom defines the difference betwixt poetry and all
other arts, all other kinds of composition, to be this: in them, utility
comes before delight; in this, delight before utility. Buonarotti submits
that in some pleasing poems there is nothing whatsoever of the useful.
But Vittoria thinks he is mistaken: an obvious moral is indeed a heavy
protuberance, which injures the gracefulness of a poem; but there is
wisdom of one kind or other, she alleges, in every sentence of a really
good composition, and it produces its effect in various ways. “The
beautiful in itself is useful by awakening our finer sensibilities, which
it must be our own fault if we do not often carry with us into action.”
Leigh Hunt, in his “Song of the Flowers,” makes them exult in the fact,
by their mere existence demonstrated, that heaven loves colour; that
great Nature clearly joys in red and green: “What sweet thoughts she
thinks of violets, and pinks, and a thousand flashing hues, made solely
to be seen:”
“Uselessness divinest
Of a use the finest
Painteth us, the teachers of the end of use;
Travellers weary eyed
Bless us far and wide;
Unto sick and prison’d thoughts we give sudden truce;
Not a poor town window
Loves its sickliest planting,
But its wall speaks loftier truth than Babylon’s whole vaunting.”
So again Mr. Procter apostrophizes Nature in his “Song of the Snowdrop,”
as having surely sent it forth alone to the cold and sullen season, like
a thought at random thrown,—“sent it thus for some grave reason.
“If ’twere but to pierce the mind
With a single gentle thought,
Who shall deem thee hard or blind,
Who, that thou hast vainly wrought?”
Bishop Copleston, in his plea for a free cultivation of the poetic
faculty, contends that its being entirely neglected must prove an
irreparable injury to young minds—losing as they do that intellectual
charm from which life borrows its loveliest graces: hence he takes
exception to Locke’s expression, that educators should beware of making
“anything a boy’s business but downright virtue.” Surely, argues his
critic, the improvement of the faculties which God has implanted in us
is itself a virtue: our attention may be given in undue measure to one,
and so may violate that just harmony without which nothing is virtuous,
nothing lovely. The faculty itself, which the philosopher seems to
condemn, the divine claims to be one of the kindest gifts of heaven. And
why, then, it is asked, should man be niggardly where Providence has
been bountiful? “Why should he think scorn of that pleasant land, and
undervalue those fair possessions, which were not thought beneath the
care of the Almighty?” In the garden of Eden, we are reminded, was made
to grow, not only what was good for food, but every tree also that was
pleasant to the sight: and in that garden man was placed, to keep it, and
to dress it.
It is, as Isaac Taylor remarks, by her diversities,—her gay adornments,
her copious fund of forms, and her sportive freaks of shape and colour,
that Nature allures the eye of man, while she draws him on toward
the more arduous, but more noble pursuit of her hidden analogies. An
insensible process goes on, the effect of which is gradually to invest
general truths with a sort of majesty, as well as beauty; so that,
at length, this new charm is found to prevail over the graces and
attractions of the exterior diversity of things.
Even philosophy, however, has been said to teach us that nature scatters
the lavish beauties of form and colour not always with a utilitarian
purpose; or rather, that beauty—merely to display beauty—is often, as
in birds and flowers and shells and crystals, the object of material
organization. “There is no special use in the metallic lustre on the
plumage of the humming-bird, and tropical blossoms blaze for the mere
sake of being splendid.” Yet is it owned to be noticeable that only in
the lower ranks of the kingdom of being is nature lavish of beauty for
the mere sake of the beautiful; and that as we advance upward in the
scale of created things, a certain severity and reserve seem to grow upon
nature itself.
Shenstone—a now all but forgotten poet—in a now quite forgotten ode,
asserts, as in duty bound, the uses beyond use of Nature’s fancy work:
“Search but the garden or the wood,
Let yon admired carnation own
Not all was meant for raiment, or for food,
Not all for needful use alone;
There while the seeds of future blossoms dwell,
’Tis colour’d for the sight, perfumed to please the smell.
“Why knows the nightingale to sing?
Why flows the pine’s nectareous juice?
Why shines with paint the linnet’s wing?
For sustenance alone? for use?
For preservation?”...
An art-poet significantly and suggestively writes, in lines to which
the contributory reader, must, on his part, supply readings as it were
between the lines:
“This wild white rose-bud in my hand hath meanings meant for me alone,
Which no one else can understand: to you it breathes with altered tone;
How shall I class its properties for you? or its wise whisperings
Interpret? Other eyes and ears it teaches many other things.”
The dull of hearing and seeing, it teaches very little. Josiah the
curate, in Colonel Hamley’s tale, finds nothing suggestive in a rose in a
buttonhole—not that he lacks interest in the flower in what he thinks its
proper place. He never, he owns, could see any possible affinity between
flowers and broadcloth; and why people should pluck blossoms from the
stems and leaves that harmonize so well with them, to stick them into a
dingy produce of the loom, he holds to be one of the puzzles of humanity.
But Josiah is indulgent to that sister Rosa of his, who confessedly
resembles the lilies in so far that she toils not, neither does she spin;
and who, idle child, seems to think human beings ought to be content with
merely blooming.
We like our churches to be beautiful, and our temples, and our whole
symbolic creations, Mr. Hannay somewhere observes; their beauty
represents the general beauty of the universe, and that is one of the
modes by which God is pleased to appeal to our faculties of love and
wonder and admiration. “The Romanists call the Virgin Mary a ‘mystical
rose,’ and a beautiful woman is a mystical rose; attractive, and yet, at
the same time, a religious symbol—an object which keeps alive in you the
sense of wonder and love of beauty, and thankfulness to the Supreme for
the glories of His creation.”
It has been said by an art-poet already quoted, that “the girl who twines
in her soft hair the orange-flower, with love’s devotion, by the mere
act of being fair, sets countless laws of life in motion.” Dr. Croly, in
his “Salathiel,” pleading for the _right_ of beauty to have a natural
power over the heart, urges, for instance, that all that overcomes
selfishness—the besetting sin of the world—is an instrument of good; and
goes on to say that beauty is but melody of a higher kind—both alike
softening the troubled and hard nature of man. “Even if we looked on a
lovely woman but as on a rose, an exquisite production of the summer
hours of life, it would be idle to deny her influence in making even
those summer hours sweeter.” We may apply the suggestion in one of Mrs.
Browning’s last poems—
“What if God has set her here
Less for action than for Being?—
For the eye and for the ear.
“Just to show what beauty may,
Just to prove what music can.”
_A HISTRIONIC ASPECT OF LIFE._
1 CORINTHIANS vii. 31.
The apostle would have his brethren so to use this world, as not abusing
it; and for this reason, that “the fashion of this world passeth away.”
In the original the phrase runs: παράγει γὰρ τὸ ΣΧΗΜΑ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου.
The expression is said by Grotius and others to be borrowed from the
theatre, and to refer to the scene-shifting of the stage. Life here below
has verily its histrionic aspects; the fashion of it passeth away much as
do the scene-painter’s creations, the stage-carpenter’s framework, the
spectacular effects and dissolving views, nay the very actors themselves.
For, all the world is in some sense a stage, and all the men and women
merely players—
“They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
Considering his own profession, the figure is one that must often have
crossed and occupied Shakspeare’s mind—at once so keenly observing and
so profoundly meditative. Not that he harps much upon it, so much as
might, perhaps, have been expected, in his plays. Still he does now and
then recur to the histrionic metaphor. And it is in his graver mood, not
his lighter, that he does so; in sober sadness, not with gibing glee. As
where Lear, in the extremity of his distraction, intent on preaching to
Gloster, takes for his text the wail of infancy, crying, the first time
that it smells the air: for
“When we are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools.”
Or again, as where Antonio, the care-fraught merchant of Venice, assured
by a friend that he is looking far from well, indeed “marvellously
changed,” and remonstrated with for not taking life more easily, replies:
“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.”
_Mundus universus exercet histrioniam_,—the saw is Petronius Arbiter’s.
There is an obverse reading, by some other old Eminent Hand: _Totum
mundum agit histrio_. If all the world’s a play, so again there’s not in
all the world a character the player won’t act. Lucretius had the stage
simile of life in his mind’s eye, when he said of those who hide certain
of their doings, _vitæ post-scenia celant_,—the _post-scenium_ being what
we call “behind the scenes,” where the actors dress and “make up” for
their parts. And what says a distich in the Greek Anthology:
“Σκηνὴ πᾶς ὁ βίος, καὶ παίγνιον· ἢ μάθε παίζειν,
Τὴν σπουδὴν μεταθεὶς, ἢ φέρε τὰς ὀδύνας.”
“Life is a stage, a play: so learn thy part,
All cares removed, or rend with grief thy heart.”
Sir Thomas Browne professes, in his large utterance and stately style:
“The world to me is but a dream or mock show, and we all therein but
pantaloons and anticks, to my severer contemplations.” To the same
effect, though not in the same spirit, Wordsworth’s recluse avows himself
tired
“Of the ostentatious world a swelling stage
With empty actions and vain passions stuffed.”
When both Swift and Bolingbroke had closed the tenth lustre of their
years, his cynical lordship wrote from Brussels to the cynical dean,
that he thought it high time to determine how they should “play the
last act of the farce. Might not my life,” adds accomplished St. John,
“be entitled much more properly a what-d’ye-call-it than a farce? Some
comedy, a great deal of tragedy, and the whole interspersed with scenes
of Harlequin, Scaramouch, and Dr. Baloardo.” Accomplished St. John was
always, and to the last an accomplished actor. As for Dr. Swift, he
expanded the histrionic similitude of life into some eighteen stanzas on
the puppet show—which record how wit, “the life of man to represent, and
turn it all to ridicule, did once a puppet show invent, where the chief
actor is a fool”—and of which, perhaps, the gravest runs thus:
“This fleeting scene is but a stage
Where various images appear;
In different parts of youth and age,
Alike the prince and peasant share.”
Don Quixote tells Sancho Panza how like human life is to a play. One
takes the part of a ruffian, another of a liar, a third of a merchant,
a fourth of a soldier. This man is for the occasion the lover; that man
is the judicious friend. At last the play is ended. Each takes off the
clothes which belong to his part, and the players remain equal. So it is
in the comedy of this world, says Don Quixote. There are emperors and
popes, and all the characters that can be introduced into a play; but it
is played out, death takes away the outward trappings which made them
seem to differ, and they remain equal in the tomb.
Where, is the author of the Complaint’s complaining query, or querulous
plaint,
“Where, the prime actors of the last year’s scene;
Their port so proud, their buskin, and their plume?”
It is a trite topic, indeed, with Dr. Young,—that of “Life’s gay stage,
one inch above the grave,” whereon those strut and fret their hour, that
shall soon be seen no more for ever. All, merely players.
“Each, in his turn, some tragic story tells,
With now and then a wretched farce between.”
Dr. Maginn takes note of the frequency with which Lucian compares life to
a theatrical procession, in which magnificent parts are assigned to some,
who pass before the eyes of the spectators clothed in costly garments,
and bedecked with glittering jewels; but, the moment the show is over,
are reduced to their original nothingness, no longer kings and heroes,
but poor players whose hour has been strutted out.
No wonder that the master Showman of Vanity Fair should pen an _envoi_
after this fashion:
“The play is done; the curtain drops,
Slow falling to the prompter’s bell:
A moment yet the actor stops,
And looks around, to say farewell.
It is an irksome word and task;
And when he’s laughed and said his say,
He shows, as he removes the mask,
A face that’s anything but gay.”
Horace Walpole will be found iterating and reiterating in his letters
a favourite apophthegm of his—that the world is a comedy to those who
think, a tragedy to those who feel.
One might safely assume beforehand that a people of so histrionic a turn
as the French would make good use of the histrionic metaphor of life,
in their _belles lettres_, of whatever date. And in point of fact the
figure is a well-worked one in French literature. Now it is a Cardinal
de Retz, who, on being named coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of
Paris, describes himself as thereupon ceasing to be “in the pit, or
at best in the orchestra, playing and funning with the fiddles,” but
mounting thence to the stage itself. Indeed, a modern critic has remarked
that Retz is perpetually making use of these expressions and images of
_théâtre_ and _comédie_. He was an accomplished actor from first to
last—not above the line of low comedy now and then, and quite an adept in
the Cloak-and-Sword business. Now again it is his contemporary, Madame de
Motteville, who so frequently represents herself as an occupant of one of
the best boxes, intent on diverting herself with the _belle comédie_ that
was being played under her eyes. “Les cabinets des rois,” says Madame—who
ought to know—are theatres in which pieces of universal interest are for
ever being played: some simply comic; others decidedly tragical, though
so frequently occasioned by the merest trifles. So, again, Madame des
Ursins (the Princess Orsino), another _habituée_ behind the scenes, and
herself a star of the first magnitude in any working company, describes
the world as _une comédie où il y avait souvent de bien mauvais acteurs_.
Then, too, we have the Abbé Chaulieu, when dancing attendance on the
Duke of Vendôme, and assisting at all the fêtes and galas got up in
that prince’s honour, writing in a sort of apologetic strain to his
sister-in-law, that since all the world’s a stage, one must just be
content to don cap and bells with the rest[13]—for if all your men and
women are merely players, motley’s your only wear.
Of another _spirituel_, and very unspiritual, abbé of that period,
Choisy, it has been observed, that his life resembled a comedy, rife with
all that is most various and most improbable: his career of fourscore
years composed a complete masquerade; for
“this man in his time play’d many parts,”
and in each of them he seems to have acted with professional aptitude,
facility, and zest.
Such another actor, with a difference, was Voltaire. As Voltaire himself
said of the Duchess of Maine, “Elle aimera la comédie jusqu’au dernier
moment, et, quand elle sera malade, je vous conseille de lui administrer
quelque belle pièce,” etc., etc.,—so of the mocking philosopher of
Ferney, playing his many parts, it has been said, that he had a genius
for transformations, having always more than one _rôle_ to play in the
comedy of life—which diversity of _rôles_ jumped with his humour, and
just hit the mobile preferences of a man who so early in his existence
turned player. The life of Voltaire is a comedy, says Sainte-Beuve: his
correspondence with D’Alembert shows us the coulisses and background—and
lets us in to damaging and disenchanting revelations behind the scenes.
Elsewhere he may be seen to fret and strut his hour upon the stage,
carefully made up, and all in point device costume; but here we have him
in undress, and by dusty daylight, and off his guard.
_Tous les comédiens ne sont pas du théâtre_, is rightly reckoned one of
the prettiest _provérbes_ of M. Théodore Leclerc. In the Proverbe which
bears that pregnant title, a nephew incidentally tells his uncle, “Vous
qui êtes un homme du monde, vous appelez cela l’esprit du monde; moi qui
suis un comédien, j’appelle cela de la comédie. C’est toujours la même
chose, sous un nom différent.” The salon and the stage are on a level.
To be a real man of the world, is to be an actor of the first class.
M. Scribe puts the proverb as a practical epigram into the mouth of old
Michonnet, when trying to soothe and inspirit his pet pupil for the
stage: “Calme toi et étudie; ... il y a dans le monde de plus grands
comédiens que nous!”
Indeed, according to Chamfort, there is no choice in the matter; every
man, however wise and unsophisticated and open-hearted, must, sooner or
later, turn actor, on this great stage of fools. For, “la fortune et le
costume qui l’entourent font de la vie une représentation au milieu de
laquelle il faut qu’à la longue l’homme le plus honnête devienne comédien
malgré lui.” We are all actors and actresses, says one of Miss Eden’s
characters, and “none of us quite up to our parts, though we act all
day long.” Not that every one plays just the part he or she would have
chosen. The distribution of _rôles_ would seem often to make this a mad
world, my masters.
“Le monde, à mon avis, est comme un grand théâtre,
Où chacun en public, l’un par l’autre abusé,
Souvent à ce qu’il est, joue un rôle opposé.”
This, one might almost paraphrase in the words of John Webster’s wobegone
Duchess Mariana:
“I account this world a tedious theatre,
For I do play a part in’t ’gainst my will.”
By way of introducing his elaborate narrative of Darnley’s fate, Mr.
Froude tells us of Mary Stuart, that on the political stage she was “a
great actress. The ‘woman’ had a drama of her own going on behind the
scenes; the theatre caught fire; the mock heroics of the Catholic crusade
burnt into ashes; and a tremendous domestic tragedy was revealed before
the astonished eyes of Europe.” And later again, describing Mary’s
caressing wiles to beguile and tranquilise her doomed husband, on the
eve of the catastrophe, the same historian employs the same histrionic
figure: “Mary Stuart was an admirable actress; rarely, perhaps, on the
world’s stage has there been a more skilful player.” But the part, he
adds, was a difficult one; she had still some natural compunction; and
the performance was not quite perfect.
Most of our business is farce, writes old Montaigne: _Mundus universus
exercet histrioniam_ (which the old French essayist’s old English
translator renders, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women
merely players”). We must play our part well, he adds, but withal as the
part of a borrowed personage; we must not make a real essence of a mask
and outward appearance, etc. So it is one of Ben Jonson’s “Discoveries,”
“de vitâ humanâ,” that our whole life is like a play—wherein every man,
forgetful of himself, is in travail with expression of another. In one of
his comedies, rare Ben makes a sham inn-keeper, taking his ease in his
own inn, and following his own fancies there, “imagine all the world’s a
play:—
“The state, and men’s affairs, all passages
Of life, to spring new scenes; come in, go out,
And shift, and vanish.... I have got
A seat to sit at ease here, in mine inn,
To see the comedy; and laugh, and chuck
At the variety and throng of humours
And dispositions, that come justling in
And out still, as they one drove hence another.”
For every man, in the play of this world, says pious Master Feltham, is
not only an actor, but is a spectator, too: “At the beginning (that is,
in his youth) it promises so much that he is loth to leave it; when it
grows towards the middle (the act of virility), then he sees the scenes
grow thick, and fill, and would gladly understand the end: but, when that
draws near, and he finds what it will be, he is then content to depart
and leave his room to others.”
Fielding’s philosopher asks if the actor is esteemed happier to whose lot
it falls to play the principal part, than he who plays the lowest? and
yet the drama may run twenty nights together, and so outlast our lives;
but at the best, says he, “life is only a little longer drama; and the
business of the great stage is consequently a little more serious than
that which is performed at the theatre-royal.”
“If the world be, indeed, as ’twas said, but a stage,
The dress only is changed ’twixt the acts of an age.
From the dark tiring-chamber behind straight reissue
With new masks the old mummers; the very same tissue
Of passionate antics that move through the play,
With new parts to fulfil and new phrases to say.”
An old Greek writer, speaking of Alexander of Pheræ, who reigned in
Thessaly only ten months, and then was slain, calls him, in derision of
his brief lease of power, a theatrical tyrant, a mere stage king, who, as
it were, walked on only to walk off again. But the palace of the Cæsars,
Plutarch remarks, received four emperors in a less space of time, one
entering, and another making his exit, as if to fret and strut each his
little hour upon the stage. How soon the stage directions, Enter Galba,
enter and exit Otho, enter and exit Vitellius, lapse in _Exeunt omnes_!
In Charles the Sixth’s ordinance, authorising the players of the
“Mysteries of the Passion” (towards the close of the fourteenth
century), that poor crazed monarch’ styles them his “loved and dear
co-mates.” And what could be juster? Michelet asks. “A hapless actor
himself, a poor player in the grand historic mystery, he went to see his
co-mates’—saints, angels, and devils, perform their miserable travestie
of the Passion. He was not only spectator; he was spectacle as well. His
people went to see in him the Passion of royalty.”
Players, the abstract and brief chronicles of the time, Hazlitt calls
the motley representatives of human nature. They are the only honest
hypocrites, he says (and hypocrite, by the way, is classically a correct
name for them, though Hazlitt may not have remembered or meant it): their
life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness—it being the height of their
ambition to be “beside themselves:”—to-day kings, to-morrow beggars,
it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing: made up of
mimic laughter and tears, they wear the livery of other men’s fortunes,
till their very thoughts are not their own. “They are, as it were,
train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity,
frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them.... The
stage is an epitome, a bettered likeness of the world, with the dull part
left out: and indeed, with this omission, it is nearly big enough to
hold all the rest.”
Sir Thomas Overbury had, two centuries before, written characteristically
to the same purport. “All men have beene of his occupation,” writes the
ill-starred knight of a good actor; “and indeed, what hee doth fainedly,
that doe others essentially: this day one plays a monarch, the next
a private person. Here one acts a tyrant, on the morrow an exile: a
parasite this man to-night, to-morrow a precisian,” and so of divers
others.
“And why not players strut in courtiers’ clothes?
For these are actors, too, as well as those.”
Or, to top (Pope) Alexander the Great with Glorious John (Dryden):
“Even kings but play, and when their part is done,
Some other, worse or better, mount the throne.”
As we cannot be monarchs, says the Porpora of fiction, we are artists,
and have a kingdom of our own: we dress ourselves as kings and great men,
we ascend the stage, we seat ourselves upon a fictitious throne, we play
a farce, we are actors. The world, he continues, sees us, but understands
us not. “It is only when I am at the theatre that I see clearly our true
relations to society. The spirit of music unseals my eyes, and I see
behind the footlights a true court, real heroes, lofty inspirations;
while the wretched dolts who flaunt in the boxes upon velvet couches are
the real actors. In truth, the world is a comedy; and we must play our
parts in it with gravity and decorum, though conscious of the hollow
pageant which compasses us on every side.” And Godolphin pronounces life
to differ from the play only in this—that it has no plot, all being
vague, desultory, unconnected, till the curtain drops with the mystery
unsolved.
All this is in Mr. Carlyle’s vein—of the _Sartor Resartus_ date at least;
or as when he depicted the family vagaries of Mirabeaudom, which produced
“such astonishing comico-tragical French farces”—with the eight chaotic
volumes of family correspondence, wherein the various personages speak
their dialogue, unfold their farce-tragedy: “Seen or half seen, it is a
stage; as the whole world is. What with personages, what with destinies,
no stranger house-drama [than that of the Mirabeau family] was enacting
on the earth at that time.” The same figure Mr. Carlyle elsewhere applies
to our own revolution times, in the century before: “Such is the drama
of life, seen in Baillie of Kilwinning; a thing of multifarious tragic
and epic meanings, then as now. A many-voiced tragedy and epos, yet with
broad-based comic and grotesque accompaniments, done by actors _not_
in buskins;—ever replete with elements of guilt and remorse, of pity,
instruction, and fear.”
* * * * *
ACT WELL YOUR PART:—there all the _moral_ lies. Though the world _be_
histrionical, and most men live ironically, says Sir Thomas Browne, “yet
be thou what thou singly art, and personate only thyself.”
It has been sadly and severely said of the Emperor Augustus, who was
loved by no one, that if, at the moment of his death, he desired his
friends to dismiss him from this world by the common expression of
scenical applause (_vos plaudite!_), in that valedictory injunction he
expressed inadvertently the true value of his own long life, which, in
strict candour, may be pronounced one continued series of histrionic
efforts, and of excellent acting, adapted to selfish ends.
_L’honnête homme_, writes an epigrammatic thinker, _joue son rôle le
mieux qu’il peut sans songer à la galerie_.
Remember, says Epictetus, so to act your part upon this stage as to be
approved by the master, whether it be a short or a long one that he
has given you to perform. If he will have you to represent a beggar,
endeavour to act the beggar’s part well; and so, a cripple, a prince, or
a plebeian. It is your part to perform well what you represent: it is his
to choose what that shall be.
Thus spake the stoic philosopher. And how speaks the Christian divine?
As the merit of an actor, says Robert Hall, is not estimated by the
part which he performs, but solely by the truth and propriety of his
representation, and the peasant is often applauded where the monarch is
hissed; so when the great drama of life is concluded, He who allots its
scenes and determines its period will take an account of His servants,
and assign to each his due, in his own proper character.
Since the life of man is likened to a scene, “I had rather,” writes John
Milton, “that all my entrances and exits might mix with such persons
only whose worth erects them and their actions to a grave and tragic
deportment, and not to have to do with clowns and vices.”
And this, lest such a player have to echo, in spirit, if not to the
letter, the bitter conviction of blinded, blundering Leontes—_Io anche_—
“And I
Play too; but so disgraced a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave.”
The measure of a happy life, writes Lord Shaftesbury—he of the
“Characteristics”—is not from the fewer or more suns we behold, the fewer
or more breaths we draw, or meals we repeat; but from the having once
lived well, acted our part handsomely, and made our exit cheerfully—or,
to print it as he wrote it, for the lovers of old books’ sake—“and made
our _Exit_ cheerfully, and as became us.”
It is well remarked by Archbishop Trench that we have forfeited the full
force of the statement, “God is no respecter of _persons_,” from the fact
that “person” does not mean for us now all that it once meant. “Person,”
from “persona,” the mask constantly worn by the actor of antiquity, is by
natural transfer the part or _rôle_ in the play which each sustains, as
πρόσωπον is in Greek. “In the great tragi-comedy of life each sustains
a ‘person;’ one that of a king, another that of a hind; one must play
Dives, another Lazarus. This ‘person’ God, for whom the question is
not _what_ ‘person’ each sustains, but _how_ he sustains it, does not
regard.”
_PHARAOH’S ALTERNATIONS OF AMENDMENT AND RELAPSE._
EXODUS vii.-x., _passim_.
His land of Egypt covered with frogs, Pharaoh was urgent with Moses and
Aaron to “intreat the Lord” for him, and with conciliatory proposals
in favour of the children of Israel. The plague of the frogs abated
accordingly, Pharaoh hardened his heart as soon as he saw that there was
respite. So with the plague of flies that came in grievous swarms into
the house of Pharaoh, and into his servants’ houses, and into all the
land of Egypt, so that the land was corrupted by reason of the flies;
again Pharaoh besought Hebrew intercession, and pledged himself to acts
of clemency; and again no sooner was the plague removed, than Pharaoh
hardened his heart at that time also, neither would he let the people go.
Plague after plague ensued—the murrain of beasts, the plague of boils
and blains, and the plague of hail and fire; and so grievous was the
last—smiting all that was in the field, both man and beast, as well as
every herb and tree—that Pharaoh once more importuned Moses and Aaron,
confessing his sins, imploring forgiveness, and promising amendment.
Once and again he was heard and answered. “And when Pharaoh saw that
the rain and the hail and the thunders were ceased, he sinned yet more,
and hardened his heart ... neither would he let the children of Israel
go.” The plague of locusts, destroying all that the hail had left, made
him call for the Hebrew brothers again in hottest haste,—entreating
forgiveness “only this once,” and deliverance “from this death only.” But
the mighty west wind that swept away the ravagers had no sooner ceased to
blow, than the hardening process again set in, and the tyrant revelled as
of yore in his accustomed tyranny. How many more plagues might have been
added to the ten—decade upon decade—with the like result, each facile
amendment merging in a more and more facile relapse, it is superfluous to
guess.
We read in Homer, as versified by Pope, that—
“The weakest atheist-wretch all heaven defies,
But shrinks and shudders when the thunder flies.”
So Boileau satirises the “intrepid” scoffer, who puts off believing in
God until fever prostrates him; who is almost as quick as the lightning
to lift up his hands to heaven when the lightning glares across it, but
laughs at poor feeble humanity as soon as the atmosphere is cleared and
the storm quite spent:
“Attend pour croire en Dieu que la fiévre le presse;
Et, toujours dans l’orage au ciel levant les mains,
Dès que l’air est calmé, rit des faibles humains.”
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu describes in one of her vivacious letters
a stormy passage she has just made from Calais to Dover, and diverts
herself not a little, as her ladyship’s manner is, at the distress of a
fellow-passenger, in alternations of anxiety as to being lost herself
and losing her smuggled head-dress. “She was an English lady that I had
met at Calais, who desired me to let her go over with me in my cabin.
She had brought a fine point-head, which she was contriving to conceal
from the custom-house officers. When the wind grew high, and our little
vessel cracked, she fell very heartily to her prayers, and thought wholly
of her soul. When it seemed to abate, she returned to the worldly care
of her head-dress;” and the alternative exclamations of the distracted
creature are liberally specified by Lady Mary; who then adds: “This easy
transition from her soul to her head-dress, and the alternate agonies
that both gave her, made it hard to determine which she thought of
greatest value.”
Lord Lytton, in one of his fictions, comments on the instinct, as he
calls it, of that capricious and fluctuating conscience, belonging to
weak minds, “which remains still and drooping and lifeless as a flag on
a mast-head during the calm of prosperity, but flutters and flaps and
tosses when the wind blows and the wave heaves.” And an example to the
purpose is given in the case of a selfish uncle, whose orphan nephews
are all but coldly discarded until his own son is _in extremis_. “Mr.
Beaufort ... thought very acutely and remorsefully of the condition of
the Mortons, during the danger of his own son. So far indeed from his
anxiety for Arthur monopolising his care, it only sharpened his charity
towards the orphans; for many a man becomes devout and good when he
fancies he has an _immediate_ interest in appeasing Providence.” Such
a man, in such a case, becomes at any rate lavish of promises, which
perhaps at the moment he even intends to keep. But how are promises of
this kind usually kept? Much after the manner predicated of Bajazet, by
Acomat, in the French tragedy; a vaguely worded intimation, but definite
enough in its scope: only let the pressure that extorts the promise be
withdrawn, and gone will be the value of the promise too:
“Promettez: affranchi du péril qui vous presse,
Vous verrez de quel poids sera votre promesse.”
Pope would consign such trifles light as air to the lunar sphere,
“Where broken vows and death-bed alms are found,
And lovers’ hearts with ends of ribbon bound,
The courtier’s promises, the sick man’s prayers.”
Why do these last make so slight an impression on by-standers? Mr.
Whitehead says because it is not a living but a dying man that speaks;
and a dying man who wants to live. “It is fear that cries out in agony,
not penitence that prays.” Fielding, in his masterpiece, moralises on the
truism that be men ever so much alarmed and frightened when apprehending
themselves in danger of dying, yet no sooner are they cleared from this
apprehension, than even the fears of it are erased from their minds. It
is much later in the same story, that the “hero’s” avowed resolution, at
a crisis in his fortunes, to sin no more, lest a worse thing happen unto
him, is ridiculed by a cynical acquaintance, as the effect merely of low
spirits, and confinement—with the quotation of “some witticisms about the
devil when he was sick.” The epigram in question is a favourite allusion
with novelists and moralists of all sorts and sizes. There is a border
freebooter of Scott’s, who, having recovered from a severe illness,
thanks to the medical skill of the Black Dwarf, greets his benefactor, on
horseback, all in bandit array, as soon as convalescent. “So,” said the
dwarf, “rapine and murder once more on horseback!” “On horseback?” said
the bandit; “ay, ay, Elshie, your leech-craft has set me on the bonnie
bay again.” “And all those promises of amendment which you made during
your illness forgotten?” continued Elshender. “All clear away, with the
water-saps and panada,” returned the unabashed convalescent. “Ye ken,
Elshie, for they say ye are weel acquent wi’ the gentleman,
“‘When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be;
When the devil was well, the devil a monk was he.’”
For it is not every vow taken in a panic, to become a monk if spared,
that is kept as Luther’s was—“devil” though the anti-Lutherans of his
day might account and call him. Young Martin saw one of his friends
struck dead by his side, by a stroke of lightning, in 1505; and the
sight moved him to utter on the instant a vow to St. Anne that he would
become a monk if he were himself spared. “The danger passed over, but
he did not seek to elude an engagement wrung from him in terror. He
solicited no dispensation from his vow.” Brother Martin _ipso facto_
approved himself no member of the fraternity of what Le Sage calls _vous
autres, messieurs les diables_, in a passage that indirectly bears upon
our theme, for it refers to the proverbial worthlessness of promises
coming from that quarter: “Voilà de belles promesses, répliqua l’Ecolier;
mais vous autres, messieurs les diables, on vous accuse de n’être pas
fort réligieux à tenir ce que vous promettez.” The epigram runs, if not
rhymes, as well in Latin as in English:
“Ægrotat dæmon, monachus tunc esse volebat;
Dæmon convaluit, dæmon ut ante fuit.”
Referring to proverbs of this kind it is that Archbishop Trench says,
that sometimes an adage, without changing its shape altogether, will yet
on the lips of different nations be slightly modified—the modifications,
slight as they often are, being not the less eminently characteristic.
“Thus in English we say, _The river past, and God forgotten_, to express
with how mournful a frequency He whose assistance was invoked, it may
have been earnestly, in the moment of peril, is remembered no more,
so soon as by His help the danger has been surmounted. The Spaniards
have the proverb too; but it is with them: _The river past, the
saint forgotten_: the saints being in Spain more prominent objects of
invocation than God. And the Italian form of it sounds a still sadder
depth of ingratitude: _The peril passed, the saint mocked_.” Men
indulge in doubts of a Supreme Being, says La Bruyère, when they are
lusty and strong; but with sickness comes belief, such as it is. “L’on
doute de Dieu dans une pleine santé.... Quand on devient malade, et que
l’hydropisie est formée ... l’on croit en Dieu.” Believes? As to that,
the devils believe, and tremble. But how when the dropsy is relieved
and the trembling fit over? Dr. Johnson once adverted in conversation
with Seward and Boswell to the evil life he led until sickness wrought a
reformation, which, in his case, had been lasting. Mr. Seward thereupon
observed: “One should think that sickness, and the view of death, would
make more men religious.” But Johnson replied to this: “Sir, they do
not know how to go about it; they have not the first notion. A man who
has never had religion before, no more grows religious when he is sick
than a man who has never learnt figures can count when he has need of
calculation.”[14] It is to be observed that the doctor claimed for
himself a previous regard for religion in quite early life; for some
years it had, to use his own phrase, “dropped out of his mind,” but
“sickness brought it back,” and he hoped he had never lost it since.
It is an old, old story, that of the generation which tempted God in the
desert, whose days He therefore consumed in vanity, and their years in
trouble. When He slew them, then they sought Him; and they returned, and
inquired early after God. But it was only to start aside again, like a
broken bow.
“Tamen ad mores natura recurrit
Damnatos, fixa et mutari nescia.”
“When men in health against physicians rail,”
says Crabbe,
“They should consider that their nerves may fail;
Nay, when the world can nothing more produce,
The priest, the insulted priest, may have his use.”
There is a passage in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters that reads like a
paraphrase and expansion of this: “Quand le médecin est auprès de mon
lit, le confesseur me trouve à son avantage. Je sais bien empêcher la
religion de m’affliger quand je me porte bien; mais je lui permets de
me consoler quand je suis malade: lorsque je n’ai plus rien à espérer
d’un côté, la religion se présente, et me gagne,” etc. Plutarch tells
us of Tullus Hostilius, that he exulted in irreligious opinions while
in health, but was frightened into superstition when taken ill. To
this passage, one of Plutarch’s translators, Dr. Langhorne, appends a
footnote, about none being so superstitious in distress as those who,
in their prosperity, have laughed at religion; and cites as an instance
the famous Canon Vossius, who was “no less remarkable for the greatness
of his fears, than he was for the littleness of his faith.” Cowper would
cite to the same purpose a more distinguished example:
“The Frenchman first in literary fame;
Mention him, if you please. Voltaire? The same.
...
The Scripture was his jest-book, whence he drew
_Bon-mots_ to gall the Christian and the Jew:
An infidel when well, but what when sick?
Oh, then a text would touch him to the quick.”
Swift gives a satirical narrative of “what passed in London during the
general consternation of all ranks and degrees of mankind” on account of
the predicted destruction of the world by a comet, on a given day. Friday
was the declared day; and during Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, public
bewilderment and terror are described as extreme—the churches crowded,
and thousands praying in the public streets. At length Friday came. But
as the day wore on, popular fears began to abate, then lessened every
hour; “at night they were almost extinct, till the total darkness that
hitherto used to terrify, now comforted every freethinker and atheist.
Great numbers went together to the taverns, bespoke suppers, and broke
up whole hogsheads for joy. The subject of all wit and conversation was
to ridicule the prophecy and rally each other. All the quality and
gentry were perfectly ashamed, nay, some utterly disowned that they had
manifested any signs of religion.
“But the next day, even the common people, as well as their betters,
appeared in their usual state of indifference. They drank, they swore,
they lied, they cheated, they quarrelled, they murdered. In short, the
world went on in the old channel.”
To apply what Butler says of “saints” in his application of the word, as
a cant term then of political significance:
“For saints in peace degenerate,
And dwindle down to reprobate; ...
And though they’ve tricks to cast their sins,
As easy as serpents do their skins,
That in a while grow out again,
In peace they turn mere carnal men;
And from the most refined of saints
As naturally turn miscreants,[15]
As barnacles turn solan geese
I’ th’ islands of the Orcades.”
That is a fine stroke of nature, in the Knight’s Tale (from Chaucer),
where Dryden makes Arcite resolve, only when and not until moribund, to
avow the wrong he has done to Palamon, and own his fear of repeating it
should he recover:
“When ’twas declared all hope of life was past,
Conscience (that of all physic works the last)
Caused him to send for Emily in haste.
With her, at his desire, came Palamon;”
to whom Arcite owns the faithless part he has played, and desires
forgiveness, but at the same time makes this frank avowal:—
“And much I doubt, should Heaven my life prolong,
I should return to justify my wrong;
For while my former flames remain within,
Repentance is but want of power to sin.”
Mr. Tennyson pictures for us a similar instance in Sir Lancelot:
“Yet the great knight in his mid-sickness made
Full many a holy vow and pure resolve.
These, as but born of sickness, could not live;
For when the blood ran lustier in him again,
Full often the sweet image of one face,
Making a treacherous quiet in his heart,
Dispersed his resolution like a cloud.”
Treating of missions in Abyssinia in the sixteenth century, Gibbon
relates how, in a moment of terror, the emperor promised to reconcile
himself and his subjects to the Catholic faith. “But the vows,” adds
the historian, “which pain had extorted, were forsworn on the return
of health.” Swift again, in his history of England,—for the Dean of
St. Patrick wrote one—tells how William Rufus fell dangerously sick at
Gloucester, on his return from Scotland, and being moved by the fears of
dying, began to discover great marks of repentance, with many promises
of amendment and retribution. “But as it is the disposition of men who
derive their vices from their complexions, that their passions usually
beat strong and weak with their pulses, so it fared with this prince,
who, upon recovery of his health, soon forgot the vows he had made in his
sickness, relapsing with greater violence into the same irregularities,”
etc.
Michael Germain—who, however, is allowed to have looked upon
the religious observances of Rome with the eye of a French
encyclopédiste—makes merry, as one of Mabillon’s Italian expedition (in
1685), at the expense of that indolent and hypochondriacal Pope (so Sir
James Stephen calls him), Innocent XI. “If I should attempt,” writes this
French Benedictine, “to give you an exact account of the health of his
Holiness, I must begin with Ovid, ‘In nova fert animus mutatas dicere
formas.’ At ten he is sick, at fifteen well again, at eighteen eating
as much as four men, at twenty-four dropsical.... The worst of it is,
that they say he has given up all thoughts of creating new cardinals,
forgetting in his restored health the scruples he felt when sick; like
other great sinners;” like Louis XV., for instance, at the commencement
of whose last illness Mr. Carlyle so vividly depicts the consternation
of the infamous Du Barry, lest she should have to take flight, as
her predecessors had been constrained to do when the Well-beloved
(Bien-aimé) had been sick before. “Should the Most Christian King die, or
even get seriously afraid of dying! For, alas! had not the fair, haughty
Chateauroux to fly, with wet cheeks and flaming heart, from that fever
scene at Metz, long since; driven forth by sour shavelings? She hardly
returned, when fever and shavelings were both swept into the background.
Pompadour, too, when Damiens wounded Royalty ‘slightly, under the fifth
rib,’ ... had to pack, and be in readiness; yet did not go, the wound not
proving poisoned.” His Most Christian Majesty was of no distant kin with
that profligate viscount in Mr. Thackeray’s story, who used to recount
misdeeds “with rueful remorse when he was ill, for the fear of death set
him instantly repenting; and with shrieks of laughter when he was well,
his lordship having a very great sense of humour.” Of the same kindred
comes the same author’s Miss Crawley, as we see her ill with fright,
in her lonely, loveless old age. When in health and good spirits, this
venerable inhabitant of Vanity Fair, we are assured, had as free notions
about religion and morals as Monsieur de Voltaire himself could desire;
but “when illness overtook her, it was aggravated by the most dreadful
terrors of death, and an utter cowardice took possession of the prostrate
old sinner.” Nor be forgotten, as a scion of the same stock, that puffy,
pursy, pusillanimous creature, Jos. Sedley, of whom we read that, in the
course of his voyage home from Bengal, he disappeared in a panic during a
two-days’ gale, and remained in his cot reading a religious tract left on
board by a missionary’s wife; while, “for common reading he had brought a
stock of novels and plays,” to which of course he would return with all
the more zest and devotion when the perils of the gale were past.
Comparing the influence on the mind of danger of death, and of danger
from a storm, or from some other external cause than sickness, Archbishop
Whately ascribes to the storm a much larger virtue of “wholesome
discipline” than to the deadly sickness. He says, “The well-known
proverb, ‘The devil was sick,’ etc., shows how generally it has been
observed that people, when they recover, forget the resolutions formed
during sickness. One reason of the difference, and perhaps the chief,
is, that it is so much easier to _recall_ exactly the sensations felt
when in perfect health and yet in imminent danger, and to act over again,
as it were, in imagination, the whole scene, than to recall fully, when
in health, the state of mind during some sickness, which itself so much
affects the mind along with the body.”
And yet the effects defective of a storm are a commonplace with the
satirists. Peter Pindar devotes a “poem” to the subject; and a greater
poet—if the said Peter can be called poet at all—has a forcible stanza on
the equinoxes, when the Parcæ cut short the further spinning
“Of seamen’s fates, and the loud tempests raise
The waters, and repentance for past sinning
In all who o’er the great deep take their ways:
They vow to amend their lives, and yet they don’t;
Because, if drown’d, they can’t—if spar’d, they won’t.”
_SLEEP AND DEATH._
ST. JOHN xi. 11-14.
To His disciples our Lord spoke of His friend, and theirs, “our friend,
Lazarus,” as sleeping; intimating at the same time His intention of
going on to Bethany, that He might awaken him out of sleep. “Then said
His disciples, Lord, if he sleep he shall do well. Howbeit, Jesus spake
of his death; but they thought that He had spoken of taking of rest in
sleep. Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.”
The affinity of sleep to death is familiarly recognised in the Old
Testament as in the New; indeed, in universal literature of whatever age,
sacred and profane. Bathsheba anticipates the day, only too near at hand,
when her lord the king “shall sleep with his fathers.” Daniel foretells
the awaking of many that sleep in the dust of the earth. The psalmist
utters a deprecation lest he sleep the sleep of death. Jesus declared
the sick maiden to be not dead, but sleeping; and was laughed to scorn
by those who _knew_ that she was dead. Them that sleep in Jesus, saith
the apostle, will God bring with Him. We shall not all sleep, he says
elsewhere, but we shall all be changed.
Homer personifies a dualism of “Sleep and Death, two twins of wingèd
race, of matchless swiftness, but of silent pace;” and he makes the
friends of Sarpedon “his sacred corse bequeath to the soft arms of
silent Sleep and Death.” He pictures Aphrodite speeding to Lemnos o’er
the rolling deep, to “seek the cave of Death’s half-brother, Sleep.” The
dying Gorgias, we are told, being in a slumber, and asked how he did,
answered, “Pretty well; only Sleep is commending me to the charge of his
brother.” Samuel Daniel apostrophizes “Care-charmer Sleep, son of the
sable Night, brother to Death, in silent darkness born;” and so too,
Beaumont and Fletcher apostrophize him in almost the selfsame words.
So again their contemporary, John Webster, “O thou soft natural Death,
that art joint twin to sweetest slumber!” Cowley’s ode _in memoriam_
of William Harvey, begins with sombre commemoration of a dismal and a
fearful night, “when sleep, death’s image, left his troubled breast, by
something liker death possest.” And the last verse of Denham’s “Song to
Morpheus” identifies the twins,—practically makes a hendiadys of them, as
grammarians might call it:
“Sleep, that is thy best repast,
Yet of death it bears a taste,
And both are the same thing at last.”
Warton’s Latin epigram on sleep, as _certissima mortis imago_, has been
Englished by Wolcot with a beauty and felicity pronounced by critics to
be worthy of the original:
“Come, gentle sleep! attend thy votary’s prayer;
And, though death’s image to my couch repair,
How sweet, though lifeless, yet with life to lie,
And, without dying, O how sweet to die!”
Shelley’s opening of “Queen Mab” is a stock quotation: “How wonderful
is Death, Death and his brother Sleep! one pale as yonder waning moon,
with lips of lurid blue; the other rosy as the morn when, throned on
ocean’s wave, it blushes o’er the world: yet both so passing wonderful!”
But where, asks a prose writer of genius, where, in the sharp lineaments
of rigid and unsightly death, is the calm beauty of slumber, telling of
rest for the waking hours that are past, and gentle hopes and loves for
those which are to come? “Lay death and sleep down, side by side, and
say who shall find the two akin.” But this is selecting such an aspect
of mortality as comes not within the poet’s purview. Prosaical in every
fibre is Sancho Panza meant to be; yet in his famous invocation of
blessings on the invention, or rather on the inventor, of sleep, which,
quoth he, “covers a man all over, body and mind, like a cloak”—for Sancho
has his poetical moods and tenses after all—he goes on to recognise the
affinity which poetry so freely asserts: “It [sleep] has only one fault,
as I have heard say, which is, that it looks like death: for between
the sleeper and the corpse there is but little to choose.” Shakspeare’s
Iachimo calls sleep the “ape of death.” To die, to sleep,—muses
Hamlet,—no more; and, by a sleep, to say we end the heart-ache, and the
thousand natural ills that flesh is heir to, were a consummation devoutly
to be wished. “Thy best of rest is sleep,” soliloquizes the duke in
“Measure for Measure,”
“And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear’st
Thy death, which is no more.”
A couplet of Butler’s, in a description of nightfall, tells how
... “sleep the wearied world relieved,
By counterfeiting death revived.”
A Greek proverb designates sleep “the minor mysteries of death”—in
allusion to the lesser Eleusinian mysteries as compared with the greater:
“ὕπος τὰ μικρὰ τοῦ θανάτου μυστήρια.” Sir Thomas Overbury calls sleep,
death’s picture drawn to the life, or the twilight of life and death.
“In sleep we kindly shake death by the hand; but when we are awaked, we
will not know him.” With the closing clause of this sentence compare the
closing lines in the following picture by Byron, of man o’erlaboured with
his being’s strife, shrinking to “that sweet forgetfulness of life” which
sleep induces:
“There lie love’s feverish hope and cunning’s guile,
Hate’s working brain, and lull’d ambition’s wile;
O’er each vain eye oblivion’s pinions wave,
And quench’d existence crouches in a grave.
What better name may slumber’s bed become?
Night’s sepulchre, the universal home,
Where weakness, strength, vice, virtue, sunk supine,
Alike in naked helplessness recline;
Glad for awhile to heave unconscious breath,
Yet wake to wrestle with the dread of death,
And shun, though day but dawn on ills increast,
That sleep, the loveliest, since it dreams the least.”
We term sleep a death, writes Sir Thomas Browne, and yet it is waking
that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. “It
is that death by which we may be literally said to die daily; a death
which Adam died before his mortality; a death whereby we live a middle
and moderating point between life and death.” And then the golden-tongued
physician—in his _Religio Medici_—goes on to say that, in fine, so like
death seemed to him sleep, that he dare not trust it without his prayers,
and a half adieu to the world; and taking his farewell “in a colloquy
with God,” that is set in the key of the Evening Hymn, where we pray
to be taught to dread the grave as little as our bed. So, in verses of
his own weaving, this consummate master of stately rhetorical prose,
beseeches God to make his sleep a holy trance:
“Sleep is a death;—O make me try
By sleeping, what it is to die!
And as gently lay my head
On my grave, as now my bed.
Howe’er I rest, great God, let me
Awake again at last with Thee.
And thus assured, behold I lie
Securely, or to wake or die.
These are my drowsy days; in vain
I do now wake to sleep again:
O come that hour when I shall never
Sleep again, but wake for ever!
“This is the dormitive I take to bedward; I need no other laudanum than
this to make me sleep; after which I close my eyes in security, content
to take leave of the sun, and sleep unto the resurrection.”
George Herbert says, that—
“When boys go first to bed,
They step into their voluntary graves;
Sleep binds them fast; only their breath
Makes them not dead.
Successive nights, like rolling waves,
Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.”
Ye children, does death ever alarm you? asks the venerable pastor in
Tegner’s _Children of the Lord’s Supper_: “Death is the brother of Love,
twin-brother is he, and is only more austere to behold.” Shakspeare’s
nobleman is gazing with disgust on a sottish sleeper, when he exclaims,
“Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!” That image, as
embodied in the form of a little child, has often inspired poets to
strains of tender admiration. Malaspina, in one of Landor’s unacted (not
to say, with almost equal truth, unread) plays thus contemplates, and
apostrophizes, such an image:—
“And still thou sleepest, my sweet babe! Is death
Like sleep? Ah, who then, who would fear to die?
How beautiful is all serenity!
Sleep, a child’s sleep, oh how far more serene,
And oh, how far more beautiful than any!
Whether we breathe so gently, or breathe not,
Slight is the difference.”
More familiar to every one in the least conversant with current
literature—not ephemeral in its currency, or running so fast as to
be, like that which decayeth and waxeth old, ready to vanish away—is
Mrs. Browning’s poem on a sleeping child—tired out with playing, and
slumbering on the floor; the latter portion alone of which may here find
room:—
“And God knows, who sees us twain, child at childish leisure,
I am near as tired of pain, as you seem of pleasure;—
Very soon, too, by His grace gently wrapt around me,
Shall I show as calm a face, shall I sleep as soundly!
Differing in this, that you clasp your playthings sleeping,
While my hand shall drop the few given to my keeping.
Differing in this, that I sleeping shall be colder,
And in waking presently, brighter to beholder.
Differing in this beside (sleeper, have you heard me?
Do you move, and open wide eyes of wonder toward me?)—
That while you I thus recall from your sleep,—I solely,—
Me from mine an angel shall, with reveille holy!”
_ELIAB AND DAVID IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH._
1 SAMUEL xvii. 28.
When the Spirit of God came upon Saul, so that he prophesied among the
company of prophets that met him, all that knew him beforetime asked one
another what was this that was come to the son of Kish? was Saul also
among the prophets? Insomuch that it became a proverb, “Is Saul also
among the prophets?” No prophet is accepted in his own country; _that_ is
become a proverb too. And as with Saul, a young man among the prophets,
so with youthful David among the men of war from their youth. Eliab, his
eldest brother, knew, as he thought, the pride and the naughtiness of his
heart in coming down to the camp to see the battle; but he knew not what
sterling stuff there was in the stripling. _Why_ had Jesse’s youngest
son come down hither? and with whom had he left those few sheep in the
wilderness? Eliab’s anger was kindled against David for his presumptuous
and idle curiosity. His scorn was well-nigh as supreme as that of Goliath
himself for the youth,—for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair
countenance. Quit his proper rusticities and retirement for the valley
of Elah, that bristled with spear-heads and resounded with the din of
battle! a boy like him, that should be feeding his father’s sheep at
Bethlehem! Was there not a cause? None that Eliab knew of, for one. He
had never seen anything in the lad to warrant this forwardness. Not to
Eliab or his brethren was it given to foresee in that fresh-coloured
shepherd boy the present slayer of Goliath of Gath, and the bosom friend
of princely Jonathan, and the paulo-post-future king of Israel, Israel’s
sweetest singer, and the man after God’s own heart.
* * * * *
The adage about unrecognised worth, on the part of kinsfolk and
neighbours, the proverb of the prophet without honour in his own country
and in his father’s house—has its parallel passage in the _Hercules
Furens_ of Euripides—
... “οὑ γὰρ ἐσθ’ ὅπου
Εσθλόν τι δράσας μάρτυρ’ ἂν λάβοις πάτραν.”
Plutarch adopts it in his treatise on Exile, where he says that you
very rarely find a wise man taken for such in his own country: “τῶν
φρονιμωτάτων καὶ σοφωτάτων ὀλίγους ἂν εὕροις ἐν ταῖς ἑαυτῶν πατρίσι
κεκηδευμένους.”
The tradition that Pythagoras borrowed all his learning and philosophy
from the East is rejected by modern scholars: could not so great a
man, they ask, dispense with foreign teachers? And the answer is, that
assuredly he could and did; but his countrymen, it is to be observed,
by a very natural process of thought, looked upon his greatness as the
result of his Eastern education. “No man is a prophet in his own country,
and the imaginative Greeks were peculiarly prone to invest the distant
and the foreign with striking attributes;” unable to believe in wisdom
springing up from among themselves, they turned to the East as to a vast
and unknown region, whence all novelty, even of thought, must come. “Πᾶσι
τοῖς φιλοσόφοις,” says a Greek philosopher, “ἔδοξε χαλεπὸς ἐν τῇ πατρίδι
ὁ βίος.”
As the first, so the most arduous conquests of Mohammed were, says
Gibbon, those of his wife, his servant, his pupil, and his friend; since
he presented himself as a prophet to those who were most conversant with
his infirmities as a man. “Thus was Mohammed,” writes Dean Milman, after
recording the conversion of the child Ali, “the prophet of his household.
Slowly however did he win proselytes, even among his own kindred. Three
years elapsed before the faith received the accession of Abubeker and
of Othman, the future caliphs. Mohammed at length is accepted as the
prophet of his family, of the noble and priestly house of Hashem. Abu
Talib, his uncle, remains almost alone an unbeliever. And now Mohammed
aspires to be the prophet of his _tribe_.” But in effect the “false”
prophet is an exception to the rule of no prophet accepted in his own
house and country. An American commentator on Shakspeare incidentally
expounds that rule, in remarking on the degree to which our sense of
truth is impeded or impaired by the pressure on our minds of what is
actual and visible and present. A faithful painter may, he observes,
portray a human face with all its characteristic expression, and in all
its true individuality; and yet the nearest relatives are not only the
hardest to satisfy, but, by the very nature of their familiarity with the
subject, will often be the worst judges of the likeness. We are all of
us, he adds, “very apt to fail in appreciating the best and noblest parts
in the characters of those whom we know familiarly, for the thousand
familiarities of common life interpose; and it is sad to think that often
it is not until death has hallowed and idealized the character, that we
can do it justice.” Envy and jealousy, remarks David Hume in treating of
the recognition of real genius, have too much place in a narrow circle,
and even familiar acquaintance with the person of one thus gifted may
diminish the applause due to his performance—that is, among those of
his own age and country. Pindar and Æschylus, we are told, left their
country because those who were born their equals could not endure to
see them rise their superiors. “What a war against the gods is this!”
a heathen admirer is made to exclaim: “it seems as if it were decreed
by a public edict that no one shall receive from them any gift beyond a
certain value; and that if they do receive it they shall be permitted to
return the gods no thanks for it in their native city.” There are towns
so barbarous, remarks Boccaccio, in Landor’s “Pentameron,” that they must
be informed by strangers of their own great man when they happen to have
produced one; and would then detract from his merits, that they might
not exhibit their awkwardness in doing him honour, or their shame in
withholding it.
Charles IX., on a progress through Provence, sent for Nostradamus, and
finding in what slight respect he was held by his countrymen, made a
point of publicly declaring, with right royal emphasis, that he should
take as a slight to himself the slighting of that philosopher.
In the Journal to Stella, Swift hails with cordiality—for the Dean could
be cordial on occasion—the appreciation in polite English circles, by
ministers and scholars, of Parnell the poet: “Lord Bolingbroke likes
Parnell mightily; and it is pleasant to see that one who hardly passed
for anything in Ireland makes his way here with a little friendly
forwarding.” In no unlike spirit and style writes Horace Walpole to
Marshal Conway, then travelling abroad: “The honours you have received,
though I have so little taste for such things myself, gave me great
satisfaction; and I do not know whether there is not more pleasure in
_not_ being a prophet in one’s own country, when one is almost received
like Mohammed in every other. To be an idol at home is no assured
touchstone of merit. Stocks and stones have been adored in fifty regions,
but do not bear transplanting. The Apollo Belvedere and the Hercules
Farnese may lose their temples, but never lose their estimation, by
travelling.” In another letter we have Walpole exclaiming, “But adieu,
retrospect! it is as idle as prophecy, the characteristic of which is
never to be believed where alone it could be useful, _i.e._, in its
own country.” And once more, in a later epistle, commenting on the
darksome aspect of the times: “That the scene grows very serious there
is no doubt; nor do I assume vanity from having possessed the spirit of
prophecy—a most useless talent, as predictions never serve as warnings.
We know prophets are not honoured in their own country: where then should
they be honoured? where they are not known? where probably they never
are heard of?” But such notes of interrogation might be multiplied _ad
libitum_.
It is to a professedly common-place philosopher we owe the remark,
that while there are families in which there exists a preposterous
over-estimate of the talents and acquirements of their several members,
there are other families in which there exists a depressing and
unreasonable under-estimate of the same. He speaks to his knowledge
of such a thing as a family in which certain boys during their early
education had it ceaselessly drilled into them that they were the idlest,
stupidest, and most ignorant boys in the world; which boys had no sooner
gone to a great public school than like rockets they went up forthwith
to the top of their classes, and never lost their places there, and
afterwards at the university distinguished themselves pre-eminently in
honours: “It will not surprise people who know much of human nature, to
be told that through this brilliant career of school and college work the
home belief in their idleness and ignorance continued unchanged, and that
hardly at its end was the toil-worn senior wrangler regarded as other
than an idle and useless blockhead.” The writer adds an example of his
knowledge of a successful author—to be identified of course by _some_
readers, whose relatives never believed, till the reviews assured them of
it, that his writings were anything but “contemptible and discreditable
trash.”
The subject is renewed in the ensuing section, on the text of a prophet’s
non-acceptance in his own country.
_THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY._
ST. LUKE iv. 24.
It was with the emphasis of a “Verily I say unto you,” that our Lord
prefaced the assurance that no prophet is accepted in his own country.
The speaker spoke from bitter experience. For neither did His brethren
believe in Him. It was when He was come into His own country, and taught
in their synagogues with a wisdom that astonished them, and wrought
mighty works of a kind that bewildered them, that His own countrymen set
about asking if this was not the carpenter’s son? was not His mother the
well-known Mary? were not James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas, His
brethren? and His sisters, were they not all near at hand, and known
as such? Whence then had this—οὗτος (indefinitely contemptuous)—all
these attributes? And they were offended, scandalized, they found a
stumbling-block in the condition of Him and His. A double answer was
vouchsafed them: the significant restriction of wonder working, for He
did not many mighty works there, because of their unbelief; and the more
direct reply, in so many words, that a prophet is not without honour,
save in his own country, and in his own house.
Montaigne adverts to this man, or that, having been a miracle to the
world, in whom neither his wife nor his servant has ever seen anything
remarkable: “Few men have been admired by their own domestics”—a sentence
to which point and popularity have been given by the epigrammatic
form of it, due to Marshal Catinat. “No one,” Montaigne continues,
“has been a prophet, not merely in his own house, but in his own
country, as the experience of history shows. It is the same in matters
of no consequence.... In my country of Gascony they look upon it as
very droll to see me in print. The farther off I am read from my own
home, the better I am esteemed; I am fain to purchase printers in
Guienne,—elsewhere they purchase me.” Ben Jonson takes note of the
greater reverence paid to things remote or strange to us, than to much
better, if these be nearer, and fall under our sense. “Men, and almost
all sorts of creatures, have their reputation by distance. Rivers, the
farther they run, and more from their spring, the broader they are, and
greater. And where our original is known, we are the less confident;
among strangers we trust fortune.” Lord Evandale, in Scott’s “Old
Mortality,” discerns at once the “extraordinary qualities” of Henry
Morton, which had escaped the notice of his kinsfolk and friends: “You
have not been long in learning all his extraordinary qualities, my lord,”
says old Major Bellenden. “I, who have known him from boyhood, could,
before this affair, have said much of his good principles and good
nature; but as to his high talents”—further on _that_ head deponent saith
not. The opinions of relatives as to a man’s power, Dr. Wendell Holmes
declares to be very commonly of little value; not so much because they
sometimes over-rate their own flesh and blood, as some may suppose; as
because, on the contrary, they are quite as likely to underrate those
whom they have grown into the habit of considering like themselves. _Vile
habetur quod domi est_, Seneca tersely says.
Edmund Burke, in early life, was not happy at home—there being none
among the household on Arran Quay to sympathise with his dreams and
his aspirations. “He might think himself a genius,” says one of his
many biographers, “but it was not to be expected that his own relations
should yet think him one.” Describing his position and influence in Lord
Rockingham’s administration, Mr. Macknight observes that it is, after
all, a man’s own relations who generally look with the least confidence
on his long wrestle with adversity, and are most astonished when the tide
turns, and a great victory succeeds to what had seemed to them a mere
hopeless toil. “To some of the Irish Nagles on the Blackwater, the news
that Edmund had been taken into the confidence of the great Whig Lord
Rockingham, ... must have seemed as extraordinary as it did to Joseph’s
brethren that he should have become so great a man in hostile Egypt.”
_Son pays le crut fou_, says La Fontaine, of a Greek sage; _mais quoi!
aucun n’est prophète chez soi_. Of Joan of Arc, and her early mental
struggles, a French historian writes: “It behoves her to find in the
bosom of her family someone who would believe in her: this was the most
difficult part of all.” Non-recognition, disparagement, cold obstruction.
Societies and families, as Goethe says, behave in the same way to their
dearest members, towns to their worthiest citizens. Consuelo advising
Anzoleto to quit Venice, reminds him that “no person is a prophet in his
own country. This is a bad place for one who has been seen running about
in rags, and where any one may come to say of you, ‘I was his protector,
I saw his hidden talent, it was I who recommended him and procured his
advance.’” Descartes had to support with philosophic patience the scorn
of his family, impatient of a philosopher in it. Jean Bodin, neglected
and slighted in his own land, exulted in the welcome accorded to his
books in the English Universities, which printed as well as prized them:
“il n’est pas rare que nous ayons besoin d’apprendre des étrangers ce que
valent nos compatriotes,” observes M. Léon Feugère.
Every rule has its exceptions, and most proverbs too. The case of
St. Catharine, of Sienna, is cited by a Protestant biographer as “an
exception to the rule that excludes a prophet from honour in his own
country.” The biographer of Edward Irving, recounting with enthusiasm the
details of his reception in Annandale in 1828, adds that “for once the
proverb seems to have failed. He had honour in his own country, where
gentle and simple flocked to hear him,”—neighbouring ministers shutting
up their kirks on the Sunday when he preached, and going the “long
Sabbath-day’s journey” across the Annandale moors to hear him, along with
their people. La Bruyère points out on the one side a man recognised by
the world at large as a master-mind, honoured and sought after by eager
admirers, but at home, of no account at all; _petit dans son domestique
et aux yeux de ses proches_: on the other hand, a man who is a prophet
in his own house and country, who enjoys a _vogue_ that is confined to
his immediate surroundings, and who _s’applaudit d’un mérite rare et
singulier qui lui est accordé par la famille dont il est l’idole_. But
exceptions to a rule are commonly taken in confirmation of it; and the
rule as to a prophet’s home acceptance is held to be only confirmed, not
disproved, by here and there a stray example in history to the contrary;
such as Arnold, of Brescia, being rescued from captivity by some of
those partisan nobles of Campania by whom he was honoured as a prophet:
“Tanquam _prophetam in terrâ suâ_ cum omni honore habebant.” Or, as
the experience, highly exceptional, of young Bernard of Clairvaux, the
“strange and irresistible force” of whose character, as the historian
of Latin Christianity describes it, enthralled his brothers one after
another, and at length his sister. Off to the monastery of Clairvaux they
trooped, a complete monastic brotherhood. The youngest boy lingered a
short time with his aged father, and then joined the rest. “Even the
father died a monk of Clairvaux in the arms of Bernard.” But it was not,
we are duly reminded, on his own kindred alone that Bernard wrought with
this commanding power. “When he was to preach, wives hurried away their
husbands, mothers withdrew their sons, friends their friends, from the
resistless magic of his eloquence.” And those that went—what went they
out into the wilderness to hear? A prophet? Yea, and almost more than a
prophet, by the verdict of his own country and of his father’s house.
_DESIRED BOON: REALIZED BANE._
PSALM cvi. 15; lxxviii. 22 sq.
We read of those who tempted God in the desert, that He gave them their
request, and sent leanness withal into their soul. So they did eat meat
and were well filled, for He gave them their own desire; but while their
meat was yet in their mouths, His wrath came upon them and slew the
fattest of them, and smote down the chosen men of Israel.
A latter-day poetess, almost masculine in genius, as in out-spoken vigour
of diction, tells us that—
“God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,—
A gauntlet with a gift in’t,”
and sometimes poison in the gift. Well therefore may the authoress of
these lines, which in their original import are scarcely applicable to
our theme, make a distressed soul utter a petition that certainly is so:—
... “’tis written in the Book,
He heareth the young ravens when they cry;
And yet they cry for carrion. O my God,—
And we, who make excuses for the rest,
We do it in our measure. Then I knelt,
And dropped my head upon the pavement too,
And prayed, since I was foolish in desire
Like other creatures, craving offal-food,
That He would stop His ears to what I said,
And listen only to the run and beat
Of this poor, passionate, helpless blood....”
_Ne mihi contingant quæ volo, sed quæ sunt utilia_: the aspiration has
been accepted as an adage, worthy of all acceptation, and of acceptation
by all.
“Mais, sans cesse ignorants de nos propres besoins,
Nous demandons au ciel ce qu’il nous faut le moins.”
To Shakspeare for an illustration. Pompey, not the Great, is anxious for
Divine sanction to speed his ambitious resolves to a prosperous issue.
If the great gods be just, he assumes, they will assist the deeds of
justest men,—and therefore himself, as pre-eminently entitled to that
designation. He is impatient, too, for this manifest favour from above;
and sage Menecrates takes occasion not only to check his impatience in
particular, but to give him a salutary warning on the subject in general:
... “We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good; so find we profit
By losing of our prayers.”
Xenophon tells us of Socrates, that when he prayed, his petition was only
this—that the gods would give to him those things that were good; which
he did, forasmuch as they alone knew what was good for man. “But he who
should ask for gold or silver, or increase of dominion, acted not, in
his opinion, more wisely than one who should pray for the opportunity to
fight, or game, or anything of the like nature; the consequence of which,
being altogether doubtful, might turn, for aught he knew, not a little to
his disadvantage.” For,
... “why, alas! do mortal men in vain
Of fortune, fate, or Providence complain?
God gives us what He knows our wants require,
And better things than those that we desire:
Some pray for riches; riches they obtain;
But, watched by robbers, for their wealth are slain;
Some pray from prison to be freed; and come,
When guilty of their vows, to fall at home;
Murdered by those they trusted with their life,
A favoured servant, or a bosom wife.
Such dear-bought blessings happen every day,
Because we know not for what things we pray.”
There is a Greek prayer by an unknown poet, but highly commended by the
most illustrious of Socrates’ disciples: that sovran Jove would grant his
subjects good, whether they pray for it or not; and avert from them evil,
even though they pray for it.
Ζεῦ βασιλεῦ, τὰ μὲν ἐσθλὰ καὶ εὐχομένοις καὶ ἀνεύκτοις
Ἄμμι δίδου· τὰ δὲ δεινὰ καὶ εὐχομένὀις, ἀπαλέξοις.
And it is to Plato’s dialogue upon prayer that we owe the instructions
imparted by Socrates to Alcibiades, upon which Addison has founded a
paper in the _Spectator_. In that dialogue we read how Socrates met
Alcibiades going to his devotions, and observing his eyes to be fixed
upon the ground with great seriousness and attention—for even that
fastest of fast young men could, it seems, be slow enough to say his
prayers—told him that he had reason to be thoughtful upon that occasion,
since it was possible for a man to bring down evil upon himself by his
own supplications, and that those things which the gods sent him in
answer to his petitions might turn to his destruction. This, says he,
may not only happen when a man prays for what is mischievous in its
own nature, as Œdipus implored the gods to sow dissension between his
sons; but when he prays for what he believes would be for his good, and
against what he believes would be to his detriment. This the philosopher
shows must necessarily happen among us, since most men are blinded with
ignorance, prejudice, or passion, which hinder them from seeing what
things are really eligible for them. And all this, as his manner is, the
philosopher teaches by examples.
It seems allowed that Juvenal took the cue of his tenth Satire, as well
as Persius of his second, from the Dialogue of Plato aforesaid.
“Evertêre domos totas, optantibus ipsis,
Dii faciles. Nocitura togâ, nocitura petuntur
Militiâ.”
Or, as Englished by Mr. Owen of Warrington:
“Th’ indulgent gods whole houses have o’erthrown
At men’s own prayer;—the fatal choice their own.
In war we ask but woes; in peace but woes,” etc.
The Crassi, Pompeii, and the like, are represented as ruined by the
assent of Heaven to their ambitious prayers—
“Magnaque numinibus vota exaudita _malignis_.”
Naples to Pompey a kind fever gave, to hide his honours in a welcome
grave (the poetry of Parson Owen may pardonably be printed as prose). But
public prayers arise: the gods allow the health requested by the erring
vow: by Rome’s and his cross fate that grave he fled, and lived—to lose
his honours and his head.
... “Sed multæ urbes, et publica vota
Vicerunt. Igitur fortuna ipsius, et urbis,
Servatum victo caput abstulit.”
Juvenal crowds his satire with cases in point, historical and
mythological, political and domestic. The sum of the discourse is this:
that man should allow the higher powers themselves to determine what may
be of advantage to him, and suitable to his real wants,—he being dearer
to them than to himself:
“Permittes ipsis expendere Numinibus quid
Conveniat nobis, rebusque sit utile nostris:
Nam pro jocundis aptissima quæque dabunt Dii.
Carior est illis homo quàm sibi.”
Montaigne bethinks him that a foremost proof of our imbecility is, that
we cannot, by our own wish and desire, find out what we want. “What plan,
how happily soe’er begun, That, when achieved, we do not wish undone?”
And he repeats the old-world story of King Midas, who prayed to the gods
that all he touched might be turned into gold; and so it was: his bread
became gold, his wine gold, the feathers of his bed, his under-clothing
and his over-coats, gold all: “so that he found himself overwhelmed with
the fruition of his desire, and endowed with a boon so intolerable, that
he was fain to unpray his prayers.” In another essay Le Sieur Michel
tells how severely the gods punished the wicked prayers of Œdipus, in
granting them. “He had prayed that his children might amongst themselves
determine the succession to his throne by arms: and was so miserable as
to see himself taken at his word. We should not pray that all things fall
out as our will would have them, but that our will should subserve what
is just and right.” Owen Feltham records his having observed that what we
either desire or fear doth seldom happen—something we think not of, for
the most part intervening. How infinitely we should perplex ourselves,
he exclaims, if we could obtain whatever we might wish for! “Do we not
often desire that, which we afterwards see would be our confusion?...
Man could not be more miserable, than if left to choose for himself....
Nothing brings destruction on him sooner, than when he presumes to part
the empire with God.” As Aricie warns Theseus in the French tragedy:
“Craignez, seigneur, craignez que le ciel rigoureux
Ne vous haïsse assez pour exaucer vos vœux.”
And two scenes later Theseus is himself sufficiently of the same mind to
exclaim:
“Ne précipite point tes funestes bienfaits,
Neptune! j’aime mieux n’être exaucé jamais.”
And afterwards again he utters the tristful line:
“Inexorables dieux! qui m’avez trop servi.”
So in a subsequent passage:
“Je hais jusqu’aux soins dont m’honorent les dieux:
Et je m’en vais pleurer leurs faveurs meurtrières,
Sans plus les fatiguer d’inutiles prières.
Quoi qu’ils fissent pour moi, leur funeste bonté
Ne me saurait payer de ce qu’ils m’ont ôté.”
Madame de Sévigné, in one of her letters to Bussy, moralizes on the
superior wisdom of Heaven’s disposal to man’s proposal; and adds: “C’est
ainsi que nous marchons en aveugles, ne sachant où nous allons, prenant
pour mauvais ce qui est bon, prenant pour bon ce qui est mauvais, et
toujours dans une entière ignorance.” The optative mood of yesterday, a
past tense, is changed in the present tense of to-day for deprecation and
regret.
In one of his many onslaughts against conventionalism, Mr. Emerson says
that what we ask daily is to be conventional. “Supply, most kind gods!
this defect in my dress, in my form, in my fortunes, which puts me a
little out of the ring; supply it, and let me be like the rest whom
I admire, and on good terms with them.” But the wise gods, according
to this essayist, reply, “No, we have better things for thee. By
humiliations, by defeats, by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of disparity,
learn a wider truth and humanity than that of a fine gentleman,”—a
Fifth-Avenue landlord, or a West-End householder, not being Mr. Emerson’s
ideal of the highest style of man. Æsop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, he
adds, have been taken by corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and
know the realities of human life.—With Mr. Carlyle, we will not complain,
therefore, of Dante’s miseries; who, had all gone right with him, as he
wished it, might have been Prior, Podestà, or whatsoever they call it,
of Florence, well accepted among neighbours,—in which case, the world
had wanted one of the most notable works ever spoken or sung. “Florence
would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries
continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there
will be ten of them and more) had no _Divina Comedia_ to hear! We will
complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and
he, struggling like a man towards death and crucifixion, could not help
fulfilling it. Give _him_ the choice of his happiness! He knew not, more
than we do, what was really happy, what was really miserable.”
Visions, and hopes, and prospects, writes Horace Walpole, are pretty
playthings for boys. “It is folly to vex one’s self for what cannot last
very long. Indeed, what can, even when one is young? Corydon firmly
believes he shall be wretched for ever if he does not marry Phyllis.
That misery can but last till she has lost her bloom. His eternal woe
would vanish if her nose grew red. How often do our griefs become our
comforts! I know what I wish to-day; not at all what I shall wish
to-morrow. Sixty says, You did not wish for _me_, yet you would like
to keep me. Sixty is in the right; and I have not a word more to say.”
The Strawberry Hill esquire was himself turning the shady side of sixty
when he thus wrote. Of quite another school was that gentle and good Q.
Q., as she styled herself, once popular, now almost forgotten, who thus
moralized her song:
“How false is found, as on in life we go,
Our early estimate of bliss or woe!
—Some sparkling joy attracts us, that we fain
Would sell a precious birthright to obtain:
There all our hopes of happiness are placed,
Life looks without it like a joyless waste;
No good is prized, no comfort sought beside,
Prayers, tears implore, and will not be denied:
Heaven pitying hears th’ intemperate, rude appeal,
And suits its answer to our truest weal.
The self-sought idol, if at last bestow’d,
Proves, what our wilfulness required—a goad.
Ne’er, but as needful chastisement, is given
The wish thus forced and torn and storm’d from Heaven;
But if withheld, in pity, from our prayer,
We rave, awhile, of torment and despair....
Meantime, Heaven bears the grievous wrong, and waits
In patient pity till the storm abates ...
Deigning, perhaps, to show the mourner soon,
’Twas special mercy that denied the boon.”
Chateaubriand’s most sentimental of melancholy-mad heroes, overwhelmed,
as he flatters himself, with imaginary sufferings, offers up a prayer
for some real calamity to overtake him; and, to his cost, is taken at
his word. “Dans mon délire, j’avais été jusqu’à désirer d’éprouver un
malheur, pour avoir du moins un objet réel de souffrance: épouvantable
souhait, que Dieu dans sa colère, a trop exaucé!” It is but the Christian
(yet not too Christian) expression of the old pagan poet’s gloomy verse:
_magnaque numinibus vota exaudita malignis_.
There is a sonnet of Filicaja’s, of which a good deal is made by
Richardson in his History of Sir Charles Grandison,—the concluding
lines being an impressive vindication of the ways of Providence to man:
_Provvidenza alta infinita_, if it sometimes denies the favours we
implore, denies in kindness; and seeming to deny a blessing, grants one
in that very refusal: _o negar finge, e nel negar concede_.
William Collins the painter—a loving and lovable man as well as refined
artist—in one of his letters home expresses his “decided opinion, that if
the Almighty were to give us everything for which we feel desirous, we
should as often find it necessary to pray to Him to take away as to grant
new favours.” And he refers to thousands of cases that he could bring
forward in proof of his assertion.
It amounts to a sort of refrain in the melodious rhythm of that
fragmentary prose-poem of De Quincey’s, “The Daughter of Lebanon,”—the
admonition of the prophet to the lovely woman in the Damascus
market-place: “Ask what thou wilt—great or small—and through me thou
shalt receive it from God. But, my child, ask not amiss. For God is
able out of thy own evil asking to weave snares for thy footing. And
oftentimes to the lambs whom He loves, He gives by seeming to refuse;
gives in some better sense, or” (and here the prophet’s voice swelled
into the power of anthems) “in some far happier world.” And when the
sun is declining to the west on the thirtieth day, the prophet iterates
the strain of old: “Lady of Lebanon, the day is already come, and the
hour is coming, in which my covenant must be fulfilled with thee. Wilt
thou, therefore, being now wiser in thy thoughts, suffer God, thy new
Father, to give by seeming to refuse; to give in some better sense, or
in some far happier world?” But the daughter of Lebanon sorrowed at
these words; she yearned after her native hills, and the sweet twin-born
sister with whom from infant days hand-in-hand she had wandered amongst
the everlasting cedars. The delirium of fever, and approaching death,
are next described; and again the evangelist sits down by her bedside,
and rebukes the clouds that trouble her vision, and bids them stand
no more between that dying Magdalen and the forests of Lebanon. Anon,
we read how the blue sky parted to the right and to the left, laying
bare the infinite revelations that can be made visible only to dying
eyes; and how, as the child of Lebanon gazed upon the mighty visions,
she saw bending forward from the heavenly host, as if in gratulation to
herself, the one countenance for which she hungered and thirsted. “The
twin-sister, that should have waited for her in Lebanon, had died of
grief, and was waiting for her in Paradise. Immediately in rapture she
soared upwards from her couch; immediately in weakness she fell back;
and being caught by the evangelist, she flung her arms around his neck;
whilst he breathed into her ear his final whisper, ‘Wilt thou now suffer
that God should give by seeming to refuse?’—‘Oh yes—yes—yes,’ was the
fervent answer from the daughter of Lebanon.” Hitherto she had known not
what to ask for as she ought. Hitherto her asking had been amiss: she had
asked for she knew not what. But now her vision was purged. Now she had
the second-sight that could pierce through and beyond the night-side of
nature, and gaze on the land that is very far off. Hitherto she had, at
the best, seen through a glass darkly; but now, it might be said, face to
face. So that she knew what to ask for, now.
Chactas, the blind old sachem in Chateaubriand’s Wertherian romance,
is made to bring that once enthusiastically admired story to an end by
relating a parable to his woe-fraught young listener. It tells how the
Meschacebé, soon after leaving its source among the hills, began to feel
weary of being a simple brook; and so asked for snows from the mountains,
water from the torrents, rain from the tempests; until, its petitions
granted, it burst its bounds, and ravaged its hitherto delightsome banks.
At first the proud stream exulted in its force; but seeing ere long that
it carried desolation in its flow, that its progress was now doomed to
solitude, and that its waters were for ever turbid, it came to regret the
humble bed hollowed out for it by nature,—the birds, the flowers, the
trees, and the brooks, hitherto the modest companions of its tranquil
course.
The moral of the myth of Tithonus is one for all time. Mr. Tennyson has
pointed it for ours. He shows us in Tithonus a white-haired shadow
roaming like a dream the ever silent spaces of the East; and from this
grey shadow, once a man, the wailing utterance of a sad story comes:—
“I ask’d thee, ‘Give me immortality.’
Then didst thou grant my asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes....
... Let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pass, as is most meet for all?
...
Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far off, on that dark earth, be true?
‘The gods themselves cannot recal their gifts.’”
“_AND HE DIED._”
GENESIS v. _passim_.
Well known is Addison’s reference to an eminent man in the Romish Church,
who upon reading in the Book of Genesis how that all the days that Adam
lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died; and all the
days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died; and all
the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty nine years, and he
died;—immediately shut himself up in a convent, an absolute recluse from
the world, as not thinking anything in this life worth pursuing, which
had not regard to another.
What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death?
“Dead!—Man’s ‘I was,’ by God’s ‘I am’—
All hero-worship comes to that.
High heart, high thought, high fame, as flat
As a gravestone. Bring your _Jacet jam_—
The epitaph’s an epigram.”
So writes Mrs. Browning. And thus writes Barry Cornwall, on the same
trite text; it is the last stanza of the History of a Life, and of a
successful one:—
“And then—he died. Behold before ye
Humanity’s poor sum and story;
Life—death—and all that is of glory.”
And again, in the same poet’s chanson of the time of Charlemagne, the
stanza that magnifies that hero-king, and tells how he fought and
vanquished Lombard, Saxon, Saracen, and ruled every race he conquered
with a deep consummate skill—is followed by one beginning,
“But—he died! and he was buried
In his tomb of sculptured stone,” etc.
And once again, in one of this author’s dramatic fragments is sketched
the career of what Mr. Carlyle would call a “foiled potentiality”—of one
who, in favourable circumstances, might have been, but who in prosaic
reality and the matter-of-fact pressure of this work-a-day world, never
actually became, great. Had he but lived under better auspices, he would
have been—
_B._ “A king?
_A._ A _man_! what else,
King, emperor, tyrant, shah, would matter not.
He would have been—a name; such as of old
Grew into gods!
_B._ And so he died?
_A._ He died.”
Death stands everywhere in the background, as the elder Schlegel says in
his analysis of the elements of tragic poetry, and to it every well or
ill-spent moment brings us nearer and closer; and even when a man has
been so singularly fortunate as to reach the utmost term of life without
any grievous calamity, the inevitable doom still awaits him to leave or
to be left by all that is most dear to him on earth. In the words, most
musical, most melancholy, of the laureate,
“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground;
Man comes and tills the field, and lies beneath;
And after many a summer dies the swan.”
Addison, in another essay than that already referred to, describes an
afternoon he passed in Westminster Abbey, straying through and lingering
in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, “amusing himself,” as
the phrase then ran—not quite in our frivolous sense—with the tombstones
and the inscriptions that he met with in those several regions of the
dead, most of which recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that
he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of
his life being comprehended in those two circumstances that are common
to all mankind. The “Spectator” could not but look upon these registers
of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the
departed persons, who had left no other memorial of them but that they
were born, and that they died. Mr. de Quincey characteristically opened
his autobiographic sketches in their original form, with the avowal that
nothing makes such dreary and monotonous reading as the old hackneyed
roll-call, chronologically arranged, of inevitable facts in a man’s
life. “One is so certain of the man’s having been born, and also of his
having died, that it is dismal to be under the necessity of reading it.”
The man—a man—any man—every man. It is the common lot. And we know what
James Montgomery has made of the Common Lot. Here are two or three of the
stanzas that are most to the purpose:—
“Once in the flight of ages past,
There lived a man: and who was he?
Mortal! howe’er thy lot be cast,
That man resembled thee.
...
“He suffered,—but his pangs are o’er;
Enjoy’d,—but his delights are fled;
Had friends,—his friends are now no more;
And foes,—his foes are dead.
...
“He saw whatever thou hast seen;
Encounter’d all that troubles thee:
He was—whatever thou hast been;
He is—what thou shalt be.
...
“The annals of the human race,
Their ruins, since the world began,
Of him, afford no other trace
Than this,—THERE LIVED A MAN!”
There lived a man—lived, and loved, and learned, and laboured—enjoyed the
common joys of his kind, endured the common sufferings. AND HE DIED. Old
Egeus mooted a veritable truism when moralizing thus, in Chaucer:—
“Yit ither ne lyvede never man, he seyde,
In al this world, that some tyme he ne deyde.”
A French historian comments on this characteristic of old cloister
chronicles, that the obscurest event of the cloister holds in them as
conspicuous a place as the greatest revolutions in history. For instance,
in a chronicle cited by him of the year of grace 732, which produced
the battle of Poictiers, whereby Charles Martel arrested the vast
invasion of Islamism, not a line is vouchsafed to that event. In fact,
the year is passed over without notice, as containing nothing really
deserving of notice. But beside a date expressly given, we read, “Martin
est mort,”—Martin being an unknown monk of the Abbey of Corvey; and,
farther on again, “Charles, maire du palais, est mort.” Martin was an
unknown monk, and he died. Charles Martel was mayor of the palace, and
the conqueror at Poictiers, and he died. Well remarks M. Demogeot, that
“tous les hommes deviennent egaux devant la secheresse laconique de ces
premiers chroniqueurs.” “We must all go, that is certain,” writes Mrs.
Piozzi to Sir James Fellows, “and ’tis the only thing that _is_ certain.
Καὶ ἀπεθανε ends all the cases Dr. James quotes from your old friend
Hippocrates.” All the physician’s cases have the same terminal affix, AND
HE DIED. Very long-lived some of them may be; but, as Mr. Browning puts
it in his fine poem of “Saul,”
“But the licence of age has its limit; thou diest at last.”
We are told of St. Anschar, whose missionary career in Sweden is
commemorated in Milman’s “Latin Christianity,” that the ardour of youth
had begun to relax his strict austerity of monastic discipline, when all
at once the world was startled by the tidings of Charlemagne’s death.
That the mighty sovran of so many kingdoms must suffer the common lot,
struck young Anschar as something beyond the common; and from that hour
he lived in the world as not of it, and bore on his way through it as
verily a stranger and a pilgrim upon earth, with serious work to do, but
working in and walking by faith, not sight.
Marcus Antoninus, in his self-communings, bids himself consider how many
physicians are dead that used to value themselves upon the cure of their
patients, and how many astrologers who thought themselves great men by
foretelling the deaths of others; how many warriors, who had knocked out
the brains of thousands upon thousands; and how many tyrants who managed
the power of life and death with as much rigour as if they had been
themselves immortal.
Among the pointed sayings that have been thought worthy of
preservation—by Gibbon, for example—of Hormisdas, a fugitive prince
of Persia, who was at Rome in the fourth century, is this,—“that one
thing only had displeased him, to find that men died at Rome as well as
elsewhere.” Courtiers have avowed themselves shocked at the non-exception
of royalty from the universal doom. A courtly preacher, who had announced
the unconditional fact that we are all mortal, is said to have checked
himself, on remembering that royalty was present, and to have qualified
the assertion by the circumspect salvo, “At least, nearly all.”[16]
Lewis the Eleventh was too shrewd a man to give heed to such courtly
suggestions; otherwise, if ever there were prince that would fain have
believed the fiction, it was he, so abhorrent to his shuddering nature
was the imagination of his own decease. And Commines relates how
physicians combined their remedies with the sacred objects produced from
the sanctuary to avert the dread decree, “pour lui allonger la vie.
Toutefois le tout n’y fasoit rien; et falloit qu’il passât par là où les
autres ont passés.” And he died. All stories have the same ending.
“The Frenchman first in literary fame;
Mention him, if you please. Voltaire? The same,
With spirit, genius, eloquence supplied,
Lived long, wrote much, laughed heartily—and died.”
That very old poet, Stephen Hawes, for discovering in whom “one fine
line,” Warton was called “the indulgent historian of our poetry,” tells
his own life-story quite to an end, including the particulars of his
funeral and epitaph. A finer critic than Warton, or than Warton’s critic,
bids those who smile at the design dismiss their levity before the poet’s
utterance:—
“O! mortal folke, you may beholde and see
Howe I lye here, sometime a mighty knight.
The end of joye and prosperitie
Is death at last thorough his course and might.
After the day there cometh the dark night,
For though the day appear ever so long,
At last the bell ringeth to evensong—”
“Ringeth,” says Mrs. Browning, “in our ear with a soft and solemn music,
to which the soul is prodigal of echoes.”
What—asks the most meditative of Roman emperors, in his Meditations,
discussing with himself the ultimate fate, often reluctantly undergone,
of certain long-lived persons—what are they more than those who went off
in their infancy? What is become of Cæcilianus, Fabius, Julianus, and
Lepidus? Their heads are all laid somewhere. They buried a great many;
but at last they came to be buried themselves. Mr. Dickens, as well as
Hervey, has his meditations among the tombs,—and these are of them in
the little hemmed-in churchyards of the city—these, over an old tree
at the church window, with no room for its branches, that has seen out
generation after generation of civic worthies: “So with the tomb of the
old Master of the Company, on which it drips. His son restored it, and
died; his daughter restored it, and died; and then he had been remembered
long enough, and the tree took possession of him, and his name cracked
out.” To quote Chaucer again:
“That is to seyn, in youthe or elles in age,
He moot ben deed, the kyng as schal a page.”
Cranmer’s transported prevision, in Shakspeare, of the grand future that
awaited the infant princess Elizabeth, is dashed with sadness towards the
end—the strain subsiding into a minor key—by the unwelcome but inevitable
reflection, “But she must die.” So muses and moralises Talbot again, in
another of the historical plays:
“But kings and mightiest potentates must die;
For that’s the end of human misery.”
And Warwick, in another of them, finding that, of all his lands, is
nothing left him but his body’s length, exclaims, as one that at last
feels it feelingly,
“Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?
And, live we how we can, yet die we must.”
And once more in yet another of them, when King John dies, and Salisbury
witnessing the death, exclaims, “But now a king—now thus!” the prince who
is to succeed takes home the lesson to himself, and confesses, in diction
borrowed from the mere machinery of clockwork,
“Even so must I run on, and even so stop.”
In exhibiting to Odysseus in the shades below a group of the fairest and
most famous of women, Homer has been supposed by some of his commentators
to have designed a lecture on mortality to the whole sex. Tertullian’s
trumpet is blown with no uncertain sound when _he_ thus addresses the
frivolous fair of his day: “I have said, ye are gods, and ye are all
the children of the Most High.... But, O gods of flesh and blood, O
gods of earth and dust, ye shall die like men, and all your glory shall
fall to the ground, _veruntamen sicut homines moriemini_.” This is in
Tertullian’s description of the vain and prodigal and exacting beauty.
Suggestive in its way is an anecdote related by Mrs. Thrale about Sir
Joshua Reynolds’s picture of two fashionable belles, Mrs. Crewe and Mrs.
Bouverie, attired as two shepherdesses, and with this motto attached,
_Et in Arcadiâ ego_. What could that mean? is Dr. Johnson said to have
asked. Reynolds replied that the king could have told him: “_He_ saw it
yesterday, and said at once, ‘Oh, there is a tombstone in the background.
Ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia.’” The thought is said to have been
borrowed from Poussin—where some gay revellers stumble over a death’s
head, with a scroll proceeding from its mouth, saying, Et in Arcadiâ
_ego_.
Memorable at Saladin’s banquet to Richard and his peers—ever memorable
among the banners and pennons, the trophies of battles won and kingdoms
overthrown, is the long lance displaying a shroud, “the banner of Death,
with this impressive inscription—‘Saladin, King of Kings—Saladin, Victor
of Victors—Saladin must Die.’”
Poet Prior laments with courtly distress the inflexible fact that the
British monarch, to whom he is addressing his _carmen seculare_ for the
year of grace MDCC., must go the way of all flesh:
“But a relentless destiny
Urges all that e’er was born:
Snatch’d from her arms, Britannia once must mourn
The demi-god; the earthly half must die.”
For as Master Matthew puts it in another ode:—
“Alike must every state and every age
Sustain the universal tyrant’s rage;
For neither William’s power nor Mary’s charms
Could, or repel, or pacify his arms.
...
Wisdom and eloquence in vain would plead
One moment’s respite for the learned head:
Judges of writings and of men have died
(Mæcenas, Sackville, Socrates, and Hyde);
And in their various turns their sons must tread
Those gloomy journeys which their sires have led.
“The ancient sage, who did so long maintain
That bodies die, but souls return again,
With all the births and deaths he had in store
Went out Pythagoras, and came no more.
And modern Asgill,[17] whose capricious thought
Is yet with stores of wilder notions fraught,
Too soon convinced, shall yield that fleeting breath
Which played so idly with the darts of death.”
The truism appears to have been a favourite theme with Prior, who
expatiates upon it in a variety of keys. Here is one other specimen from
his stores, in octosyllabic metre:—
“All must obey the general doom,
Down from Alcides to Tom Thumb.
Grim Pluto will not be withstood
By force or craft. Tall Robin Hood,
As well as Little John, is dead—
(You see how deeply I am read).”
Does not Cervantes begin the last chapter of his great work with the
reflection that, as all human things, especially the lives of men, are
transitory, ever advancing to their decline and final termination, so
“Don Quixote was favoured by no privilege of exemption from the common
fate,” for the period of his dissolution came when he least thought of
it—and he died.
Death’s final conquest is the subject of a fine poem of James Shirley’s;
the piece by which he is, in every sense, best remembered. How death
lays his icy hands on kings, is there told with pitiless candour; and
the merry monarch, _par excellence_, Charles the Second, is said to have
greatly admired the poetry, if not the candour, of Shirley’s strain.
Early or late, all stoop to fate; that is the trite topic. But the moral
is noble, and nobly expressed. The poet reminds laurelled victors that
the garlands are withering on their brow, and that soon upon death’s
purple altar shall the “victor victim” bleed:—
“All heads must come
To the cold tomb;
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”
The first verse only of George Herbert’s “Virtue” is familiar to men; all
four have a music and a meaning of their own:—
“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.
“Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
“Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
“Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.”
_AN ULTRA-PROTESTER._
ST. MATTHEW xxvi. 33-35, 69-75.
To have written it ultra-Protestant, would mislead into an expectation
of polemical matter, offensive to Orangeism, and entirely alien
from the purpose. For who is the hyper-protester, not to write it
ultra-Protestant, of whom we speak? None other than St. Peter.
Nominally the first Pope. But let that pass. Whether technically an
ultra-Protestant or not,—let that pass too. It is with his surplusage
of protestations, vehemently asserted, and anon ignominiously ignored,
that we are at present concerned. Though all men, all, should be offended
because of Christ, should stumble and fall because of Him, yet would he
never be offended, never stumble, never lose his footing, firm as a rock,
firm as his own name, Peter, Cephas; a rock on which the Church was to be
built. The protest of the apostle won no meed of thanks and assurance
of conviction from his Lord. He who needed not that any should testify
of man, for He knew what was in man—and knew what was wanting in _this_
man,—waved aside, as absolutely worthless, the perfervid protestations
of the impulsive son of Jonas. Thrice should Peter deny Him before dawn
of another day. Deny Him? Had it come to that? The protester must become
ultra in his protests. “Though I should die with Thee, yet will I not
deny Thee!” It would be beside the mark here to take into account the
other _voces et præterea nihil_, echoing the same thing—protested notes
at the best—for likewise also said all the disciples. Peter is their
representative man, and ours.
Gertrude’s comment in “Hamlet,” on the accumulated asseverations of the
stage-queen, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” has passed into
a proverb. “The more vehemently they assert, the less credit they obtain
for sincerity,” observes Hartley Coleridge, of some examples of impulsive
womankind. Racine’s Bérénice turns the tables on Titus in this regard,
when she tells him,
“Hé quoi! vous me jurez une éternelle ardeur,
Et vous me la jurez avec cette froideur!
Pourquoi même du ciel attester la puissance?
Faut-il par des serments vaincre ma défiance?
Mon cœur ne prétend point, seigneur, vous démentir;
Et je vous en croirai sur un simple soupir.”
How fulsome and hollow, exclaims Marcus Antoninus, does that man look
who cries, “I’m resolved to deal clearly with you.” Hark you, friend,
the philosophic emperor addresses him, “what need of all this flourish?
let your actions speak.” Mr. Disraeli, in his earliest book, has an
eloquent paragraph on “that eagerness of protestation which,” in the man
charged with criminality, “is a sure sign of crime.” There is as much of
overacting one’s part on the great stage of life, as on the mimic boards;
and that with graver issues and a drearier fate.
* * * * *
When the subtle and ambitious John of Gischala, pursuing his own dark
course, as it is traced in the “History of the Jews,” joined outwardly
the party of Ananus, and was active beyond others in council and camp, he
yet kept up a secret correspondence with the Zealots, to whom he betrayed
all the movements of the assailants. “To conceal this secret he redoubled
his assiduities, and became so extravagant in his protestations of
fidelity to Ananus and his party, that he completely over-acted his part,
and incurred suspicion.” His intended dupes began gradually, and none too
soon, to look with a jealous eye on their too obsequious, most obedient,
and most devoted servant.
Describing the ten dreary years during which (A.D. 1198-1208), with but
short intervals of truce, Germany was abandoned to all the horrors of
civil war, Dean Milman observes that “the repeated protestations” of
Pope Innocent III., that _he_ was not the cause of these fatal discords,
betray the fact that he was accused of the guilt, and that he had to
wrestle with his own conscience to acquit himself of the charge. Sir
Thomas Overbury suggestively avers that
“He that says oft that he is not in love,
By repetition doth himself disprove.”
Hawthorne remarks that Italian asseverations of any questionable
fact, though uttered with rare earnestness of manner, never vouch
for themselves as coming from any depth, like roots drawn out of the
substance of the soul, with some of the soil clinging to them. Their
energy expends itself in exclamation. The vaulting ambition of their
hyperboles overleaps itself, and falls on the other side. Swift refers
to oaths in the mouth of a gamester, as ever most used as their truth is
most questioned.
“’Tis not the many oaths that make the truth,
But the plain single vow, that is vowed true,”
says Shakspeare’s Diana of Florence. And though from Shakspeare to Wolcot
is a descent indeed, Peter Pindar is for once quotable when he writes,
“Truth needs not, John, the eloquence of oaths,
Not more so than a decent suit of clothes
Requires of broad gold lace the expensive glare,
That makes the linsey-woolsey million stare;
Besides, a proverb, suited to my wish,
Declares that swearing never catches fish.”
That scapegrace guardian of George Canning’s boyhood, Mr. Reddish, is
said to have been significantly fond, on quite trivial occasions, of
making affidavits,—“the refuge of base and vulgar minds,” Robert Bell
calls them,—as if he, Reddish, felt that his word was not to be believed.
Cowper is caustic in his application of St. Paul’s statement, that oaths
terminate all strife, for “some men have surely then a peaceful life!” he
infers, in lines that go on to tell how
“Asseveration blustering in your face
Makes contradiction such a hopeless case;
In every tale they tell, or false or true,
Well-known, or such as no man ever knew,
They fix attention, heedless of your pain,
With oaths like rivets forced into the brain;
And e’en when sober truth prevails throughout,
They swear it, till affirmance breeds a doubt.”
The imprecation of Corneille’s Dorante, _Que le foudre à vos yeux
m’écrase si je mens!_ only evokes from Clarice the contemptuous rebuff,
_Un menteur_ [which, and more than which, emphatically, Dorante is,
for he is _Le Menteur_,] _est toujours prodigue de serments_. So again
Racine’s Theseus: _Toujours les scélérats ont recours au parjure_,—when
Hippolytus begins to call heaven, and earth, and universal nature to
witness, etc. So, too, Chamont, in Otway’s tragedy: “When a man talks
of love, with caution trust him; but if he swears, he’ll certainly
deceive thee.” Indeed, as Owen Feltham has it, wherever there is too
much profession, there is cause for suspicion. “Reality cares not to be
tricked out with too taking an outside; and deceit, when she intends to
cozen, studies disguise. Least of all should we be taken with swearing
asseverations. Truth needs not the varnish of an oath to make her
plainness credited.” Fielding’s Pettifogger, on a certain occasion,
calling to mind that he had not been sworn, as he usually was, before he
gave his evidence, “now bound what he had declared with so many oaths
and imprecations, that the landlady’s ears were shocked, and she put a
stop to his swearing, by assuring him of her belief,” inconsiderately
enough, as the manner of the man might have proved. Scott’s Jorworth,
when heaping asseveration on asseveration, is cut short by the honest
Fleming he is striving to mislead: “Stop, good Jorworth; thou heapest
thine oaths too thickly on each other, for me to value them to the
right estimate; that which is so lightly pledged, is sometimes thought
not worth redeeming.” So again Monkbarns tells the gaberlunzie, after
hearing his story of the adept, “I am strongly disposed to believe that
you have spoken the truth, the rather, that you have not made any of
those obtestations of the superior powers, which I observe you and your
comrades always make use of when you mean to deceive folks.” The author
of “London Labour and the London Poor,” recounts the redundance of “Glory
be to God! it’s the thruth I’m telling of you, sir,” etc., etc.; which he
had to hear from Irish mendicity, or mendacity, or both. “The dignity of
truth is lost with much protesting,” the Cicero of Jonson’s “Catiline”
says.
Take up any ordinary history, and you are but too sure to come across
examples enough and to spare, of people who did protest too much, and did
not keep their word. Glance at Alison’s big book, and on one page you
read, of Napper Tandy, for instance, “But the conduct of this leader was
far from keeping pace with these vehement protestations; for no sooner
did he hear of the reverse sustained by the French corps which had landed
in Killala Bay, than he re-embarked on board the French brig _Anacreon_,
and got safe across the channel.” On another we have Tippoo Saib striving
to disarm the suspicions of the British Government by “professions of
eternal gratitude and attachment,” and considerably overacting his part.
On another we have Napoleon bidding Marmont “spare no protestations of
assistance to Turkey;” and himself assuring the Turkish ambassador that,
“his right hand was not more inseparable from his left, than the Sultan
Selim should ever be to him;” in consequence of which protestations,
Turkey threw herself into the breach against both Russia and England,
only to find the imperial ultra-protester, within one little month from
the protestations, arranging for the immediate partition, with the Czar,
of the Turkish dominions. Look, again, at Benjamin Constant, launching
his vehement philippic against Napoleon, in the _Journal des Débats_ on
the eve of the Emperor’s return from Elba, and declaring, “Never will
I crawl, like a base deserter from power to power. Under Louis XVIII.
we enjoy a representative government. Under Bonaparte we endured a
government of Mamelukes. He is an Attila, a Gengis Khan!” And then we
read how, a few days after this fulmination, Constant, the _in_constant,
became a councillor of state under this Attila, an active supporter of
this Gengis Khan. Another ground of indictment against Napoleon is found
by Alison in the eagerness of his protestations to Russia, that he had no
way connived at the election of Bernadotte to the throne of Sweden, when
next vacant. “The extreme anxiety which Napoleon evinced for some time
afterwards to convince the court of St. Petersburg that he had taken no
concern in this election, only renders it the more probable that he was
in reality at the bottom of the transaction.” The asseverations commenced
by the younger Pennyboy, in Jonson’s “Staple of News,” are declined and
dismissed, by the elder, who knows their worth, with this summary and
suggestive caution:
“No vows, no promises; too much protestation
Makes that suspected oft, we would persuade.”
_FLEETING SHADOWS._
JOB xiv. 2.
As man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble; as
he is said to come forth like a flower, only to be cut down, so is it
further said of him, that “he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth
not.” His days are like a shadow that declineth. He himself is gone as a
shadow that fleeteth away. For man is vanity, his days are as a shadow,
saith the psalmist. And the preacher, whose text is vanity of vanities,
all is vanity, finds vexation of spirit in meditations on man, all the
days of whose vain life he spendeth as a shadow.
_What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!_ The exclamation
was that of a great statesman, amid the excitement and the contests
of public life, when there reached him news of the sudden death of a
fellow-candidate and colleague. Shadow-hunted shadows. The pursued and
the pursuers—the game and the sportsmen—shadows all. Burke’s exclamation
was often in the mind of the late Sir James Graham, and, towards the
close of his life, not unfrequently on his lips.
“Ὁρῶ γὰρ ἡμᾶς οὐδὲν ὄντας ἄλλο, πλὴν
Εἰδωλ’, ὅσοιπερ ζῶμεν, ἤ κούφην ΣΚΙΑΝ.”
_O curas hominum! O quantum est in rebus inane!_ Men were ever of old,
and they are found to be now, the willing victims of illusion in all
stages of life: children, youths, adults, and old men, all, as Emerson
puts it, are led by one bauble or another. “There are as many pillows of
illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another
dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated in refinement
to the quality of the dupe.” For instance, the intellectual man requires
a fine bait, while the sots are easily amused. “But everybody is drugged
with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and
banner and badge.” Shadows before, and shadows behind, and all fleeting.
False glozing pleasures, to adopt George Herbert’s diction, are the
shadowy lure,
... “casks of happiness,
Foolish night-fires, women’s and children’s wishes,
Chases in arras, gilded emptiness,
Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career,
Embroider’d lies, nothing between two dishes,—
These are the pleasures here.”
Marcus Antoninus, in his “Meditations,” harps on the note of
shadow-hunting or shadow-hunted shadows. You will soon be reduced to
ashes and a skeleton, he keeps telling himself; and even if you leave
a name,—what is a name? what is in a name? _Vox et præterea nihil._ The
shadows you, a shade, pursue, are miserably shadowy. The prizes of life
are, he says, so paltry, that to scuffle for them is ridiculous, and puts
him in mind of a set of puppies snarling for a bone, or of the contests
of children for a toy. Wherever he looks, the wide world over, and in
whatever age of its history, he sees abundance of people very busy, and
big with their projects, who presently drop off, and moulder to dust and
ashes. The freshest laurels wither apace, and the echoes of Fame are soon
silenced. The “insect youth” that people the air and make it murmurous
with busy life,—is not their close resemblance to the children of men one
of poetry’s common-places?
“To Contemplation’s sober eye,
Such is the race of man;
And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began.
“Alike the busy and the gay,
But flutter through life’s little day,
In fortune’s varying colours drest;
Brushed by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chilled by Age, their airy dance
They leave, in dust to rest.”
Having asked to be told her fortune by the Wise Wight of Mucklestane
Moor, Miss Ildeston, in Scott’s story, is told by the cynical recluse,
that it is a simple one; an endless chase through life after follies
not worth catching, and when caught, successively thrown away—a chase,
pursued from the days of tottering infancy to those of old age upon his
crutches. “Toys and merry-making in childhood—love and its absurdities in
youth—spadille and basto in age, shall succeed each other as objects of
pursuit: flowers and butterflies in spring,—butterflies and thistledown
in summer,—withered leaves in autumn and winter—all pursued, all caught,
all flung aside.” _Que vont elles faire de si grand matin_, Cleopas asks
his demon-guide, concerning _ces personnes_ whose early rising and eager
bustle have caught and fixed his attention. “Ce que vous souhaitez de
savoir, reprit le Démon, est une chose digne d’être observée. Vous allez
voir un tableau des soins, des mouvements, des peines que les pauvres
mortels se donnent pendant cette vie, pour remplir, le plus agréablement
qu’il leur est possible, ce petit éspace qui est entre leur naissance et
leur mort.” _Telle est la vie_, as most of us live it.
“Dream after dream ensues,
And still they dream that they shall still succeed,
And still are disappointed,”
writes William Cowper. Not at all in the same measure or manner, but
pretty much to the same effect, writes the picturesque poet of Bells and
Pomegranates:
“It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one’s eyes and laugh at a fall,
And baffled, get up to begin again,—
So the chase take up one’s life, that’s all.
While, look but once from your farthest bound,
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope drops to ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark
I shape me—ever removed.”
There is much that is suggestive in the Abbé Gerbet’s discoursings in
the Catacombs at Rome. “Ce dernier calque de l’homme,” he says, in what
has been called a commentary on Bossuet’s _mot_, that the corpse of
a man becomes a _je ne sais quoi_, for which there is no name in any
language—“cette forme si vague, si effacée, à peine empreinte sur une
poussière à peu près impalpable, volatile, presque transparente, d’un
blanc mat et incertain, est ce qui donne le mieux quelque idée de ce que
les anciens appelaient une _ombre_. Cette forme est plus frêle que l’aile
d’un papillon, plus prompte à s’evanouir que la goutte de rosée suspendue
à un brin d’herbe au soleil; un peu d’air agité par votre main, un
souffle, un son deviennent ici des agents puissants qui peuvent anéantir
en une seconde ce que dix-sept siècles, peut-être, de destruction ont
épargné. Voyez,—vous venez de respirer, et la forme a disparu. Voilà la
fin de l’histoire de l’homme en ce monde.” What shadows we are! Ashes to
ashes ends, even in Westminster Abbey, man’s noblest story, and dust to
dust concludes his noblest song.
“O death all-eloquent! you only prove
What dust we doat on, when ’tis man we love.”
Hawthorne’s Gervayse Hastings is a type and symbol, when he describes
himself as depressed by a haunting perception of unreality; as one to
whom all things, all persons, are like shadows flickering on the wall.
“Neither have I myself any real existence,” he says, “but am a shadow
like the rest.” And the end—not to say the moral—of his story may serve
to remind us of the Abbé Gerbet’s words. Gervayse Hastings is seated with
other guests at a feast—of very odd fellows—over whom is suspended the
skeleton of the oddest of all, the founder of the feast. As the speaker
ceased his confession of shadowy experiences, “it so chanced that at this
juncture the decayed ligaments of the skeleton gave way, and the dry
bones fell together in a heap.... The attention of the company being thus
diverted for a single instant from Gervayse Hastings, they perceived on
turning again towards him, that the old man had undergone a change. His
shadow had ceased to flicker on the wall.” The woe of this old man was,
that to him the world to come was all shadow too.
Mrs. Schimmelpenninck expresses her belief that in youth and middle age
there is often a real conviction of the transitory nature of the most
established temporal things, but that in old age it is not merely a
conviction, but a vivid palpable reality, and that the eternal mountains
do then indeed appear near at hand; while all the campaign around seems
faded into shadowy distance; and she inclines to say, like the monk, who
for forty years had exhibited the picture of the Last Supper, that he
had seen so many pass away, that himself and those he spoke to seemed a
shadow, while the blessed institution of the Holy Supper stood before him
alone a reality. But many are the young hearts that feel as Margaret Hale
felt, in Mrs. Gaskell’s story, when to her life seemed a vain show, so
unsubstantial, and flickering, and fleeting, and when “it was as if from
some aërial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there
was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is
past!’”
_Le tems même sera detruit_, as La Bruyère says: “ce n’est qu’un point
dans les espaces immenses de l’éternité, et il sera effacé. Il y a de
légères et frivoles circonstances du tems, qui ne sont pas stables,
qui passent, et que j’appelle des modes, la grandeur, la faveur, les
richesses, la puissance, l’autorité, l’indépendance, le plaisir, les
joies, la superfluité. Que deviendront ces modes, quand le tems même aura
disparu? La vertu seule, si peu à la mode, va au-delà des tems.”
“Between two worlds life hovers like a star
’Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge:
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! The eternal surge
Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar
Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,
Lash’d from the foam of ages; while the graves
Of empire heave but like some passing waves.”
So writes Byron in the poem that contains perhaps his grandest and most
powerful strains, interspersed among his wittiest and most wicked ones.
If ever man was haunted by the conviction that we are shadows all, and
that shadows are our pursuit, it was he. But with him there was nothing
of a “saving faith” in this. As Shakspeare’s Prince of Arragon reads on
the scroll at Belmont,
“Some there be that shadows kiss;
Such have but a shadow’s bliss;”
and of such was Byron. And he knew it. Not more alive to this philosophy
was Cowper himself, when he pictured men
“For threescore years employed with ceaseless care
In catching smoke and feeding upon air;”
or when he pointed with this moral his lines on the felled poplars that
once lent him a shade, beneath which he had so often been charmed by the
blackbird’s sweet flowing ditty:
“’Tis a sight to engage me, if anything can,
To muse on the perishing pleasures of man;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a being less durable even than he.”
One great amusement of the household in the Castle of Indolence, on the
testimony of its poet-laureate, was,
“In a huge crystal magic globe to spy,
Still as you turned it, all things that do pass
Upon this ant-hill earth; where constantly
Of idly busy men the restless fry
Run bustling to and fro with foolish haste,
In search of pleasures vain that from them fly,
Or which, obtained, the caitiffs do not taste.”
If, with Churchill, we stand as
“Spectators only on this bustling stage,
We see what vain designs mankind engage:
Vice after vice with ardour they pursue,
And one old folly brings forth twenty new....
Squirrels for nuts contend, and, wrong or right,
For the world’s empire, kings, ambitious, fight.
What odds?—to us ’tis all the selfsame thing,
A nut, a world, a squirrel, and a king.”
In other verses, and another measure, the same poet justifies his use of
the expression “whatever shadows we pursue,” by the interpolated comment,
“For our pursuits, be what they will,
Are little more than shadows still;
Too swift they fly, too swift and strong,
For man to catch or hold them long.”
Of world-wide application is what Bernardin de Saint-Pierre said of
himself, by way of private interpretation: “Toutes mes idées ne sont que
des ombres de la nature, recueillies par une autre ombre.” Goldsmith was
not altogether in sport when he made Croaker in the comedy pronounce
life to be, at the greatest and best, but a froward child, that must be
humoured and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care
is over; while Honeywood assents—Good-natured Man that he is—with a ready
“Very true, sir; nothing can exceed the vanity of our existence, but the
folly of our pursuits.” For Goldsmith was in sad earnest when he wrote of
himself as one
“Impelled with steps unceasing to pursue
Some fleeting good that mocks me with the view
That like the circle bounding earth and skies,
Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies.”
Shadow-hunted shadows is the very text for Mr. Carlyle. World’s memory
is very whimsical now and then, he says, in recording the forgotten
exploits of Johann, King of Bohemia, “all which have proved voiceless in
the World’s memory; while the casual Shadow of a Feather he once more has
proved vocal there.” And a whole chapter is devoted to, and entitled,
a Kaiser hunting Shadows,—Kaiser Karl with his Pragmatic Sanction to
wit, and similar projects, aims, or hobbies, more or less shadowy
and unsubstantial, all. “There was another vast Shadow, or confused
high-piled continent of shadows, to which our poor Kaiser held with his
customary tenacity. To procure adherences and assurances to this dear
Pragmatic Sanction, was even more than the shadow of the Spanish crown,”
the one grand business of his life henceforth. “Shadow of Pragmatic
Sanction, shadow of the Spanish crown,—it was such shadow-huntings of the
Kaiser in Vienna” that thwarted the Prussian Double-marriage. Another
object which Kaiser Karl pursued with some diligence, and which “likewise
proved a shadow,” was his Ostend East India Company, which gave much
disturbance to mankind. “This was the third grand shadow which the Kaiser
chased, shaking all the world, poor crank world, as he strode after it.”
Foiled in this, as in another and another chase, no wonder he grew more
and more saturnine, and “addicted to solid taciturn field-sports. His
Political ‘Perforce Hunt (_Parforce Jagd_),’ with so many two-footed
terriers, and legationary beagles, distressing all the world by their
baying and their burrowing, had proved to be of Shadows; and melted into
thin air, to a very singular degree!” Many chapters later Mr. Carlyle
recurs to his picture of the “Kaiser in his Shadow-hunt, coursing the
Pragmatic Sanction chiefly, as he has done these twenty years past”—and
so begins a chapter entitled, by a mixed metaphor, “Kaiser’s Shadow-hunt
has caught Fire”—by contact, namely, with inflammable Poland. And a
subsequent chapter details the damages the poor Kaiser had to pay for
meddling in Polish elections,—“for galloping thither in chase of
Shadows.... This may be considered as the consummation of the Kaiser’s
Shadow-hunt; or at least its igniting and exploding point.... Shadow-hunt
is now all gone to Pragmatic Sanction, as it were: that is now the one
thing left in Nature for a Kaiser; and that he will love, and chase,
as the summary of all things.” From this point we see him go steadily
down, and at a rapid rate,—getting into disastrous Turkish wars, “with
as little preparation for War or Fact as a life-long Hunt of _Shadows_
presupposes.”
Or let us take our stand, with the same philosopher, in that
_Œil-de-Bœuf_, in the Versailles Palace Gallery—through which what
figures have passed, and vanished! “Figures? Men? They are fast-fleeting
Shadows; fast chasing each other: it is not a Palace, but a Caravansera.”
Macaulay has his Sermon in a Churchyard. To that spot the homilist
invites all and sundry, and he takes his standpoint for his text. Come
to this school of his, he bids us, with the promise that there we shall
learn, “in one short hour of placid thought, a stoicism more deep, more
stern, than ever Zeno’s porch hath taught:”
“The plots and feats of those that press
To seize on titles, wealth, or power,
Shall seem to thee a game of chess,
Devised to pass a tedious hour.
What matters it to him who fights
For shows of unsubstantial good,
Whether his kings, and queens, and knights,
Be things of flesh, or things of wood?
“We check and take, exult, and fret;
Our plans extend, our passions rise,
Till in our ardour we forget
How worthless is the victor’s prize.
Soon fades the spell, soon comes the night:
Say will it not be then the same,
Whether we play the black or white,
Whether we lost or won the game?”
This may remind us of Mrs. Battle’s apology for whist, or of the
concluding sentence in a characteristic confession by Benjamin
Constant—who, by the way, had said of himself in a previous letter, _Je
passerai comme une OMBRE sur la terre entre le malheur et l’ennui_—he
records his _sentiment profond et_ (like his name) _constant_ of the
shortness of life—a sentiment, he says, so deep and so constant that
it makes the pen or the book drop from his hand whenever he takes to
study: “Nous n’avons pas plus de motifs pour acquérir de la gloire, pour
conquérir un empire ou pour faire un bon livre, que n’en avons pour
faire une promenade ou une partie de whist.” Even so utterly different
a man in creed and character as Joseph de Maistre could exclaim, “Ah!
le vilain monde! j’ai toujours dit qu’il ne pourrait aller si nous
avions le sens commun.... C’est nôtre folie qui fait tout aller.” Else
when we see—especially when death brings home to us, strikes home to
us—what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue, “en vérité chacun se
coucherait et daignerait à peine s’habiller.” _N’importe! tout marche et
c’est assez._ And readers of M. de Tocqueville’s letters will remember
how often that philosophic writer confides to his correspondents his
conviction that there is no one thing in the world capable of fixing and
satisfying him. He had attained a success unhoped for at the beginning of
his career, but was far from happy. Often, in imagination, he would fancy
himself at the summit of human greatness; and when there, the conviction
would force itself irrepressibly upon him, that the same painful
sensations would follow him to that sublime altitude.
Succeeding? What is the great use of succeeding? muses the master
showman of Vanity Fair. Failing? Where is the great harm? “Psha! These
things appear as nought, when Time passes—Time the consoler—Time the
anodyne—Time the grey calm satirist, whose sad smile seems to say, Look,
O man, at the vanity of the objects you pursue, and of yourself who
pursue them!”
“Dust are our frames; and, gilded dust, our pride
Looks only for a moment whole and sound;
Like that long-buried body of the king,
Found lying with his urns and ornaments,
Which at a touch of light, an air of heaven,
Slipt into ashes and was found no more.”
The professed cynic, remarks an essayist on the theme of Occasional
Cynicism, has reached the delightful conclusion that “the whole thing,”
by which he means life and all its interests, is a sheer mistake and
piece of confusion. And as it presents itself to the grander and loftier
type of mind, this difficulty is held by the same writer to be the
“starting-point of all systems of religion and philosophy, of which it
is the object to show either that aims exist before men’s eyes that are
solid realities worth pursuing, and not mere shadows, or else that even
shadows are better worth pursuing in some one way than in all others.”
Jeffrey’s earlier letters abound in almost cynical reflections on the
folly of ambition and the “ridiculous self-importance” implied in “heroic
toils.” The whole game of life seemed to him a little childish, “and the
puppets that strut and look lofty very nearly as ridiculous as those that
value themselves on their airs and graces—poor little bits of rattling
timber—to be jostled in a bag as soon as the curtain drops.” “God help
us! it is a foolish little thing this human life at the best; and it is
half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it,
and to its little ornaments and distinctions,” etc. We are, as a modern
poet of name and promise puts it, for ever at hide-and-seek with our
souls:
... “Not in Hades alone
Doth Sisyphus roll, ever frustrate, the stone,
Do the Danaïds ply, ever vainly, the sieve.
Tasks as futile does earth to its denizens give.”
When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable,
exclaims David Hume, seem all our pursuits of happiness! And even if we
would extend our concern beyond our own life, he goes on to say, how
frivolous appear our most enlarged and most generous projects, when we
consider the incessant changes and revolutions of human affairs, by
which laws and learning, books and governments, are hurried away by
time, as by a rapid stream, and are lost in the immense ocean of matter.
If such a reflection certainly tends to mortify all our passions, does
it not, asks the essayist, thereby counterwork the artifice of nature,
by which we are “happily deceived into an opinion that human life is
of some importance? And may not such a reflection be employed with
success by voluptuous reasoners, in order to lead us from the paths of
action and virtue into the flowery fields of indolence and pleasure?”
The Chinese have been pointed to, by a moral philosopher, to point his
moral, which is, the desolating tendency of secularism—they having learnt
practically, as well as theoretically, to think of themselves as mere
transitory beings, who have no future life to expect, and no present
Providence to reverence or fear; and the result he takes to be, that
they are the meanest, the most deceitful, and one of the most vicious
nations in the world—a people who literally sit in darkness, and whose
lives are passed in the shadow of death. “In all the world there is no
more terrible or instructive example of the practical results of looking
upon men as mere passing shadows, who have no superior and no hereafter.”
Once succeed, this writer argues, in persuading men that they are mere
passing phenomena, possessing no more distinctive qualities than the
successive waves of the sea, and the consequence is inevitable. “They
will cease—gradually, imperceptibly, and with all sorts of moral, and
perhaps religious, reflections on their lips—to care for what is great,
permanent, and noble, and they will become, in the fullest sense of the
words, beasts that perish.”
Many men, says Archdeacon Hare, spend their lives in gazing at their
own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof. And one of his
companion guessers at truth remarks, that instead of watching the bird
as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and,
finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.
If a man be a reality, says John Sterling, no empty vision in the
dreaming soul of nature, but inwardly substantial and personal, that
which he most earnestly desires, which best satisfies his whole being,
must be real too. And here is a parallel passage from a later writer:
“Yes, this life is the war of the False and the True,
Yet this life is a truth, though so complex to view
That its latent veracity few of us find....
Ay, the world but a frivolous phantasm seems,
And mankind in the mass but as motes in sunbeams;
But when Fate, from the midst of this frivolous nature,
Selects for her purpose some frail human creature,
And the Angel of Sorrow, outstretching a wan
Forefinger to mark him, strikes down from the man
The false life that hid him, the man’s self appears
A solemn reality: Him the dread spheres
Of heaven and hell with their forces dispute,
And dare we be indifferent? Hence, and be mute,
Light scoffer, vain trifler! Through all thou discernest
A Greater than thou is at work, and in earnest;
And he who dares trifle with man, trifles too
With man’s awful Maker.”...
_HARAN TAKEN: TERAH LEFT._
GENESIS xi. 28.
There is a pathetic significance in what to the unobserving reader might
seem a dry record of decease, commonplace among other commonplaces,
in the fact mentioned concerning the house of Terah, the father of
Abraham,—that “Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his
nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.”
It is, as Canon Melvill says, like an inversion of the natural order,
when we see parents performing the last office to their children: we feel
it natural that children should close the eyes, and shroud the limbs
of fathers and mothers, but unnatural that fathers and mothers should
perform these sad duties for children. “Haran should have followed Terah,
and not Terah Haran.”
A great French moralist, in his exposition of the sublime intensity of
a father’s love, goes on to say of the tie, the _lien_, which unites
devoted parent to endeared child, “Et la nature brise ce lien. Elle jette
au tombeau cette vie qui commence, et condamne le père à rester vivant.”
A tender poet of our day was writing from such an experience—not in his
case an isolated one—when bewailing the gem of his hearth, his household
pride, who, could love have saved from death, would have found a father’s
love, and a mother’s, stronger than death:
“Humbly we bow to Fate’s decree;
Yet had we hoped that Time should see
Thee mourn for us, not us for thee.”
_Les funérailles des fils_, says another French author, _sont toujours
contre la nature quand les parents y assistant_. How often Edmund
Burke harps on that tremulously vibrating string, in reference to the
master-grief which overshadowed his closing period of life! In a letter
to Dr. Lawrence, he expresses his thankfulness to God for dismissing him
“so gently from life,” and being sent, he adds, “to follow those who in
course ought to have followed me.” In his famous letter to the Duke of
Bedford, the bereaved old man utters the lament: “I live in an inverted
order. They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me. They who
should have been to me as posterity, are in the place of ancestors.”
Shakspeare had anticipated the thought, and the expression of the
thought, when he made old Lucretius exclaim:
“If in the child the father’s image lies,
Where shall I live, now Lucrece is unlived?
Thou wast not to this end from me derived.
If children predecease progenitors,
We are their offspring, and they none of ours.”
So again he makes Capulet cry out, at the loss of his daughter Juliet, “O
thou untaught! what manners is in this, to press before thy father to a
grave!” Writing to a kinsman on the birth of a son, Burke gives utterance
to the wish, “May he live to be the staff of your age, and to close your
eyes in peace; instead of, like me, reversing the order of nature, and
having the melancholy office to close _his_.” And to his “dear little
niece,” Mary, he thus writes after the birth of her son (Thomas Haviland
Burke): “May you see your son a support to your old age; ... and at a
very long day may _he_ close _your_ eyes, not as I have done those of
your admirable cousin.” His progeny may never be his posterity, muses Sir
Thomas Browne, in his meditations on man: “he may go out of the world
less related than he came into it; and considering the frequent mortality
in friends and relations, in such a term of time, he may pass away divers
years in sorrow and black habits, and leave none to mourn for himself;
orbity may be his inheritance.”
Bitterly Mohammed bewailed the death of his four sons by Kadijah, who
died in their infancy; and especially that of one by Maria the Egyptian;
for not only was this fatal to his hopes of founding an hereditary
religious dynasty, but it affected his claims to pre-eminent favour with
God. “Al-as Ebn Wayel, who was so cruel and so daring as to insult him on
the loss of his favourite boy, ... was accursed of heaven, and a special
Sura (the 108th) was revealed to console the Prophet.” Bitterly Saint
Stephen, the first king of Hungary, bewailed the loss of his promising
son Emeric—the first of a series of shocks that hastened his own end.
Like the desolate sire in Scott’s poem who
... “beheld aghast,
With Wilfrid all his projects pass,
All turn’d and centred on his son,
On Wilfrid all—and he was gone.
‘And I am childless now,’ he said.”
Réné of Anjou, in surviving his male offspring, was the last
representative of his race. Southey observes that _Pauli in domo præter
se nemo superest_, is a reflection passing melancholy in the speech of
Paulus Æmilius; and applying it to his own emphatically good physician,
he says, that the speedy extinction of his family in his own person was
often in the Doctor’s mind, and that he would sometimes touch upon it, to
dear friends, in moods of autumnal feeling.
Michelet’s record of the death of Charles le Bel, who leaving only a
daughter, was succeeded by a cousin, closes with the reminder, “All that
fine family of princes who had sat near their father at the council of
Vienne, was extinct. In the popular belief, the curse of Boniface had
taken effect.” So with Alexander III. of Scotland, whose eldest son died
soon after his marriage, leaving no issue, and whose second son died
while a boy; other bereavements followed, and the king came to feel in
fact as the patriarch felt by anticipation, that to be bereaved of one’s
children, was bereavement indeed. King James V., in like manner the
survivor of both his sons, died a broken-hearted man.
Laelio Torelli, the Florentine statesman and man of letters, survived all
his children. Shakspeare lost his only son some twenty years before his
own decease. Vincentio Scamozzi, the architect, who died the same year as
Shakspeare, caused no little talk at the time, by the very singular will
he left, betokening a most extraordinary solicitude for the perpetuation
of his name, as he had the grief of outliving his offspring. Sir Francis
Vere’s three sons and two daughters all died before him. It was accounted
a signal calamity in the career of that true nobleman, the Duke of
Ormond, that he outlived “the noble-minded Ossory,” worthy son of such a
sire.
“The feeble wrap the athletic in his shroud; and weeping fathers build
their children’s tomb.” Young’s is that truism; and Pope’s is the cognate
query, “Say, was it virtue, more though Heaven ne’er gave, lamented
Digby, sunk thee to the grave?
“Tell me, if virtue made the son expire,
Why, full of days and honours, lives the sire?”
Passing in his Meditations from single persons to families, Marcus
Antoninus refers to that of the Pompeys, for one instance, as wholly
extinct. “This man was the last of his house,” he says, is not an
uncommon inscription upon a monument. As with Homer’s Phænops, in feeble
age, who lost his joy and hope in young Xanthus and Thoön:
“Vast was his wealth, and these the only heirs
Of all his labours, and a life of cares.
Cold death o’ertakes them in their blooming years,
And leaves the father unavailing tears.
To strangers now descends his heapy store,
The race forgotten, and the name no more.”
Who on his staff is this? we ask with Ossian; who is this whose head is
white with age, whose eyes are red with tears, who quakes at every step?
“It is thy father, O Morar!” dead and gone Morar: “the father of no
son but thee.... Weep, thou father of Morar; weep, but thy son heareth
thee not. Deep is the sleep of the dead—low their pillow of dust.” This
flies sure to the old man’s heart, says Schiller’s Illo of the elder
Piccolomini,
... “He has his whole life long
Fretted and toil’d to raise his ancient house
From a count’s title to the name of prince;
And now must seek a grave for his only son.”
Peter the Great, whether guilty or not of putting to death his elder son,
Alexis, was inconsolable for the loss of the only remaining one. It was
the fate of Queen Anne to lose, at twelve years of age, the hopeful young
prince who alone survived of all her very many children.
Samuel Richardson was the saddened survivor of all his five sons
and a daughter. The celebrated Dutch philosopher and mathematician,
’Sgravesande, who, by the way, was born within the same year with
Richardson, lost his two sons within eight days of each other, and is
honoured for the Christian resignation with which he bore the sharp
trial. Sir John Vanbrugh lost his only son at the battle of Tournay.
Bishop Warburton died not long after his only son, who was carried off
by a decline in the springtide of life. It is of a distinguished Swiss
littérateur, who died in his prime, that Sainte-Beuve somewhere says _que
sa destinée tranchée avant l’heure a pourtant été complète, si un père
octogénaire ne lui survivait_.
“I ought to have gone before him: I wonder he went so young,”
wails the aged mother in Mr. Tennyson’s poem, all whose children have
gone before her, she is so old.
The gathering sorrows which clouded the latter years of Bishop Percy,
“after a life in the main prosperous and happy,” commenced with the loss
of an only son.
Lord Kenyon died in 1802, “sorrow-stricken by the loss of his eldest son,
after having accumulated a fortune of £300,000.” Lord Stowell lost his
son, aged forty-two, about two months only before he too fell on death.
Sprengel, the very learned German physician, never recovered the stroke
of his son’s loss. Cuvier’s four children all died before him. “Write ye
this man childless:” many a man of genius has felt his heart sink and his
strength fail under that blighting sentence. In his sixty-seventh year
we find Moore writing, “The last of our five children is now gone, and
we are left desolate and alone. Not a single relative have I now left in
the world.” How Mr. Hallam was successively bereaved of sons so rich in
promise, if not in performance, is too well known.
There is a seeming affectation of literary paternity in what
Chateaubriand writes of the death of Byron,—as though it were Terah and
Haran, with a difference. “I preceded him in life; he preceded me in
death. He was summoned before his time. My number came before his, and
yet his was drawn first from the urn. It was Childe Harold who ought to
have remained.”
_THE MOTE AND THE BEAM._
ST. MATTHEW vii. 5.
As easy is it to discern the mote in a brother’s eye as to discern the
face of the sky. Hypocrite is the term by which the facile discerner in
either case is divinely stigmatised; in the one instance, because with
all his discernment he cannot read the signs of the times; in the other,
because with all his insight and microscopic nicety of perception, and
exceptionally developed faculty of vision, he yet considers not the beam
that is in his own eye.
With our Lord’s words concerning the mote and the beam, Archbishop
Trench bids us compare the Chinese proverb, “Sweep away the snow from
thine own door, and heed not the frost upon thy neighbour’s tiles.” The
Greek and Latin classics are not wanting in various readings of the same
theme. Demosthenes meant much the same thing when he said that we must
beware of austerely scrutinizing the actions of others, unless first we
are conscious of having acquitted ourselves aright: “οὐ γὰρ ἐστι πικρῶς
ἐξετάσαι τι πέπρακται τοῖς ἀλλοῖς, ἀν μὴ παῤ ὑμῶν ἀυτῶν πρῶτον ὑπάρξη τὰ
δέοντα.” “Man is blind to his own faults, but keen-sighted to perceive
those of others,” is a Latin adage: “Vitiis suis pervidendis cæcus est
homo, in alienis perspicax.” “Is it never your way to look at yourself
when you are abusing another?” is a question in Plautus: “Non soles
respicere te, cum dicas injuste alteri?” Cicero pronounces it to be of
the nature of folly to see the faults of others, and to forget one’s own:
“Proprium est stultitiæ aliorum vitia cernere, oblivisci suorum.” Horace
shrewdly submits that the man who is desirous that his friends should not
take offence at his own protuberances, will “ignore” that friend’s warts:
“Qui, ne tuberibus propriis offendat amicum,
Postulat, ignoscat verrucis illius.”
And at least as pointed and piquant is the passage beginning,
“Quum tua pervideas oculis male lippus inunctis,
Cur in amicorum vitiis tam cernis acutum,” etc.
The query Plautus puts, “How is it that no man tries to search into
himself, but each fixes his eyes on the wallet of the one who goes before
him?” is in allusion to the fable of Jupiter having loaded men with a
couple of wallets; the one, filled with our own vices, being slung at our
backs,
“Propriis repletam vitiis post tergum dedit;”
the other, heavy with our neighbour’s faults, hung in front,
“Alienis ante pectus suspendit gravem.”
To pardon those absurdities in ourselves which we cannot suffer in
others, is neither better nor worse, says Dean Swift, than to be more
willing to be fools ourselves than to have others so. The proverbs
of all nations show all nations to be alive to the ridiculous in this
respect. The kiln calls the oven, burnt house, says one. In Italy,
the pan says to the pot, Keep off, or you’ll smutch me. In Spain, the
raven bawls hoarsely to the crow, Get out, blackamoor! (_Quítate allá,
negro!_) In Germany, one ass nicknames another, Long-ears. And Dr. Trench
is rather taken with a certain originality in the Catalan version of
the proverb: “Death said to the man with his throat cut, ‘How ugly you
look!’” They should be fair, hints Juvenal, who venture to deride the
disproportioned leg or sooty hide, _Loripedem rectus derideat, Æthiopem
albus_. Yet, as the Ettrick shepherd once sang in his native Doric:—
“There’s some wi’ big scars on their face,
Point out a prin scart on a frien’;
And some, black as sweeps wi’ disgrace,
Cry out, the whole warld’s unclean.”
Molière’s Chrysale twits her sister Bélise, who is a _femme savante_,
with snapping up everybody short who makes a slip with the tongue, while
herself liable to graver censure for slips of conduct:—
“Le moindre solécisme en parlant vous irrite;
Mais vous en faites, vous, d’étranges en conduite.”
Sappho, again, in Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s portentous romance—once
the rage of readers in France, despite its plurality of volumes, as
“Clarissa” was in England, a century later—ridicules the _bizarre_
orthography of the fine-ladyism of the day, while amused at the fact
that the fine ladies in question, who perpetrated such gross errors in
writing, and who lost every particle of wit the moment they took up a
pen, would yet make game for days together of some poor foreigner who
happened to use one term for another. As if it were less a matter of
mirth or marvel for a _grande dame_, claiming to be a woman of wit, too,
and a power in society, to commit a thousand blunders in writing her
native language, than for a raw foreigner to make a few slips in speaking
it.
We every day and every hour, observes Montaigne, say things of another
that we might more properly say of ourselves, could we but revert our
observation to our own concerns as well as extend it to others. And the
old essayist has his fling at not a few authors of the day who, in this
manner, prejudiced their own cause by running headlong upon those they
attacked, and darting those shafts against their enemies that might, with
much greater propriety and effect, be hurled back at themselves.
A stanza in the most elaborate of Shakspeare’s poems that are not
plays—for are not all his plays poems?—runs into this eloquence of
remonstrant appeal:—
“Think but how vile a spectacle it were
To view thy present trespass in another.
Men’s faults do seldom to themselves appear;
Their own transgressions partially they smother:
This guilt would seem death-worthy in thy brother.
O, how are they wrapped in with infamies,
That from their own misdeeds askance their eyes!”
It is of their common friend Breuning that Beethoven writes to Ferdinand
Ries,—“He certainly possesses many admirable qualities, but he thinks
himself quite faultless, whereas the very defects that he discovers in
others are those which he possesses himself to the highest degree.” One
of the most natural and truthfully, as well as forcibly, drawn characters
in Mrs. Inchbald’s “Simple Story,”—Sandford,—a man of understanding, of
learning, and a complete casuist, yet all whose faults were committed for
the want of knowing better, is described as constantly reproving faults
in others, and most assuredly too good a man not to have corrected and
amended his own, had they been known to him; but known to him they were
not. He had been, we are told, for so long a time the spiritual superior
or preceptor of all with whom he lived, and so busied with instructing
others, that he had not once recollected that he needed instruction
himself; and in such awe did his habitual severity keep all about him,
that although he had numerous friends, not one of them told him of his
failing. “Was there not then some reason for him to suppose he _had_ no
faults? His enemies, indeed, hinted that he had; but enemies he never
hearkened to; and thus, with all his good sense, he wanted the sense to
follow the rule, ‘Believe what your enemies say of you rather than what
is said by your friends.’” He had yet to learn, and to learn by heart,
the wide and practical import of the prayer—
“Teach me to love and to forgive,
Exact my own defects to scan,
What others are to feel, and know myself a Man.”
Well may the demoniac guide of Don Cleofas, in Le Sage’s symbolical
fiction, say, and well does he say, “J’admire messieurs les hommes; leurs
propres défauts leur paraissent des minuties, au lieu qu’ils regardent
ceux d’autrui avec un microscope.” To their own faults more than a little
blind, to those of others they are not a little unkind.
Gay begins his fable of the Turkey and the Ant with the smoothly-turned
truism, that
“In other men we faults can spy,
And blame the mote that dims their eye;
Each little speck and error find;
To our own stronger errors blind.”
One of the most classical masters of modern English, whether in verse
or prose, was employing the same metre—of fatal facility, as it is
called—when he closed his address to a brother bard in a strain that must
also close this chapter of instances:
“We, who surround a common table,
And imitate the fashionable,
Wear each two eye-glasses: _this_ lens
Shows us our faults, _that_ other men’s.
We do not care how dim may be
_This_ by whose aid our own we see;
But, ever anxiously alert
That all may have their whole desert,
We would melt down the stars and sun
In our heart’s furnace, to make one
Through which th’ enlightened world might spy
A mote upon a brother’s eye.”
_STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS._
1 PETER ii. 11.
Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout
Asia Minor, addressed the urgent appeal that _as_ strangers—strangers and
pilgrims—they should abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the
soul.
Consider what you are, he seems to say, as his words are paraphrased
by the greatest of all commentators on his first epistle: “If you were
citizens of this world, then you might drive the same trade” with the
men of this world, “and follow the same lusts; but seeing you are chosen
and called out of this world, and invested into a new society, made free
of another city, and are therefore here but travellers passing through
to your own country, it is very reasonable that there be this difference
betwixt you and the world, that while they live at home your carriage be
such as fits strangers, not glutting yourselves with their pleasures,
nor surfeiting upon their delicious fruits, as some unwary travellers
do abroad; but as wise strangers living warily and soberly, and still
minding most of all your journey homewards, suspecting dangers and snares
in your way, and so walking with a holy fear, as the Hebrew word for a
stranger imports.”
The topic is one upon which Archbishop Leighton ever writes feelingly.
As again in his comment on the psalmist’s profession of being a stranger
with God, and a sojourner as all his fathers were, the same devout
expositor observes that he who looks on himself as a stranger, and is
sensible of the darkness round about him in this wilderness, will often
put up that request with David, “I am a stranger in the earth: hide not
Thy commandments from me.” What, Leighton asks, is the joy of our life,
but the thoughts of that other life, our home before us? “And certainly
he that lives much in these thoughts, set him where you will here, he is
not much pleased nor displeased; but if His Father call him home, that
word gives him his heart’s desire.”
Once again, in the sixth of his lectures on the immortality of the soul,
Leighton expatiates on the fact that this is not our rest, that we have
no place of residence here below: “it is the region of fleas and gnats;
and while we search for happiness among these mean and perishing things,
we are not only sure to be disappointed, but also not to escape those
miseries which, in great numbers, continually beset us; so that we may
apply to ourselves the saying of the famous artist confined in the island
of Crete, and truly say,—
“‘Nec tellus nostræ, nec patet unda fugæ,
Restat iter cœli, cœlo tentabimus ire.’”
(“The earth and the sea are shut up against us, and neither of them can
favour our escape; the way to heaven is alone open, and this way we will
strive to go.”)
Incidentally, it adds to the interest of every such passage in Leighton’s
writings to remember a noteworthy circumstance respecting his death.
He had been used to say that if he were to choose a place to die in it
should be an inn—for that would look so like a pilgrim’s going home, to
whom this world was all as an inn. It was his opinion, also, as we read
in the memoir of him by Aikman, that “the officious tenderness and care
of friends was an entanglement to a dying man, and that the unconcerned
attendance of those who could be procured in such a place would give less
disturbance.” He had his wish. At the Bell Inn, Warwick Lane, Robert
Leighton, in his seventy-fourth year, stranger and pilgrim, drew his last
breath.
“An inn receives me, where, unknown,
I solitary sit me down;
Many I hear, and some I see—
I nought to them, they nought to me.
Thus, in those regions of the dead,
A pilgrim’s wandering life I lead;
And still at every step declare
I’ve no abiding city here.
...
The world is like an inn; for there
Men call and storm and drink and swear;
While undisturbed the Christian waits,
And reads and writes and meditates.
Though in the dark ofttimes I stray,
The Lord shall light me on my way;
And to the city of the sun
Conduct me, when my journey’s done.
There by these eyes shall He be seen,
Who sojourned for me at an inn;
On Sion’s hill I those shall hail
From whom I parted in the vale.”
Of him who walks by faith and not by sight, who places eternity by the
side of time, and so regards the one as a mere path or stepping-stone to
the other, it is well said by Dr. Chalmers that he actually moves through
life in the spirit of a traveller, feels his home to be heaven, and all
his dearest hopes and interests to be laid up there; “walking therefore
over the world with a more light and unencumbered step than other men,
just because all its adversities to him are but the crosses of a rapid
journey, and all its joys but the shifting scenery of the land through
which he is travelling, and visions of passing loveliness.”
As in the pilgrim’s song of a contemporary clerical poet:
“My rest is in heaven; my rest is not here:
Then why should I murmur when trials are near?
Be hushed, my dark spirit! the worst that can come
But shortens thy journey, and hastens thee home.
...
A scrip on my back, and a staff in my hand,
I march on in haste through an enemy’s land:
The road may be rough, but it cannot be long;
And I’ll smooth it with hope, and I’ll cheer it with song.”
The second of Bishop Beveridge’s Resolutions comprises this
utterance,—after the expression of a longing that he could be ever on
the mount, taking a view of the land of Canaan, for then what dreams and
shadows would all things here below appear to be,—“Well! by the grace of
God, I am resolved no longer to tie myself to sense and sight, the sordid
and trifling affairs of this life, but always to walk as one of the other
world; to behave myself in all places, and at all times, as one already
possessed of my inheritance and an inhabitant of the New Jerusalem;—by
faith assuring myself I have but a few more days to live below, a little
more work to do, and be admitted to a nearer vision and fruition of God,
and see Him face to face.” And thus, although at present here in the
flesh, the believer’s resolve is to look upon himself as more really an
inhabitant of heaven than abiding (for here we have no continuing city)
upon earth.
In the words of _l’exilé_ of Lamennais, “La patrie n’est point ici-bas;
l’homme vainement l’y cherche; ce qu’il prend pour elle n’est qu’un gite
d’une nuit.” Happy they, exclaims Pascal in his _Pensées_, whose tears
are shed, not at the evanescence of all things earthly and perishable,
but when they remember Sion—_dans le souvenir de leur chère patrie_—the
heavenly Jerusalem, after which they sigh continually in the weariness of
their exile. But as Schiller’s Thekla replies to Neubrunn’s comment on
“the journey’s weary length,”—
“The pilgrim, travelling to a distant shrine
Of hope and healing, does not count the leagues.”
John Foster describes the Israelite indeed, who is a pilgrim indeed, as
resembling a person whose eye, while he is conversing with you about an
object or a succession of objects, should glance every moment towards
some great obstacle appearing on the distant horizon. “He seems to
talk to his friends in somewhat of the manner of expression with which
you can imagine that Elijah spoke, if he remarked to his companion any
circumstance in the journey from Bethel to Jericho, and from Jericho
to the Jordan; a manner betraying the sublime anticipation which was
pressing on his thoughts.” To other pilgrims the vision of the land that
is very far off may be, as Professor Maurice puts it, not so clear as
they wish; but it is more clear than their vision of anything which lies
about them; and without it all would be shadow and darkness. “There, in
that state, must lie all that they dream of and hope for.” “There only
they must live, or have no life.” “When they pray ‘Thy kingdom come,’
they ask that the Great Shepherd will lead them and their brethren out of
a land of pits, a thirsty wilderness, a valley of the shadow of death,
to a peaceable habitation and a sure dwelling-place.” There is a bleak
desert, in the words of one who wrote sacred songs, though himself no
sacred poet,—
... “where daylight grows weary
Of wasting its smiles on a desert so dreary—
What may that desert be?
’Tis life, cheerless life, where the few joys that come
Are lost like that daylight, for ’tis not their home.
There is a lone pilgrim, before whose faint eyes
The water he pants for but sparkles and flies—
Who may that pilgrim be?
’Tis man, hapless man, through this life tempted on
By fair shining hopes, that in shining are gone.”
In that essay of John Foster’s, from which a citation has already been
made, the essayist protests against the care so many popular writers
seem to take to guard against the inroad of ideas pertaining to another
life—as much care as the inhabitants of Holland take against the
irruption of the sea; and their writings, he adds, do really form a kind
of moral dyke against the invasion from the other world. “They do not
instruct a man to act, to enjoy, and to suffer, as a being that may by
to-morrow have finally abandoned this orb; everything is done to beguile
the feeling of his being ‘a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth.’” They
fail to recognise the _c’est vrai_ of the Christian lyrist’s avowal, the—
“_’Tis true_, we are but strangers
And sojourners below;
And countless snares and dangers
Surround the path we go:
Though painful and distressing,
Yet there’s a rest above;
And onward still we’re pressing,
To reach that land of love.”
The object of such a pilgrim is progress—or, rather, progress is the
means to an end; and the end is not yet, is not here, but will surely
come, and come quickly, and will not tarry. There is a wicket gate
towards which they are making progress, and it is the portal of a
city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. They who
professedly sojourn here as in a strange country, who obey the call to go
out into a place which they shall after receive for an inheritance; who
confess, and act on the confession, that they are strangers and pilgrims
on the earth; they that say and do such things declare plainly that they
seek a country, a better country—that is, a heavenly.
Chaucer’s “old style” conveys a meaning the world can never be too old to
learn:
“Here is no home, here is but wyldyrnesse.
Forth, pilgrime! forth, best out of thy stalle!
Look up on hye, and thonke God of alle;
Weyve thy lust, and let thy goste thee lede,[18]
And trouthe shall thee delyver, it is no drede.”
We are strangers and sojourners before God, as were all our fathers.
By faith it was that Abraham sojourned in the land of promise, as in a
strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs
with him of the same promise; in tabernacles, that bespeak the stranger
and pilgrim upon earth; not in houses built to endure. For he confessed,
and denied not, but confessed that here he had no continuing city. True,
a citizen he was of no mean city. But it was not of the earth, earthy.
For he looked for a city which hath foundations, more everlasting than
the hills. Meanwhile, God’s statutes were his songs in the house of his
pilgrimage.
The Bird of God is Wordsworth’s epithet for that “resplendent wanderer”
called by Eastern islanders the Bird of Heaven, and by us of the West,
Bird of Paradise; and, as usual with the serenely meditative bard of
Rydal, there is moral, nay, religious teaching in the symbolism of his
strain:—
“The Bird of God! whose blessed will
She seems performing as she flies
Over the earth and through the skies,
In never-wearied search of Paradise—
Region that crowns her beauty with the name
She bears for us—for us how blest,
How happy at all seasons, could like aim
Uphold our spirits urged to kindred flight
On wings that fear no glance of God’s pure sight,
No tempest from His breath, their promised rest
Seeking with indefatigable quest
Above a world that deems itself most wise
When most enslaved by gross realities!”
An appalling pestilence raged in Carthage, and so gave deadly emphasis to
the exhortations of St. Cyprian, when he, a good shepherd, sought to lead
the sheep of his flock to green pastures and still waters of comfort;
reminding them, as he stood between the living and the dead, while as yet
the plague was stayed not, that they had renounced the world, and were
abiding here as strangers and pilgrims only. “Let us,” he besought them,
“embrace that time which gives to each one his home, which, delivering
us from this world, and loosing us from worldly snares, restores us to
paradise and the kingdom.” Who, he asks, that is placed in a foreign
land, would not hasten to return to his own country? Who that saileth
towards his own, would not eagerly desire a prosperous wind to bring him
swiftly to the embrace of those he loves? “Our country we believe to be
paradise: the patriarchs we esteem our parents. Why, then, do we not
speed and run, that we may behold our country and salute our parents?”
Salutary though the sentiment be, however, it admits of one-sided
exaggeration. There are good people who, for instance, exalt and
expatiate upon the death of godly infants, as though to quit this earth
of ours at the very earliest date were the most blessed of privileges.
The idea of man being sent into the world for any definite purpose
never seems, it has been justly said, to enter the minds of these good
people. “With them life is but an irksome omnibus-journey—the shorter
the better—and to be got over by each without any regard to the comfort
or requirements of his fellow-travellers.” Only in part are these
strictures on “the shorter the better” applicable, if at all, to the
theme and expression of Mrs. Browning’s sonnet:—
“I think we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God’s. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope
Of yon grey blank of sky, we might grow faint
To muse upon eternity’s constraint
Round our aspirant souls. But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop
For a few days consumed in loss and taint?
O pusillanimous heart! be comforted,
And, like a cheerful traveller, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints?—At least it may be said,
‘Because the way is _short_, I thank thee, God!’”
Addison devotes a paragraph in one of his _Spectators_ to the fact of
men being in Scripture called strangers and sojourners upon earth, and
life a pilgrimage. And he refers to several heathen as well as Christian
authors, who under the same kind of metaphor have represented the world
as an inn, which was only designed to furnish us with accommodation in
this our passage. It is therefore very absurd, urges our moral essayist,
to think of setting up our rest before we come to our journey’s end; and
not rather to take care of the reception we shall there meet with, than
to fix our thoughts on the little conveniences and advantages which we
enjoy one above another in the way to it.
“The Illusiveness of Life” is the title of a sermon on the patriarchs
as sojourners in a strange country, by the late F. W. Robertson, of
Brighton; who with characteristic force and insight explains the
deception of life’s promise, and the meaning of that deception. He shows
how our natural anticipations deceive us—every human life being a fresh
one, bright with hopes that will never be realized. With our affections,
he goes on to say, it is still worse, because they promise more. “Men’s
affections are but the tabernacles of Canaan—the tents of a night—not
permanent habitations, even for this life.” Where, he asks, are the
charms of character, the perfection and the purity and the truthfulness
which seemed so resplendent in our friend? They were only the shape of
our own conceptions—our creative shaping intellect projected its own
fantasies on him; and hence we outgrow our early friendships—outgrow
the intensity of all: we dwell in tents; we never find a home, even in
the land of promise, any more than Abraham did. “Life is an unenjoyable
Canaan, with nothing real or substantial in it.” But there is another
beside the sentimental way, trite enough, of considering this aspect of
life—as a bubble, a dream, a delusion, a phantasm, and that other is the
way of faith. “The ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist could
feel the brokenness of life’s promises: they confessed that they were
strangers and pilgrims here; they said that they had here no continuing
city; but they did not mournfully moralize on this; they said it
cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so.” Strangers—the very term implies
a distant home. Pilgrims—the law of whose pilgrimage is to make progress.
Forgetting the things behind; rating at their true worth the things
around; earnestly pressing forward to the things before. Keble’s devout
lyric on the escape to Zoar is pitched in this key:—
“Sweet is the smile of home; the mutual look
When hearts are of each other sure;
Sweet all the joys that crowd the household nook,
The haunt of all affections pure;
Yet in the world even these abide, and we
Above the world our calling boast:
Once gain the mountain-top, and thou art free:
Till then, who rest, presume; who turn to look, are lost.”
_THE FALSITY OF THE FAMILIAR FRIEND._
PSALM xli. 9.
The psalmist’s enemies were speaking evil of him: when should he die,
and his name perish? All that hated him were whispering together against
him, and devising hurt. But this he could bear, on the part of declared
foes. What he could not bear was that his own familiar friend, in whom he
trusted, and who ate of his bread, should have lifted up his heel against
him.
Hengstenberg remarks that in Judas the expression, “Which did eat of my
bread,” receives its full, its frightful verification, in the fact of his
participating in the Last Supper—to say nothing of habitually sharing in
previous and everyday meals.
Even a comparatively slight wound may be severe when dealt by a friend.
Dr. Colani thinks that never could the Son of man have felt so acutely
the pain caused by opposition and non-recognition as when He received
the message from John the Baptist, inquiring into the credentials of His
Divine mission. That the rulers of the people, that one of the twelve,
that those of His own kin, should doubt or dispute His mission, was hard
enough to bear, but perhaps easy to foresee. But when he who had baptized
Him, who had, so to speak, revealed Him to Himself,—when His “spiritual
father” took his stand among the doubters, “Jesus must have felt a
heartrending surprise, a veritable consternation:” for the Baptist was
not a reed shaken with the wind, and yet, if the Divine hand rested on
that support, what but a reed was it, to pierce, even while it gave way?
The _Et tu, Brute!_ of dying Cæsar is a large utterance, hardly more
deep in reproachful pathos than wide of application. The bitterness of
its import, varying in intensity, has sufficed to choke bad men and good
and indifferent,—as a pang more sharp than all. What stung Jugurtha to
the heart was the treachery of his confidential agent, Bomilcar, who
intrigued to betray him to the Romans. What Cicero professes to have felt
most keenly, during the Clodian troubles, was the perfidious conduct to
him of that Serranus to whom, when consul, he had been so kind; nor was
it the least bitter drop in the cup he had to drain at the last, that the
leader of the band who took his life was one whose life Cicero had once
saved, as counsel for the defence. Antony in the tragedy is naturally
made to brood most resentfully on the being betrayed by one on whose
bosom he had “slept secure of injured faith.” He can forgive a foe, but
not a friend:
“Treason is there in its most horrid shape,
Where trust is greatest.”
Herod the Great felt the pang when that dark and horrible secret, as
Milman calls it, came to light, that Antipater, the beloved son, for whom
he had imbrued his hands in the blood of his own children—Antipater, the
heir of his kingdom—was “clearly proved to have conspired with Pheroras
(B.C. 5) to poison his old and doting father, and thus to secure and
accelerate his own succession.” Michelet’s narrative of the decline and
death of the Emperor Frederick II. comprises this record: “Finally his
chancellor, his dearest friend, Peter de Vineâ, attempted to poison him.
After this last blow it only remained for him to veil his face, like
Cæsar on the ides of March.” And familiar to us all is the story of our
Henry II., sick and bedridden, inquiring the names of the supporters
of his rebellious son Richard. He was for declaring John, the youngest
of his sons, and as he thought the most attached to him, heir to all
his continental dominions. But on hearing the name of his beloved John,
highest on the list of Richard’s adherents, Henry was seized with a sort
of convulsive agitation, sat up in bed, and gazing around with searching
and haggard look, exclaimed, “Can it be true that John, my heart, the
son of my choice, on whom I doted more than on all the rest, and my love
for whom has brought on me all my woes, has fallen from me?” Assured
that so it was, “Well then,” sighed Henry, falling back on his bed, and
turning his face to the wall, “henceforward let all go on as it may; I
no longer care for myself nor for the world.” And in this connection may
be mentioned the dying exclamation of Henry’s murdered chancellor. “What
is this, Reginald?” cried Becket to Fitzurse, when the latter made up to
him, bared sword in hand: “I have loaded you with favours, and _you_ come
to me armed, and in the church?” The last stroke that broke down the aged
Pope Boniface VIII., bowed with the weight of eighty-six years, was the
defection of his favourite and favoured nephew. One may apply to such
defections the upbraidal in a latter-day poem on Old Pictures in Florence:
“Giotto, how, with that soul of yours,
Could you play me false who loved you so?
Some slight if a certain heart endures,
It feels, I would have your fellows know.
Well—I perceive not why I should care
To break a silence that suits them best;
But the thing grows somewhat hard to bear
When I find a Giotto join the rest.”
Most painful to Luther, in his last moments, was the controversy forced
upon him by the defection of so dear a friend as Agricola, the leader of
the Antinomians. He had long before that expressed his “astoundment” at
the secession of Œcolampadius and Regius, and other intimate associates.
“Why should I fret and fume against the papists?” he wrote in 1531: “all
they have done against me has been in fair, open war; we are declared
enemies, and act as such. They who hurt me are my own dear children. My
brothers, _fraterculi mei, aurei amiculi mei_.... I thought I had gone
through, had exhausted all the adversities the evil one could inflict;
but it was not so. My Absalom, the child of my heart, had not deserted
his father, had not poured out ignominy upon David; my Judas, the traitor
who delivered up his master, had not sold me: he has done so now.”
If Mary Stuart had any quarter to which, in her disastrous condition,
she might look for love and favour, it was, says the most popular of
historians of Scotland, her brother Murray. _His_ kindness and compassion
she deserved, after loading him with favours, as well as pardoning him
considerable offences. But his acceptance of the regency broke all
remaining ties of tenderness betwixt him and his sister. Scott is not
romancing when, in an historical romance, he describes her reception
of the news. “The queen gave a sort of shriek, and clapping her hands
together, exclaimed, ‘Comes the arrow out of his quiver?—out of my
brother’s bow?’” When Elizabeth appointed commissioners to inquire into
Mary’s case, the Regent Murray appeared before them, “in the odious
character of the accuser of his sister, benefactress, and sovereign.”
To adopt the sentiment of the most sententious of stage moralists, When
ingratitude barbs the dart of injury, the wound has double danger in it.
What touched Cortez most nearly, at the time of the expulsion from
Mexico, was to find the name of his trusted friend, his _intimado_, his
_privado_, the secretary Duero, at the head of the paper of remonstrance
presented by his disaffected soldiers. We find Louis XVI., on the eve
of his execution, inquiring with calm curiosity, and as though not
personally affected, how certain members of the convention whom he knew
had voted at his trial. Told that his cousin of Orleans had voted for
his death, “Ah!” he exclaimed to Malesherbes, “that affects me more than
all the rest.” It was, remarks Lamartine, the comment of Cæsar when he
recognised the face of Brutus amongst his murderers; he alone roused him
to speak.
So spake the captain of Plymouth, but with more of anger in his sorrow,
in the New England hexameters devoted by Longfellow to Miles Standish,
when he charged John Alder with having supplanted, defrauded, betrayed
him:—
“Yours is the greater treason, for yours is a treason to friendship!
You, who lived under my roof, whom I cherished and loved as a brother;
You, who have fed at my board and drunk of my cup, to whose keeping
I have entrusted my honour, my thoughts the most sacred and secret,—
You too, Brutus! ah, woe to the name of friendship hereafter!”
It was the revolt of his beloved son Conrad which crushed to the earth
the emperor Henry IV. What Dean Milman calls “the almost fatal effect” of
his conduct on his father, can only be ascribed to profound affection,
deeply, cruelly, wantonly wounded. “The revolt of Conrad seemed to crush
the aged Emperor to the earth. He had borne all the vicissitudes of his
earlier life with unbroken courage, he had risen from his humiliation
at Canosa with refreshed energy; he now abandoned himself to despair,
threw off the robes and insignia of royalty, and was hardly prevented
by his friends from falling on his own sword.”—There is a spice of the
_et tu Brute_ bitterness in Becket’s exclamation to John of Poitiers,
when even that most ardent of his admirers followed him to Etampes, and
implored him to yield. “And you too,” cried the primate, in a pang of
wrath, “will you strangle us”—_ut quid nos et vos strangulatis_?—The
great Emperor Frederick II. reproached Pope Gregory IX., in the height of
their contest, as having been, while in the lower orders of the Church,
his familiar friend; but that no sooner had he reached the height of
his ambition than he threw off all gratitude, and became his determined
foe.—When Queen Elizabeth broke out on a party of the peers for urging
her whither she would not, Norfolk she as good as called traitor and
conspirator, and Pembroke she said talked like a foolish soldier; but to
Leicester it was that she exclaimed, “You, my lord, you! If all the world
forsook me I thought that you would be true!”—Charles I.’s celebrated
letter to Prince Rupert after the loss of Bristol, depriving him of his
command, begins with assuring him that the surrender, in such a manner,
and by his trusted, no longer trusty nephew, of that most important city,
was the greatest trial of his constancy that had yet befallen him: “For
what is to be done, after one that is so near me as you are, both in
blood and friendship, submits himself to so mean an action (I give it the
easiest term)? such—I have so much to say, that I will say no more of
it.” The tone is that of the duke in Mr. Browning’s _Colombe’s Birthday_:
“Ah, the first bitterness is over now!
Bitter I may have felt it to confront
The truth, and ascertain those natures’ value
I had so counted on—that was a pang.”
Corneille, in his historical tragedy of _Cinna_, treats in a like strain
the effect upon Augustus of the discovered conspiracy:
“Quoi! mes plus chers amis! quoi! Cinna! quoi! Maxime!
Les deux que j’honorais d’une si haute estime,
A qui j’ouvrais mon cœur, et dont j’avais fait choix
Pours les plus importants et plus nobles emplois!
Après qu’entre leurs mains j’ai remis mon empire,
Pour m’arracher le jour l’un et l’autre conspire!”
But a later scene proves that Augustus is not even yet aware of all the
accomplices; and the conviction of Æmilie as one of them, wrings from
him, as Brutus from the elder Cæsar, the upbraiding cry, _Et toi, ma
fille, aussi!_
One touching incident marks the horror of the murder of the Czar Paul in
1801. The dress of Ouvaroff, one of the conspirators, is said to have
caused him to be mistaken by the Emperor for his son Constantine; and,
according to Bignon, the last words which the unhappy monarch uttered
were, “And you too, my Constantine!”
Very worthless objects have sometimes been very undeservedly
Et-tu-Brutefied. The first Lord Holland, when forsaken by the selfish
friends, as they have justly been described, with whom he had jobbed and
made merry and laughed at principle, had yet retained enough belief in
the social virtues to be made seriously unhappy by the conduct of his
worthless companions, particularly by that of Rigby, the most worthless
of them all;
“White-liver’d Grenville and self-loving Gower
Shall never cause one peevish moment more; ...
Slight was the pain they gave, and short its date;
I found I could not both despise and hate;
But, Rigby, what did I for thee endure?”
A man as pious as Henry Fox was otherwise, has declared that he knew
few things which so darken one’s views of the moral government of God,
as the experience of baseness and treachery in persons who have won our
confidence; that it tempts one to question the reality of human virtue,
to suspect the hollowness of all appearance of truth and piety, whence
there is but a step to calling in question the moral purpose for which
we are placed on earth. Hawthorne somewhere intimates that the young and
pure are not apt to find out how actually sin is in the world, until that
miserable truth is brought home to them by the guiltiness of some trusted
friend. “Trust ye not in a friend,”—but ah, the pity of it, for him who
has to take up with these words of the Morasthite,—“A man’s enemies are
the men of his own house.”—How many variations on this general theme
might be played from Shakespeare’s plays! Sir Valentine, for instance,
denouncing the falsity of that other, so-called, but so far mis-called,
Gentleman of Verona:
... “Now I dare not say
I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me.
Who should be trusted now, when one’s right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest: O time most curst!
’Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!”
Polixenes, again, argues touching the breach of amity between him
and Leontes, that revenge is like to be all the more bitter for the
cordiality of past confidence. Then, too, the implication of Lord Scroop,
of Masham, in the conspiracy with Grey and Cambridge against Henry V.,—
“Nay, but the man that was his bedfellow,
Whom he hath cloy’d and graced with princely favours,—
That he should, for a foreign purse, so sell
His sovereign’s life to death and treachery!”
Henry reminds Scroop that he bore the key of all his counsels, and knew
the very bottom of his soul; and he wept for _him_,—“for this revolt of
thine, methinks, is like another fall of man.”—A later king of England,
Edward IV., is made to despair when he sees his brother Clarence among
the supporters of the foe: “Yea, brother of Clarence, art thou here too?
Nay, then, I see that Edward needs must down.”—And once again, there is
the _Et tu Brute_ cue from which we started, thus set forth in all its
suggestive force by Shakespeare’s Antony:
“For Brutus, as you know, was Cæsar’s angel:
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Cæsar loved him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all:
For when the noble Cæsar saw _him_ stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitor’s arms,
Quite vanquish’d him: then burst his mighty heart.”
But as we recur to this, as the first among these secular annotations on
a Scripture text, so we recur to Scripture, in conclusion, for a pathetic
parallel, also from the Book of Psalms: “For it was not an enemy that
reproached me; then I could have borne it; neither was it he that hated
me that did magnify himself against me: then I would have hid myself from
him. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance.
We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in
company.” The companionship past intensifies the cruelty present.
Without so recent and vivid a remembrance of sweet counsel together, and
companionship hallowed by the sanctuary itself, the present cruelty could
have been borne; but with them it hardly can.
“_JUDGE NOT._”
ST. MATTHEW vii. 1.
A stringent motive is adduced to enforce the strenuous monition, “Judge
not,”—and it is, “that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge,
ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured
to you again.” There is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy;
even He who hath committed all judgment unto the Son: who art thou that
judgest another?
* * * * *
Appalled were all who gazed on the last struggles of Cardinal Beaufort,
rendered hideous by the tortures of agonizing remorse. Hope had he none.
Despair was impersonated in the frenzied contortions of that dying man.
King and peers stood beside the death-bed, awe-stricken and shocked. The
king prayed for the cardinal, that the Eternal mover of the heavens might
“look with a gentle eye upon this wretch:
O beat away the busy meddling fiend
That lays strong siege upon this wretch’s soul,
And from his bosom purge this black despair.”
See, says a less gentle observer, Warwick, how the pangs of death do make
him grin. Royal Henry, on devouter thoughts intent, bids “peace to his
soul,” in parting, “if God’s pleasure be.” And then the monarch solemnly,
urgently, importunes the moribund cardinal to give some token, ere he
quite depart, that Despair has not made him all her own: “Lord cardinal,
if thou think’st on heaven’s bliss, hold up thy hand, make signal of
thy hope.” But the cardinal—dies, and makes no sign. The appeal is
fruitless: no hand is held up; no signal of hope displayed. The baffled
prince, cut to the heart, can but exclaim, “He dies, and makes no sign:
O God, forgive him!” Warwick again interposes a harsher voice, “So bad a
death argues a monstrous life,” he is sure. But his sovereign hushes his
damning criticism with a right royal veto:—
“FORBEAR TO JUDGE, _for we are sinners all_.
...
Close up his eyes, and draw the curtain close;
And let us all to meditation.”
Forbear to judge. And the Shakspearean Henry practises in person the
monition thus enforced. It is his rule to check in himself every tendency
to uncharitable judgment. As when proof all but positive distresses him
of his uncle Gloster’s death being due to violence, he yet restrains the
bent of his convictions by the prayer,—
“O Thou that judgest all things, stay my thoughts:
My thoughts, that labour to persuade my soul
Some violent hands were laid on Humphrey’s life!
If my suspèct be false, forgive me, God;
For judgment only doth belong to Thee!”
It is by the deathbed of the man self-convicted of Duke Humphrey’s death,
that Henry can yet say, even of him, when from so bad a death is argued a
monstrous life, Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.
Are we to infer that Shakspeare was himself for backing to the full this
royal veto? That, perhaps, were going too far. The veto is dramatically
true to character, and designedly characteristic of the royal speaker.
But if Shakspeare himself (we are assuming him to _be_ the author of this
disputed play) would or could scarcely in this particular instance have
enforced such a lesson of charity, we may at least be assured, from
the large tolerance and subtle apprehension so patent in his own kingly
nature, that he would in spirit have echoed the king’s _forbear_. Perhaps
his own feeling might be as nearly as possible expressed in other words
of his, put into the mouth of quite another character, and referring to
quite another occasion:—
“And how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven?
But, in our circumstance and course of thought,
’Tis heavy with him.”
Forbear to judge, is, nevertheless, the moral of this strain, as of the
other. Human ignorance in the one case, human frailty in the other, ousts
human nature from the judgment-seat.
No man, avers Sir Thomas Browne, can justly censure or condemn another;
because, in fact, no man truly knows another. “This I perceive in myself;
for I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me
but in a cloud.... Further, no man can judge another, because no man
knows himself.” In a former section of this his profession of faith, this
good physician warns those who, upon a rigid application of the law,
sentence Solomon unto damnation,[19] that they condemn not only him, but
themselves, and the whole world; “for, by the letter and written word
of God, we are without exception in the state of death: but there is a
prerogative of God, and an arbitrary pleasure above the letter of His
own law, by which alone we can pretend unto salvation, and through which
Solomon might be as easily saved as those who condemn him.”
The Vicar of Gravenhurst, in his position of parish priest, owns himself
compelled to confess that the best people are not the best in every
relation of life, and the worst not bad in every relation of life; so
that, with experience, he finds himself growing lenient in his blame, if
also reticent in his praise. “Again and again I say to myself that only
the Omniscient can be the equitable judge of human beings—so complicated
are our virtues with our failings, and so many are the hidden virtues,
as well as hidden vices, of our fellow-men.” If judge at all we dare, and
do, be it in the spirit and to the letter of Wordsworth’s counsel:—
“From all rash censure be the mind kept free;
He only judges right who weighs, compares,
And, in the sternest sentence which his voice
Pronounces, ne’er abandons Charity.”
Well and wisely said La Bruyère, that “La règle de Descartes, qui ne
veut pas que l’on décide sur les moindres vérités avant qu’elles soient
connues clairement et distinctement, est assez belle et assez juste pour
devoir s’étendu au jugement que l’on fait des personnes.” Real character,
as William Hazlitt says, is not one thing, but a thousand things: actual
qualities do not conform to any factitious standard in the mind, but
rest upon their own truth and nature. “The dull stupor under which we
labour in respect of those whom we have the greatest opportunities of
inspecting nearly, we should do well to imitate, before we give extreme
and uncharitable verdicts against those whom we only see in passing, or
at a distance.”
“Well—after all—
What know we of the secret of a man?
His nerves were wrong. What ails us; who are sound,
That we should mimic this raw fool, the world,
Which charts us all in its coarse blacks or whites,
As ruthless as a baby with a worm,
As cruel as a schoolboy ere he grows
To pity—more from ignorance than will.”
Who can say, asks Samuel Rogers, “In such circumstances I should have
done otherwise?” Who, did he but reflect by what slow gradations, often
by how many strange occurrences, we are led astray; with how much
reluctance, how much agony, how many efforts to escape, how many sighs,
how many tears—who, did he but reflect for a moment, would have the heart
to cast a stone?[20]
The autobiographer of one of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s earlier fictions
proposes in an opening chapter to give a sketch of his character. But
he sensibly refrains from the execution of a too ambitious plan. For,
“what man can say: I will sound the depth of my own vices and measure the
height of my own virtues; and be as good as his word? We can neither know
nor judge ourselves—others may judge, but cannot know us—God alone judges
and knows too.”
“Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord—its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it.”
Dunsford the essayist’s objection to all hasty judgment of our
fellow-creatures is based on the ground of its being “such an
unscientific proceeding.” You comment, he says, upon another man’s
conduct, and attribute motives to him. Now an ingenious and imaginative
person—a lawyer making a speech for him—might show many different motives
of equal probability. You fix upon one, perhaps because it is consonant
to your own mind and nature, or because it is the uppermost or easiest
one to conjecture; but really you often ignore the doctrine of chances,
and perhaps you will find upon strict calculation that the chances are
fairly four to one against your having named the right motive. As the
winning horse is often “a dark one,” at any rate not the favourite, so
after all some obscure and improbable motive is often the true cause of
a man’s actions. In short, Dunsford maintains that our condemnation of
others is often as unscientific as it is unchristian.
When the Doge of Venice, Foscari, in Byron’s tragedy, agitated by the
summons to judge his son, speculates somewhat wildly on the burden of the
mystery of all this unintelligible world, Marina submissively suggests
that
“These are things we cannot judge
On earth.”
And how then, demands the old man,—
“And how then shall we judge each other,
Who are all earth?”
Mr. Lockhart, in the closing chapter of his admirable Life of Scott,
quoting Keble’s lines,—
“Not even the tenderest heart, and next our own,
Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh,”
declares considerations of this kind to have always induced him to regard
with small respect any attempt to delineate fully and exactly any human
being’s character. He avows his distrust of our capacity for, even in
very humble cases, judging our neighbour fairly; and cannot but pity
the presumption that must swell in the heart and brain of any ordinary
brother of the race, when daring to pronounce, _ex cathedrâ_, on the
whole structure and complexion of a great mind, from the comparatively
narrow and scanty materials which can by possibility have been placed
before him.
Men who see _into_ their neighbours, observes Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,
are very apt to be contemptuous; but men who see _through_ them find
something lying behind every human soul which it is not for them to sit
in judgment on, or to attempt to sneer out of the order of God’s manifold
universe.
The same wise-hearted writer—wise of heart as well as head—has a dialogue
between doctor and minister concerning a quasi-reprobate, to whom the
former has been kind, and about whose destiny the other is hardly more
severe than certain. “Bad enough, no doubt,” Doctor Kittredge owns
this scampish half-breed to be; “but might be worse. Has some humanity
left in him yet. Let him go. God can judge him—I can’t.” “You are too
charitable, doctor,” objects the minister. “He has saved his neck—but
his soul is a lost one, I am afraid, beyond question.” “I can’t judge
men’s souls,” the doctor replies. “I can judge their acts, and hold them
responsible for those; but I don’t know much about their souls. If you
or I had found our soul in a half-breed body, and then been turned loose
to run among the Indians, we might have been playing just such tricks
as this fellow has been trying.” What said a greater doctor when Boswell
asked him whether, in the case of an aggressor forcing on a duel by
ill usage, and getting killed in it, there is not almost no “ground to
hope that he is gone to a state of happiness”? “Sir,” said Johnson, “we
are not to judge determinately of the state in which a man leaves this
life. He may in a moment have repented effectually.” And then Johnson
quoted, apparently with approval, at any rate with hopeful interest,
an epitaph, from Camden’s Remains, upon a very wicked man, who was
killed by a fall from his horse, in which epitaph he is supposed to say,
“Between the stirrup and the ground, I mercy asked, I mercy found.” On
another occasion Johnson appealed to Richard Baxter’s avowed belief that
a suicide—if hurried by sudden passion to self-slaughter—may be saved.
And “if,” says Baxter, “it should be objected that what I maintain may
encourage suicide, I answer, I am not to tell a lie to prevent it.” Who,
as Campbell asks, after surmising that the hand which smote its kindred
heart, might yet be prone to deeds of mercy,—
... “Who may understand
Thy many woes, poor suicide, unknown?
He who thy being gave shall judge of thee alone.”
_Qualis vita, finis ita_, is a rhyming proverb not quite worthy of all
acceptation. That Country Parson whose Recreations made him a name (such
name, at least, as four initials may comprise) declares himself to have
no look but one of sorrow and pity to cast on the poor suicide’s grave,
and thinks the common English verdict is right as well as charitable,
which supposes that in every such case reason has become unhinged, and
responsibility is gone. “No doubt it is the saddest of all sad ends; but
I do not forget that a certain Authority, the highest of all authorities,
said to all human beings, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ The writer
has, in the course of his duty, looked upon more than one suicide’s dead
face; and the lines of Hood appeared to sketch the fit feeling with which
to do so:—
“‘Owning her weakness,
Her evil behaviour;
And leaving, with meekness,
Her soul to her Saviour.’”
A different spirit informs the Kirk from the day when Wishart complained
that, in their arrogance, her ministers, “as if they had been privy to
the councils of God, or the dispensers of His vengeance to the world,”
presumed to pronounce upon the future state of their adversaries, and
“doomed them, both body and soul, to eternal torments.” Pity but the
poet had been better man and Christian who wrote these strong lines on
damnatory sentences _de mortuis_, even when there remains nought to show—
... “save a life misspent,—
And soul—but who shall answer where it went?
’Tis ours to bear, not judge the dead; and they
Who doom to hell, themselves are on the way,
Unless those bullies of eternal pains
Are pardoned their bad hearts for their worse brains.”
More in a reverent spirit, and in a farther-seeing one, is the mystic
finale of the Laureate’s memorable Vision of Sin, and its open verdict on
the obscure crime of a great criminal:—
“At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, ‘Is there any hope?’
To which an answer pealed from that high land,
_But in a tongue no man could understand_;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn,
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.”
Never let it be forgotten, insists a Quarterly Reviewer, that there is
scarcely a single moral action of a single human being of which other men
have such a knowledge—its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents,
and the real determining causes of its merits,—as to warrant their
pronouncing a conclusive judgment.
The writings of Mr. Arthur Helps are honourably distinguished by an
oft-recurring plea for mutual tolerance, on the ground of the little we
really know one of another. In “Companions of my Solitude,” for instance,
the author remarks that were it only considered how utterly incompetent
men are to talk of the conduct of others as they do, the talkers would
often be silenced at once, and the sufferers as readily consoled. Take
the one question merely of difference of temperament—which, amongst men,
is probably as great as that amongst the different species of animals—as
between that, for example, of the lively squirrel and the solemn crane.
“Now, if only from this difference between them, the squirrel would be a
bad judge of the felicity, or generosity, or the domestic conduct, of the
crane.
“Probably when we are thinking or talking of a person, we recall some
visual image of that person. I have thought what an instructive thing it
would be, if under some magic influence—like that, for example, which
would construct a ‘palace of truth’—it were arranged that as we gave out
our comments on the character or conduct of any person, this image on the
retina of memory should change according to the truth, or rather the want
of it, in our remarks. Gradually, feature after feature would steal away
till we gazed at nonentity, or we should find another image glide into
the field of view,—somebody we had never seen, perhaps, but to whom the
comments we were uttering really did apply.”
Accordingly, our author would have the sufferers from injurious and
unjust comment treat the whole thing as one which lacked reality.
No thoughtful man, he urges, ought to be long vexed at such stuff,
immaterial in every sense: such stuff as dreams are made of.
In one of his Dialogues, again, he makes Dunsford declare the most
curious thing, as regards people living together, to be the intense
ignorance they sometimes are in of each other. And Milverton follows up
the remark by adding, that people fulfil a relation towards each other,
and only know each other in that relation: they perform orbits round each
other, each gyrating, too, upon his own axis, so that there are parts of
the character of each which are never brought into view of the other. In
another Dialogue, Milverton refers to the habit divines have of reminding
us, that, in forming our ideas of the government of Providence, we should
recollect that we see only a fragment. The same observation, in its
degree, he holds to be true as regards human conduct. “We see a little
bit here and there, and assume the nature of the whole. Even a very silly
man’s actions are often more to the purpose than his friends’ comments on
them.”
In yet another of his works, this popular essay-writer devotes an entire
essay to the subject of our judgments of other men. Who does not feel, he
asks, that to describe with fidelity the least portion of the entangled
nature that is within him would be no easy matter? And yet the same man
who feels this, and who, perhaps, would be ashamed of talking at hazard
about the properties of a flower, of a weed, of some figure in geometry,
will put forth his guesses about the character of his brother-man, as if
he had the fullest authority for all that he was saying. It is shown in
detail how an opinion of some man’s character and conduct gets abroad
which is formed after a wrong method, by prejudiced persons, upon a
false statement of facts, respecting a matter which they cannot possibly
understand; and how this is then left to be inflated by Folly, and blown
about by Idleness.
There is among Wordsworth’s Poems on the Naming of Places, one which is
memorable if only as containing one of the most admired lines he ever
wrote, descriptive of Lady of the Mere—
“Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,”
—but which is also pertinent to the present occasion, as pointing a
moral, after the poet’s wont to moralise his song. A man had been seen in
the distance by the poet and his friends, angling. No great harm in that,
my masters? Nay; but the angler was in peasant’s garb, and the season was
mid-harvest, and therefore, and on the spot, they voted him improvident
and reckless. But when they came up to him, these over-hasty judges
found in the man they had summarily condemned, a poor mortal wasted by
sickness, and all too weak to labour in the harvest-field, but using his
best skill to gain a pittance from the dead unfeeling lake that knew not
of his wants:—
“I will not say
What thoughts immediately were ours, nor how
The happy idleness of that sweet morn
With all its lovely images, was changed
To serious musing and to self-reproach.
Nor did we fail to see within ourselves
What need there is to be reserved in speech,
And temper all our thoughts with charity.
—Therefore, unwilling to forget that day,
My friend, myself, and she who then received
The same admonishment, have called the place
By a memorial name, uncouth indeed
As e’er by mariner was given to bay
Or foreland on a new-discovered coast;
And POINT RASH-JUDGMENT is the name it bears.”[21]
Forbear to judge: for how pitifully little is the all we really know one
of another! Mr. Froude has forcibly remarked—even admitting the remark
to be a truism—that whoever has attended but slightly to the phenomena
of human nature has discovered how inadequate is the clearest insight
which he can hope to attain into character and disposition. “Every one is
a perplexity to himself and a perplexity to his neighbours; and men who
are born in the same generation, who are exposed to the same influences,
trained by the same teachers, and live from childhood to age in constant
and familiar intercourse, are often little more than shadows to each
other, intelligible in superficial form and outline, but divided inwardly
by impalpable and mysterious barriers.” And yet how ready each “weak
unknowing hand” to hurl the bolts of Heaven against whomsoever it deems
to be Heaven’s foe.
Sir James Stephen bids all hail to Rhadamanthus on his posthumous
judgment-seat in the nether regions. But when Rhadamanthus comes
above ground, holds in his hand the historical pen, and resolves all
the enigmas of hearts which ceased to beat long centuries ago, more
confidently than most of us would dare to interpret the mysteries of
own, Sir James for one wishes him back again at the confluence of Styx,
Phlegethon, and Cocytus. For, “it is, after all, nothing more than
the surface of human character which the retrospective scrutiny of the
keenest human eye is able to detect.” It is in a subsequent portion of
the same instructive treatise, that the writer pronounces human justice
to be severe, not merely because man is censorious, but because he
reasonably distrusts himself, and fears lest his weakness should confound
the distinctions of good and evil; and Divine justice to be lenient,
because there alone love can flow in all its unfathomable depths and
boundless expansion, impeded by no dread of error, and diverted by no
misplaced sympathies.[22]
In the course of some remarks on the harshness with which man is disposed
to regard the fellow-man whose doctrine, in matters of religious faith,
differs from his own, the author of the “Caxton Essays” is impressive
on the fact that He who hath reserved to Himself the right of judging,
has imperatively said to man, whose faculty of judging must be, like
man himself, erring and human, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Now,
argues the essayist, of all our offences, it is clear that that offence
of which man can be the least competent judge is an offence of defective
faith. “For faith belongs to our innermost hearts, and not to our overt
actions. And religious faith is therefore that express tribute to the
only Reader of all hearts, on the value of which man can never, without
arrogant presumption, set himself up as judge.”
If even-handed justice, says Mr. Anthony Trollope, were done throughout
the world, some apology would be found for most offences. Not that
the offences would thus be wiped away, and black become white; but
much that is now very black would, he submits, be reduced to that
sombre, uninviting shade of ordinary brown which is so customary to
humanity.“[23] It is much the same humane thought which underlies
Pelayo’s apology for Roderick, when we read how closely that generous
prince would and did
... “cherish in his heart the constant thought
Something was yet untold, which, being known,
Would palliate his offence, and make the fall
Of one till then so excellently good,
Less monstrous, less revolting to belief,
More to be pitied, more to be forgiven.”
As one of George Eliot’s good parsons has it, God sees us as we are
altogether, not in separate feelings or actions, as our fellow-men see
us. We are always doing each other injustice, and thinking better or
worse of each other than we deserve, he says, because we only hear and
see separate words and actions—not each other’s whole nature. Do not
philosophic doctors tell us, again, the reflective author in person
elsewhere muses, that we are unable to discern so much as a tree,
except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate
sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that in the
dark we can hardly taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe is alight
or not, and the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs
instead of fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If
so, it is easy to understand that our discernment of men’s motives must
depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own
susceptibility and our own experience. “See to it, friend, before you
pronounce a too hasty judgment, that your own moral sensibilities are
not of a hoofed or clawed character.” For, as this penetrating writer
insists, in continuation of the metaphor, the keenest eye will not serve,
unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtile nerve filaments,
which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible
world of human sensations.
Deeds which, to quote another popular though less powerful penwoman,
our acquaintance designate our follies, may at another tribunal be our
virtues—our single redeeming points; who judges rightly, who can rightly
judge, where so many of our efforts are bent to seem other than we are,
and the universal conjuring trick of this world is to throw dust expertly
in our neighbours’ eyes?
Centuries ago, well-nigh two score, it was written by the most
philosophic, and perhaps the best, of Roman emperors, that men’s actions
look worse than they are; and, says he, “one must be thoroughly informed
of a great many things before one can be rightly qualified to give
judgment in the case.” The sceptic Bayle was a better Christian than
Scaliger, when he protested against the assertion of that peremptory
scholar that Bellarmin did not believe a word of what he wrote, and
was at heart an atheist: besides the testimony of Bellarmin’s life and
deathbed to the contrary, such judgments are, said Bayle (and no friend
to the Jesuits he), a usurpation of the rights of One who alone is the
Judge of hearts, and before whom there is no dissembling.
An apostle’s reason given for the counsel, Speak not evil one of another,
brethren,—is this: that whoso speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth
his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law. Now, there
is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; who art thou that
judgest another?
“Oh what are we,
Frail creatures as we are, that we should sit
In judgment man on man! and what were we,
If the All-merciful should mete to us
With the same rigorous measure wherewithal
Sinner to sinner metes!”
No observant reader of Mr. Carlyle but will have noticed, if not (which
were better) laid to heart, his habitual abstention from that dogmatism
of the judgment-seat in which smaller spirits delight. For instance, in
his moral estimate of so erring a genius as Hoffmann, if, in judging
him, Mr. Carlyle is forced to condemn him, it is with mildness, with a
desire to do justice. Let us not forget, urges the critic, that for a
mind like Hoffmann’s, the path of propriety was difficult to find—still
more difficult to keep. “Moody, sensitive, and fantastic, he wandered
through the world like a foreign presence, subject to influences of which
common natures have happily no glimpse.” A good or a wise man we must
not call him; but among the ordinary population of this world, “to note
him with the mark of reprobation were ungrateful and unjust.” So, again,
in the same author’s review of the life and writings of Werner—who,
always in some degree an enigma to himself, may well be obscure to us.
For “there are mysteries and unsounded abysses in every human heart; and
that is but a questionable philosophy which undertakes so readily to
explain them.” Religious belief especially, Mr. Carlyle urges, at least
when it seems heartfelt and well-intentioned, is no subject for harsh
or even irreverent investigation. “He is a wise man that, having such a
belief, knows and sees clearly the grounds of it in himself; and those,
we imagine, who have explored with strictest scrutiny the secret of their
own bosoms, will be least apt to rush with intolerant violence into that
of other men’s.” Still more elaborate and emphatic is the exposition
of this doctrine as applied to the case of Robert Burns. The world, it
is alleged, is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men, since
it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes, and not positively
but negatively,—less on what is done right, than on what is or is not
done wrong. Whereas, by Mr. Carlyle’s doctrine, not the few inches of
deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured,
but the _ratio_ of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real
aberration. “This orbit may be a planet’s, its diameter the breadth of
the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of
a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of
deflection only are measured; and it is assumed that the diameter of the
ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared
to them!” Here, according to our author, lies the root of many a blind,
cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens
to with approval. “Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and
tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and
all-powerful: but to know _how_ blameworthy, tell us first whether his
voyage has been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of
Dogs.”
To a very different style of sinners the same judgment—rather the same
refusal to judge—is accorded, when the doom of Chaumette, Gobel, and
other reddest of red-republican reprobates, is rehearsed, in the history
of France’s reign of terror, while the revolution was devouring so
greedily her own children. “For Anaxagoras Chaumette, the sleek head now
[April 1794] stript of its _bonnet rouge_ [and a traveller by tumbril to
Sainte Guillotine], what hope is there? Unless Death _were_ ‘an eternal
sleep’? Wretched Anaxagoras! God shall judge thee, not I.”
Once more: “Unhappy soul! who shall judge him?” is the historian’s
deprecating query in the instance of August of Poland, the physically
strong,—who dies, confessedly a _very_ great sinner, early in 1733. Who
shall judge him?
“Hereafter?—And do you think to look
On the terrible pages of that Book
To find his failings, faults, and errors?
Ah, you will then have other cares,
In your own shortcomings and despairs,
In your own secret sins and terrors!”
Corporal Trim was once moved to avow his belief—rather hotly, for his
_esprit de corps_ was piqued—that when a soldier “gets time to pray, he
prays as heartily as a parson—though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy.
Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim, said my uncle Toby—for God only
knows who is a hypocrite, and who is not. At the great and general review
of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then)—it will
be seen who have done their duties in this world, and who have not.”
In a like spirit, another clerical novelist, of a more recent type,
and whose distinctive evangel is Muscular Christianity, introduces a
“double-first” candidate for orders who reminds him of Mr. Bye-Ends in
Bunyan: “And yet,” comes the charitable clause conditional, “I believe
the man was really in earnest. He was really desirous to do what was
right, as far as he knew it; and all the more desirous, because he saw,
in the present state of society, what was right would pay him. God shall
judge him, not I. Who can unravel the confusion of mingled selfishness
and devotion that exist even in his own heart, much less in that of
another?”
In Mr. Thackeray’s instance, exception has been taken, on ethical
grounds, by no vulgar critic, to his habit of shrinking from moral
estimate as well as moral judgment, in dealing with his characters.
Into that distinction not without a difference, this is not the place
(nor this the pen) to enter. But the critic in question—for some years
a main support of the _National Review_—recognises this avoidance of
moral judgment as springing from kindly feeling, from the just and humble
sense we all should have that our own demerits make it unseemly for us to
ascend the judgment-chair, and from a wide appreciation of the variety
and obscurity of men’s real motives of action.[24]
_PART-KNOWLEDGE._
1 CORINTHIANS xiii. 9.
“We know in part,” said the apostle; who, therefore, prophesied in part;
always with the assurance that when that which is perfect is come, then
shall that which is in part be done away. Meanwhile, we see through a
glass darkly, through a medium obscurely—“now I know in part.”
If so it was with him that once was caught up into the third heavens,
much more with his readers. For we are but of yesterday, and know
nothing. “Behold, God is great, and we know Him not.” At the height of
our knowledge we can but fall back upon the old saying, “Lo, these are
parts of His ways; but how little a portion is heard of Him!” And when
we consider the heavens, the work of His hands; the moon and the stars,
which He hath ordained; the earth beneath, the ocean round about, the
waters under the earth, the pent-up fires within it,—verily He is a God
that hideth Himself still, and that revealeth but a portion of His work,
clouds and darkness covering the rest. His thoughts are very deep; and
what is man that he should know them, or the son of man that he should
find them out unto perfection? From the topmost pinnacles attained by
science he can see but the utmost part of them, and cannot see them all.
Locke argues the intellectual and sensible world to be in this perfectly
alike: that the part which we see of them holds no proportion with
what we see not; and that whatsoever we can reach with our eyes, or
our thoughts, of either of them, is but a point, almost nothing, in
comparison with the rest. Shall he whose birth, maturity, and age, as
Beattie has it, scarce fill the circle of one summer day—shall the
poor gnat conclude nature in collapse because of a passing cloud, not
transparent to the insect’s vision?
“One part, one little part, we dimly scan
Through the dark medium of life’s feverish dream;
Yet dare arraign the whole stupendous plan,
If but that little part incongruous seem.
Nor is that part perhaps what mortals deem;
Oft from apparent ill our blessings rise.
Oh then renounce that impious self-esteem,
That aims to trace the secrets of the skies;
For thou art but of dust: be humble and be wise.”
Freethinking Lord Shaftesbury begins a section of his “Characteristics”
with the remark, that when we reflect on any ordinary frame or
constitution, either of art or nature, and consider how hard it is to
give the least account of a particular _part_ without a competent
knowledge of the _whole_, we need not wonder to find ourselves at a loss
in many things relating to the constitution and frame of the universe.
Elsewhere he suggestively observes, that in an infinity of things
mutually relative, a mind which sees not infinitely, can see nothing
fully; “and since each particular has relation to all in general, it can
know no perfect or true relation of anything in a world not perfectly and
fully known.” And supposing the case of an ignorant landsman presuming
to question the details of a ship’s rigging, his lordship breaks out
into the apostrophe, “O my friend, let us not thus betray our ignorance,
but consider where we are, and in what a universe. Think of the many
parts of the vast machine in which we have so little insight, and of
which it is impossible we should know the ends and uses; when instead of
seeing to the highest pennons, we see only some lower deck, and are in
this dark case of flesh, confined even to the hold and meanest station
of the vessel.” There is Mrs. Browning’s usual energy of diction in the
exclamation,
“Ay, we are forced, so pent,
To judge the whole too partially, confound
Conclusions. Is there any common phrase
Significant, when the adverb’s heard alone,
The verb being absent, and the pronoun out?
But we, distracted in the roar of life,
Still insolently at God’s adverb snatch,
And bruit against Him that His thought is void,
His meaning hopeless.”
The same good Providence, as Madame de Sévigné writes, that governs all,
shall one day unravel all; we poor mortals being, in the meanwhile, so
many all but stone-blind and utterly ignorant lookers-on. We suffer,
as the author of “Thorndale” says—there is no doubt about that—and we
naturally speak and think under the sharp pang of our present agony; but
the ultimate and overruling judgment which we form of human life, should
be taken from some calm, impersonal point of view. “We should command
the widest horizon possible. Of the great whole of humanity we see but a
little at a time. We pause sometimes on the lights only of the picture,
sometimes only on the shadows. How very dark those shadows seem! Yet if
we could embrace in our view the whole of the picture, perhaps the very
darkest shadows might be recognised as effective or inevitable portions
of a grand harmonious whole.” How closes Thomson his poem of “The
Seasons,” drear Winter then his cue?—with the memorable lines:—
“Ye good distress’d!
Ye noble few! who here unbending stand
Beneath life’s pressure, yet bear up awhile;
And what your bounded view, which only saw
A little part, deemed evil, is no more:
The storms of wintry time will quickly pass,
And one unbounded spring encircle all.”
The theme of our part knowledge, so strictly cabin’d, cribb’d, confined,
is one to which Thomson repeatedly recurs. For instance, in an earlier
book:—
“But here the cloud,
So wills Eternal Providence, sits deep.
Enough for us to know that this dark state,
In wayward passions lost, and vain pursuits,
This infancy of being, cannot prove
The final issue of the works of God,
By boundless love and perfect wisdom form’d
And ever rising with the rising mind.”
Again, with emphasis and discretion (as Polonius says), he puts the query—
“Shall little haughty ignorance pronounce
His works unwise, of which the smallest part
Exceeds the narrow vision of her mind?
As if upon a full proportioned dome,
On swelling columns heaved, the pride of art,
A critic-fly, whose feeble ray scarce spreads
An inch around, with blind presumption bold,
Should dare to tax the structure of the whole.”
Horace Walpole makes use of a similar figure in one of his three or four
thousand published letters: “We are poor silly animals: we live for an
instant upon a particle of a boundless universe, and are much like a
butterfly that should argue about the nature of the seasons, and what
creates their vicissitudes, and does not exist itself to see one annual
revolution of them.”
“Earth’s number-scale is near us set;
The total God alone can see;
But each some fraction.”[25]
Addison, in one of his essays, comments on the body of an animal as an
object comparatively adequate to our senses, it being a particular part
of Providence that lies within a narrow compass, so that the eye is able
to command it, and by successive inquiries to search into all its parts.
Could the body of the whole earth, he goes on to say, or indeed the whole
universe, be thus subjected to the examination of our senses, were it
not too big and disproportioned for our inquiries, too unwieldy for the
management of the eye and hand, “there is no question but it would appear
to us as curious and well-contrived a frame as that of a human body. We
should see the same concatenation and subserviency, the same necessity
and usefulness, the same beauty and harmony, in all and every of its
parts, as what we discover in the body of every single animal.” To adopt
an illustration of Fénélon’s to the same purpose: imagine the letters
of a sentence to be so enormous in size, that a man could only make out
one of them at a time; in that case he could not read, that is, collect
the letters together and discover the sense of them in combination. So
it is, argues the benign prelate, with the _grands traits_ of Providence
in the conduct of the world at large during the lapse of centuries. It
is only the whole that is intelligible, and the whole is too vast to
be scrutinised near at hand. Each event in the process of ages is like
a separate letter or sign, which is too large for our petty organs,
and which is without a meaning when taken apart from the rest. A more
vigorous philosopher than the gentle Fénélon compares the universe to
a picture, the beauty of which is then alone perceptible when the true
stand-point of perspective is taken. There are certain inventions in
perspective, or certain beautiful designs, he says, which look all
confusion until you either inspect them from the right point of view, or
make use of some kind of glass or mirror as the medium of observation. In
the same manner the apparent deformities of our fractional side-views,
resolve themselves into harmonious unity when the eye is directed aright.
Dr. Johnson was in an unwontedly placid and benignant frame of mind, by
Boswell’s account, when the two stood together, one serene autumn night,
in Dr. Taylor’s garden, and the sage delivered himself, in meditative
mood, of this noteworthy surmise: “Sir,” said he, “I do not imagine that
all things will be made clear to us immediately after death, but that the
ways of Providence will be explained to us very gradually.” Be that as it
may, few could have been found more ready than the melancholic Johnson to
agree that meanwhile, until the day star arise and the shadows flee away,
“The ways of Heaven are dark and intricate,
Puzzled in mazes, and perplexed with errors:
Our understanding traces them in vain,
Lost and bewildered in the fruitless search;
Nor sees with how much art the windings run,
Nor where the regular confusion ends.”
It was at a time of national and household tribulation, when darkness
that might be felt seemed to encompass altar and hearth, that Joseph
de Maistre wrote to a friend in trouble: “Be it enough for us to know,
that for everything there is a reason with which we shall one day become
acquainted; let us not weary ourselves with seeking out the why and
the wherefore, even when possibly they might be discerned.” He would
have his correspondent bear in mind that the epithet “very good” is a
necessary adjunct to “very great;” and that is sufficient. The inference
is self-evident, that under the sway of the Being who combines in himself
those two qualities—the _très-bon_ and the _très-grand_—all the evils
we either suffer or witness must needs be acts of justice or means of
reformation equally indispensable. In the declared love of God to man, M.
de Maistre found a general solution of all the enigmas that can offend
(_scandaliser_, in the New Testament sense of putting a stumbling-block
in the way of) our ignorance. “Fixed to one little point of time and
space, we are insane enough to refer all to this point; and in so doing
we are at once blameworthy and absurd.” If De Maistre’s collation of the
_très-bon_ with the _très-grand_ resembles the lines of Drummond’s hymn
beginning,
“O King, whose greatness none can comprehend,
Whose boundless goodness doth to all extend,”
so is the scope of his argument at one with what follows:
“Here, where, as in a mirror, we but see
Shadows of shadows, atoms of Thy might,
Still owly-eyed when staring on Thy light.”
What we call this life of men on earth, as Mr. Browning’s island-poet has
it, is, as he finds much reason to conceive,
“Intended to be viewed eventually
As a great whole, not analysed to parts,
But each part having reference to all.”[26]
Pope’s well-worked line is of perpetual application,
“’Tis but a part we see, and not the whole.”
So is the avowal of the present laureate:
“I see in part
That all, as in some work of art,
Is toil co-operant to an end.”
To us, as Sir Benjamin Brodie remarks, in one of his psychological
discussions, the universe presents itself as an assemblage of
heterogeneous phenomena, some of which we can reduce to laws of limited
operation, while others stand by themselves, bearing no evident relation
to anything besides. We may well, he thinks, suppose that there are
in the universe beings of a superior intelligence, and possessed of a
greater range of observation, who are sufficiently “behind the scenes” to
be able to contemplate all the immense variety of material phenomena as
the result of one great general law. Their standpoint may enable them
to see a Cosmos, a world of order, where to lower intelligences Chaos
alone is discernible, a world comparatively without form and void, with
darkness upon the face of its deep. And as with the physical, so with the
metaphysical. As with the material, so with the moral.
“Experience, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hand;
Whence harmonies we cannot understand
Of God’s will in the worlds, the strain unfolds
In sad perplexèd minors....
“We murmur—‘Where is any certain tune
Of measured music, in such notes as these?’—
But angels leaning from their golden seat,
Are not so minded! their fine ear hath won
The issue of completed[27] cadences,—
And, smiling down the stars, they whisper—Sweet.”[28]
_RULING THE WAVES._
PSALM cxiv. 1-5; ST. MARK iv. 39.
When Israel went out of Egypt, it was under the guidance of One whose
hand being mighty to save, the sea saw it, and fled; Jordan was driven
back. “What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? thou Jordan, that
thou wast driven back?” The trembling was at the presence of Him who hath
placed the sand for the bound of the sea, by a perpetual decree, that it
cannot pass it; and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can
they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it. The
commotion, the fleeing, the driving back, was at the bidding of Him
who, and who alone, can say to the sea, Thus far shalt thou come, and no
farther; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.
The men of Galilee marvelled when, at the storm that once arose on their
sea, and the ship was in jeopardy, there arose One who rebuked the winds
and the sea; and there was a great calm. What manner of man was this,
that even the winds and the sea obeyed Him?
What manner of man? Be it legend or history, the story of royal Cnut
on the seashore, forbidding, at his flatterers’ instigation, or by his
own desire to rebuke their folly—forbidding the farther approach of the
incoming tide, is pregnant with instruction on this head. The royal Dane
might be a man of men, but the surging waves were not obedient unto his
voice. King though he was, the tide was responseless as deaf adder to
any charming of his, charmed he never so wisely, enjoined he never so
straitly. What manner of man, then, but the Son of man? What manner of
king but the King of kings?
The Dane might have enforced the lesson on his parasites by such a strain
as that of a defeated monarch in Shakspeare:—
“Farewell king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread, like you, feel want, taste grief,
Need friends:—subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?”
A king, that is, in _their_ sense of right Divine, and Divine extent.
So with poor, mad, discrowned Lear, drenched in that terrible storm
on the heath, and remembering soft speeches of cozening courtiership,
only of yesterday too. “When the rain came to wet me, and the wind to
make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there
I found them, there I smelt them out. Go to, they are not men of their
words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.”
Mark, again, from the opening scene of the “Tempest,” the rough, blunt,
uncivil words with which the boatswain cuts short the addresses of his
royal passengers:—
“Hence! What care these roarers [the waves] for the name of
king? To cabin: silence: trouble us not.
“_Gonzalo._ Good; yet remember whom thou hast aboard.
“_Boatswain._ None that I love more than myself. You are a
counsellor; if you can command these elements to a silence,
and work the peace of the present [instant], we will not hand
a rope more: use your authority. If you cannot, give thanks
you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin
for the mischance of the hour, if so it hap. Cheerily, good
hearts.—Out of our way, I say!”
Of Antiochus Epiphanes, and his pride that had a fall, it is written in
the book of Maccabees: “And thus he that a little afore thought he _might
command the waves of the sea_ (so proud was he beyond the condition of
man), and weigh the high mountains in a balance, was now cast on the
ground.”
An elder king than Cnut, and not a wiser, not only lashed the winds that
blew contrary to his will, but bound the sea with fetters, after a sort:
“Ipsum compedibus qui vinxerat Ennosigæum.”
Much good it did him: witness his return from his great expedition,
in a poor skiff, wind-tossed across waves red with the blood of his
slaughtered host, _cruentis fluctibus_. The stars in their courses
once fought against Sisera, and the fettered waves were little more
propitious to speed the fortunes of Xerxes. He might have spared his
chains. At any rate he lost his army. Archdeacon Hare practically applied
the extravagance of the Great King, as they of Persia were styled, in
designating the present (or, rather, what was to him the present) as an
age when men will scoff at the madness of Xerxes, yet themselves try to
fling their chains over the ever-rolling, irrepressible ocean of thought;
nay, they will scoop out a mimic sea in their pleasure-ground, he goes
on to say, and make it ripple and bubble, and spout up prettily into the
air, and then fancy that they are taming the Atlantic; which, however,
keeps advancing upon them, until it sweeps them away with their toys.
It is edifying to read in the Diary of Mr. Pepys how, one July afternoon,
soon after the king had come back to enjoy his own again, that gentleman
went upon the river, but had to put ashore and shelter himself from the
rain that rained so hard; during which time came by the king in his
barge, going down towards the Downs to meet the queen: “But methought it
lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the
rain.”
Instructive, too, is the tenor of the legend of King Robert of Sicily,
which has been so attractively treated in prose by Leigh Hunt, in his
Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and in verse by Professor Longfellow, in
his Tales of a Wayside Inn. There we read how the king with his nobles
proudly sat at vespers, on St. John’s Eve, and heard the priests chant
the Magnificat:—
“And, as he listened, o’er and o’er again
Repeated, like a burden or refrain,
He caught the words, ‘_Deposuit potentes_
_De sede, et exaltavit humiles_;’
And slowly lifting up his kingly head,
He to a learned clerk beside him said,
‘What mean these words?’ The clerk made answer meet,
‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
And hath exalted them of low degree.’
Thereat King Robert muttered scornfully,
’Tis well that such seditious words are sung
Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue;
For unto priests and people be it known
There is no power can push me from my throne!’”
The sequel teaches him a different lesson, which he learns by (and lays
to) heart.
In those days, however, if any order of men might, or did, claim
authority over such turbulent subject-matter as the sea, it was not
kings, but priests. Ecclesiastical history relates the calamitous
visitation of earthquake and inundations by which Epidaurus must once,
and for ever, have been overwhelmed, had not the prudent citizens placed
St. Hilarion, an Egyptian monk, on the beach. “He made the sign of the
cross; the mountain-wave stopped, bowed, and returned.” One’s respect
for the great qualities of the fearless Akbah, traversing the wilds of
Africa, and at length penetrating to the verge of the Atlantic, is not
lessened by what Gibbon relates of him:—that his career, though not his
zeal, being checked by the prospect of a boundless ocean, Akbah spurred
his horse into the waves, and raising his eyes to heaven, exclaimed
with the tone of a fanatic, “Great God, if my course were not stopped
by this sea, I would still go on, to the unknown kingdoms of the West,
preaching the unity of Thy holy name.” And the picture reminds us of
another, some eight centuries later, when Constantinople was besieged and
taken by Mahomet II., who, while his ships were engaged against those of
the Genoese, sat on horseback on the beach, to encourage by voice and
presence the valour of the faithful: “The passions of his soul, and even
the gestures of his body, seemed to imitate the action of the combatants;
and, as if he had been the lord of nature, he spurred his horse with
a fearless and impotent effort into the sea.” Sir Archibald Alison
moralises on the spectacle of Napoleon, in 1804, reviewing, or intending
to review, the naval force by which he designed to crush the British
power: the flotilla being tempest-tost when it hove in sight, and several
vessels stranded—an event “destined to teach the French Emperor, like
Canute the Dane, that there were bounds to his power, and that his might
was limited to the element on which his army stood.” The sea—_c’est autre
chose_.
It is of Tiberius, absolute master of the vastest, richest empire ever
seen under the sun, that an eminent French preacher is treating when
he says that an adulatory senator kept repeating to him in every tone
and accent that his authority was without bounds. Tiberius would fain
have believed the assurance, if the illusion had been possible,—if
he had not felt himself at every instant _heurté contre une barrière
infranchissable_. The emperor’s flatterers had forgotten, for one thing,
to secure a peremptory decree against the inconvenient limitation called
time. His days were numbered. And in vain Tiberius essayed to trick and
elude death, and dissembled with himself as to the stubborn fact of its
resistless advance.
Kings, great nobles, and the like, as a popular essayist observes, have
been known, even to the close of life, to violently curse and swear, if
things went against them; going the length of stamping and blaspheming
even at wind and rain, and branches of trees and plashes of mud, for
insubordination and disrespect of persons. A popular novelist, again,
having to describe a fashionable wedding in the country on a portentously
wet and stormy day, makes the Lisford beadle, “who was a sound Tory of
the old school,” almost wonder that the heavens themselves should be
audacious enough to wet the uncovered head of the lord of Jocelyn’s Rock.
“But it went on raining nevertheless.” It was in no such spirit that John
Bunyan once was all but resolved on putting to the test the reality of
his faith, by commanding some water puddles to be dry.
Mr. Carlyle made a picturesque application of the royal Dane’s injunction
to the waves, in his survey of the advancing tide of the French
Revolution—grim host marching on, the black-browed Marseillese in the
van, with hum and murmur, far-heard; like the ocean-tide, “drawn up,
as if by Luna and Influences, from the great deep of waters, they roll
gleaming on; no king, Canute or Louis, can bid them roll back.” To quite
another effect is Judge Haliburton’s application of the incident, in his
panegyric on the capabilities of the Southampton docks. It was here, he
says, that Cnut sat in his arm-chair, to show his courtiers (after he
gave up drinking and murder) that though he was a mighty prince, he could
not control the sea. “Well, what Canute could not do, your dock company
has accomplished. It has actually said to the sea, ‘Thus far shalt thou
go, and no farther:’ and the waves have obeyed the mandate.”
By poetical licence a Cornish poet of the present day ascribes to his
rock-bound coast a _ne plus ultra_ control over an ever-aggressive sea:
he pictures the embattled advance of the waves, and their discomfiture
and retreat:
“They come—they mount—they charge in vain.
Thus far, incalculable main;
No more! Thine hosts have not o’erthrown
The lichen on the barrier stone.
Have the rocks faith that thus they stand,
Unmoved, a grim and stately band,
And look, like warriors tried and brave,
Stern, silent, reckless, o’er the wave?”
One, and one alone, is veritably the ruler of the waves. When the floods
are risen, when the floods have lift up their voice, and lift up their
waves, to Him only it pertaineth to still their tumultuous clamour, and
to level their aspiring crests. The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage
horribly; yet the Lord, who dwelleth on high, is mightier. “O Lord God of
hosts, who is like unto Thee?... Thou rulest the raging of the sea: Thou
stillest the waves thereof when they arise.”
With a moral application we conclude, borrowed from one whose was ever
the pen of a ready writer to point a moral. Some dream, says Cowper, that
... “they can silence when they will
The storm of passion, and say, ‘Peace, be still:’
But ‘Thus far and no farther,’ when addressed
To the wild wave, or wilder human breast,
Implies authority that never can,
That never ought to be the lot of man.”
_IN DEADLY PERIL UNAWARES._
1 SAMUEL xxvi. 8-25.
Soundly the stalwart king of Israel slept within the trench, while David
and Abishai gazed on him by stealth in the night-watches—his spear stuck
in the ground at his bolster, and Abner and the people lying round about
him. Abishai was for smiting him with the spear at once, promising that
once should be quite enough. Could David hesitate? Was it not a special
Providence? Had not God delivered his enemy into his hand? Let but David
give the word, the look, the nod, and Abishai would at one fell swoop
send Saul to his account, with all his imperfections on his head. “Now,
therefore, let me smite him, I pray thee, with the spear, even to the
earth at once, and I will not smite him the second time.” But David was
inflexible in repudiating the regicide. Not for him was it to stretch
forth a hand against the Lord’s anointed. So Saul slept on, and the
shadow of death passed away. Unaware of the peril that had approached
him, his awaking was an ordinary awaking. But, to convict the watchers
of unwatchfulness, if not to convince the king of a narrow escape and a
generous foe, David took the spear and the cruse of water from Saul’s
bolster; and he and his companion gat them away unperceived—for no man
saw it, nor knew it, neither awaked; for they were all asleep; because
a deep sleep from the Lord was fallen upon them. Anon David roused the
host with the story of that narrow escape, charging Abner with criminal
neglect worthy of death. And as he recited the story, Saul was touched;
and there was emotion in his voice and in his words when he felt what the
peril had been, and knew whom he had to thank for its harmless issue.
Had we eyes sharp enough, observes Cowper in a letter to Hayley, we
should see the arrows of death flying in all directions, and account
it a wonder that we and our friends escape them but a single day.
Many years previously the poet had written to the same effect to
Unwin,—that could we see at a glance of the eye what is passing every
day upon all the roads in the kingdom, we should indeed find reason
to be thankful for journeys performed in safety, and for deliverance
from dangers we are not perhaps even permitted to see. “When in some of
the high southern latitudes, and in a dark tempestuous night, a flash
of lightning discovered to Captain Cook a vessel which glanced along
close by his side, and which but for the lightning he must have run
foul of, both the danger and the transient light that showed it were
undoubtedly designed,” as Cowper is devoutly convinced, “to convey to
him this wholesome instruction, that a particular Providence attended
him, and that he was not only preserved from evils of which he had
notice, but from many more of which he had no information or even the
least suspicion.” It is noticeable, as Mr. de Quincey points out, that
a danger which approaches, but wheels away—which threatens, but finally
forbears to strike—is more interesting by much on a distant retrospect
than the danger which accomplishes its mission. “The Alpine precipice,
down which many pilgrims have fallen, is passed without much attention;
but that precipice, within one inch of which a traveller has passed
unconsciously in the dark, first tracing his peril along the snowy margin
on the next morning, becomes invested with an attraction of horror for
all who hear the story.” In another of his books, and the most celebrated
of them all, the same impassioned master of English prose, recites the
thoughts that arose within him, at a crisis in his youthful life, on the
suggestive opening of that beautiful collect, “Lighten our darkness,
we beseech thee, O Lord!” in which the great shadows of night are made
symbolically significant—those great powers, night and darkness, that
belong to aboriginal chaos, being made representative of the perils that,
unseen, continually menace poor afflicted human nature. “With deepest
sympathy I accompanied the prayer against the perils of darkness,—perils
that I seemed to see, in the ambush of midnight solitude, brooding
around the beds of sleeping nations; perils from even worse forms of
darkness shrouded within the recesses of blind human hearts; perils from
temptations weaving unseen snares for our footing.” As Marcello has it,
in Beddoes’ tragedy,
“Each minute of man’s safety he does walk
A bridge, no thicker than his frozen breath,
O’er a precipitous and craggy danger
Yawning to death!”
With admirable subtlety and suggestiveness, Mr. Hawthorne illustrates
this subject in that _fantasiestück_ of his, called “David Swan.” A young
man of that name falls asleep on the roadside, of a summer’s day, and
_we_ see, what he sees not, nor dreams of happening to him, a series of
incidents that go near to alter the current of his being, and very near,
in one instance, to stop altogether its earthly course. When he awakes
from that sound sleep, and hies him cheerily homeward, he knows not,
nor ever will know, in this world at least, that while he slumbered, all
in one brief hour, wealth was all but made over to him by one heirless
passer-by, and death all but dealt him by two reckless ruffians. They
were interrupted, and left him, and he never was to know of the narrow
escape. The moral of the fantasy is, that sleeping or waking, we hear
not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen. And the
moralist’s query ensues, Does it not argue a superintending Providence,
that while viewless and unexpected events thrust themselves continually
athwart our path, there should still be regularity enough in mortal life
to render foresight even partially available?
The moral of “David Swan” is implicitly conveyed in that passage in
“Waverley” which relates Colonel Gardiner’s unconscious escape from the
raised and pointed weapon of the Highlander, Callum Beg. An incident
that appeals to his superstition makes the intending slayer drop his
piece; and “Colonel Gardiner,” we read, “unconscious of the danger he had
escaped, turned his horse round, and rode slowly back to the front of his
regiment.”
So with Mrs. Hilyard, in “Salem Chapel,” on the evening of the secret
interview upon the chapel steps. A hidden witness there is of that
interview, who, however, sees not the gesture of her companion which
bodes, and almost involves, a fatal, a murderous issue. “But even Mrs.
Hilyard herself never knew how near, how very near, she was at that
moment to the unseen world.”
Or glance, again, at the Azteca, in Southey’s “Madoc,” gliding like a
snake to where Caradoc lay sleeping—all unconscious of peril, as happy,
and happily unconscious, David Swan:—
“Sweetly slept he, and pleasant were his dreams
Of Britain, and the blue-eyed maid he loved.
The Azteca stood over him; he knew
His victim, and the power of vengeance gave
Malignant joy. Once hast thou ’scaped my arm;
But what shall save thee now? the Tiger thought,
Exulting, and he raised his spear to strike.
That instant, o’er the Briton’s unseen harp
The gale of morning passed, and swept its strings
Into so sweet a harmony, that sure
It seemed no earthly tune. The savage man
Suspends his stroke; he looks astonished round;
No human hand is near:—and hark! again
The aërial music swells and dies away.
Then first the heart of Tialala felt fear:
He thought that some protecting spirit watched
Beside the stranger, and, abashed, withdrew.”
To Cremona went together, in seeming amity, the Emperor Sigismund and
Pope John XXIII., and there an incident had nearly taken place, which,
as the historian of Latin Christianity says, might, by preventing the
Council of Constance, have changed the fortunes of the world. Gabrino
Fondoli, who from podestâ had become tyrant of Cremona, “entertained his
distinguished guests with sumptuous hospitality. He led them up the lofty
tower to survey the rich and spacious plains of Lombardy. On his deathbed
Fondoli confessed the sin, of which he deeply repented, that he resisted
the temptation, and had not hurled pope and emperor down, and so secured
himself an immortal name.” Pope and emperor on the tower-top were as
little inclined to suspect how closely the shadow of death was then and
there overshadowing them, as they would have been able to comprehend the
ultimate repentance of the intending murderer, not for having intended
murder, but for having not carried his intention out.
It is one of Young’s night thoughts that “the farthest from the fear,
are often nearest to the stroke of fate.” Often the stroke menaces them
unawares, but after all is not dealt; and to the last they are unaware
that on such a day, and at such a minute, there was but a step between
them and death.
_Quid quisque vitet_, says Horace, _nunquam homini satis cautum est, in
horas_. The ignorance of what is impending is bliss, in a certain sense.
Just as
“The kid from the pen, and the lamb from the fold,
Unmoved may the blade of the butcher behold;
They dream not—ah, happier they!—that the knife,
Though uplifted, can menace their innocent life.
It falls;—the frail thread of their being is riven;
They dread not, suspect not, the blow till ’tis given.”
_Mais qu’il me soit permis de ne le savoir pas_, is the wish of some in
regard even of escaped peril.
Scott vividly illustrates in “Rokeby” the position of unconscious and
therefore unconcerned borderers on the grave; it is where Bertram creeps
on hands and knees through the spreading birch and hazels, and takes aim
at Redmond, and twice Matilda comes between the carabine and Redmond’s
breast, “just ere the spring his finger pressed;” and the interruption of
Guy Denzil’s approach makes the ruffian retire, _rê infectâ_:
“They whom dark Bertram, in his wrath,
Doomed to captivity or death,
Their thoughts to one sad subject lent,
Saw not nor heard the ambushment.
Heedless and unconcerned they sate,
While on the very verge of fate;
Heedless and unconcerned remained,
When Heaven the murderer’s arm restrained;
As ships drift darkling down the tide,
Nor see the shelves o’er which they glide.”
_NO LEISURE._
ST. MARK vi. 31.
That must have been a busy time with the apostles, careful and troubled
about many things, cumbered with much serving, worn with many anxieties,
and kept in unrest by continual demands on their services, when the
Divine Master—knowing their frame and remembering that they were
dust—bade them come by themselves “apart into a desert place, and rest a
while; for there were many coming and going, and they had _no leisure_ so
much as to eat.”
Our own age has been rightly described as one of stimulus and high
pressure: we live as it were our lives out fast; effect is everything;
results produced at once; something to show, and something that may
_tell_. “The folio of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet that
stirs men’s curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten.” Or as an
eminent reviewer puts it—writing to the same effect as the eminent divine
just quoted—without grudging to contemporary productions the applause
which they receive, or the interest which they excite, thoughtful minds
cannot see them with complacency obscuring by their brilliance, or
perhaps their “glare,” the more temperate and wholesome light of the
elder classics of our land. “At no moment in the intellectual progress
of England has repose ever been more needful, if the literature of the
present century be to take its place among its great antecessors.” For
want of repose our prose is declared on the same authority to be growing
turgid, our verse empty or inflated; and as a good cooling regimen
is required to correct these exorbitances, nothing would rejoice our
censor more than to be assured, on the credit of sound publishers’
statistics, that the number of new books was diminishing, while that of
re-editions of old books was on the increase. Dr. Arnold, we are told,
once preached a sermon to the boys at Rugby against taking in the monthly
numbers of “Nicholas Nickleby,” by way of protest against systematic and
uninterrupted excitement. “Society keeps up as much excitement as it can.
It wants its new number of something to appear incessantly. There is no
rest or repose, and one subject of thought succeeds another faster than
wave succeeds wave.” A rather ironical apology for dull sermons sets up
at least this plea in their behalf: that so easy is it for a man who
lives in such a society never to be alone with himself, that a compulsory
half-hour of quietude at a wakeful time of the day, in a place which
recalls to him the most solemn thoughts, is no slight advantage.
La Bruyère, two centuries ago, complained of French society in his day,
that there was no getting any one to abide quietly at home, and there in
patience possess his soul, and make sure to himself that he had one. All
was hurry and flurry. Not to be excitedly busy was to be idle. But that
the philosopher denied. A wise man turns his leisure to account. He is
not idle who devotes his leisure to tranquil meditation, and converse
and reading. Rather is this a species of work—at any rate a means for
working with fresh energy and better effect when the working hour comes
round again. There is such a thing as what Wordsworth wisely calls a wise
passiveness.
Chateaubriand, again, more than a century afterwards, complained—not
indeed of Frenchmen alone, but of all men—that all was done
helter-skelter and in haste, post-haste; that amid this din and
distraction of coming and going there was no leisure so much as to eat;
or that if men did set about a meal, there was no such thing as sitting
down to it, but it was eaten by them with their loins girded, their shoes
on their feet, and their staff in their hand—eaten in haste, as was the
Jewish passover.
The most eminent political economist of our day owns himself to be “not
charmed” with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the
normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the
trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on one another’s heels,
which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable
lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of
the phases of industrial progress. The town, complains one of the most
thoughtful and influential of latter-day divines,—the town, with its
fever and its excitements, and its collision of mind with mind, has
spread over the country, and there is no country, scarcely home. “To men
who traverse England in a few hours, and spend only a portion of the
year in one place, home is becoming a vocable of past ages.” He echoes
Wordsworth’s lament that
“Plain living and high thinking are no more;”
and in another place he declares our want to be the vision of a calmer
and simpler beauty, to tranquillise us in the midst of artificial tastes,
and the draught of a purer spring to cool the flame of our excited life.
It is many years ago since the most genial of essayists avowed his
preference for “coaching it,” and could have been well content to live
upon the road, in those roomy antiques, instead of getting on at the
present rate, and being impatient to arrive at some town, only perhaps
to be equally restless when arrived there. Not that he was insensible
to the pleasure of driving fast—stirring the blood as it does, and
giving a sense of power; but he complained that everything was getting a
little too hasty and business-like, “as though we were to be eternally
getting on, and never realizing anything but fidget and money—the means
instead of the end.” A distinction is duly recognised between haste and
hurry—hurry adding to rapidity the element of painful confusion; but
in the case of ordinary people, as Dr. Boyd observes, haste generally
implies hurry, and very strenuously he dilates on “what a horrible thing”
it must be to go through life in a hurry. The self-styled country parson
made a name (“letters four do make that name”) by his “Recreations.”
And he has since then maintained its popularity by a series of
“Leisure Hours.” In his essay concerning Hurry and Leisure he avows
his utter contempt for the idler—the loafer, as Yankees term him—who
never does anything, whose idle hands are always in his idle pockets,
and who is always sauntering to and fro. Leisure, we are reminded,
is the intermission of labour—the blink of idleness in the life of a
hard-working man; and it is only in the case of such a man that leisure
is allowed to be dignified, commendable, or enjoyable. “But to him it
is all these, and more. Let us not be ever driving on. The machinery,
physical and mental, will not stand it.” Only in leisure, it is further
contended, will the human mind yield many of its best products. Calm
views, sound thoughts, healthful feelings, do not originate in a hurry or
a fever.
It was in wistful remembrance of the silence in heaven for the space
of half an hour, as recorded by the Seer of Patmos, that Mrs. Browning
penned a sonnet which expressed a prayer, suggestive in its earnestness
and of wide application,
“Vouchsafe us such a half-hour’s hush alone,
In compensation for our stormy years!”
Never to be forgotten amid the tranquillising sweets of leisure hours,
with healing on their wings, is the serene solemnity of that silent
half-hour.
Professor Longfellow, in one of his earliest works, proclaimed to his
countrymen as the great want of the national character, that of the
“dignity of repose.” “We seem,” he said, “to live in the midst of a
battle—there is such a din, such a hurrying to and fro. In the streets
of a crowded city it is difficult to walk slowly. You feel the rushing
of the crowd, and rush with it onward. In the press of our life, it is
difficult to be calm. In this stress of wind and tide, all professions
seem to drag their anchors, and are swept out into the main.” The
following stanza is so thoroughly conceived in the spirit and expressed
in the style of the same author—the author of the “Psalm of Life”—that
few readers might have hesitated to attribute it to him, were it not
known to be from one of the “Palm Leaves” of Lord Houghton, who, a
quarter of a century ago, as Richard Monckton Milnes, after contrasting
the din, and stir, and turmoil of the West with the reposeful air of the
East, counselled the poet of the West to wander eastward now and then:
“There the calm of life comparing
With his Europe’s busy fate,
Let him gladly homeward faring,
Learn to labour and to wait.”
It is perhaps the most gifted of American writers of fiction to whom we
owe the avowal, that were he to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do,
and fondle it in his embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be
that the great want which mankind labours under at this present period
is—sleep. The world, he urges, should recline its vast head on the first
convenient pillow, and take a prolonged nap. It has gone distracted,
on his showing, through a morbid activity, and while preternaturally
wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem real to it
now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all things
once set right by an interval of sound repose. This he declares to be
the only method of getting rid of old delusions and of avoiding new
ones—of restoring to us the simple perception of what is right, and the
single-hearted desire to achieve it, both of which have long been lost
in consequence of this weary activity of brain and torpor or passion
of the heart that now afflict the universe. “Stimulants, the only mode
of treatment hitherto attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but
heighten the delirium.” Sleep, therefore, is the panacea he prescribes
for the physical and metaphysical regeneration of our race, so that it
may in due time awake, as an infant out of dewy slumber.
To the like effect protests an able essayist of our day against
tendencies to overrate the endless facilities of speedy locomotion now
enjoyed, as if they were a boon without a drawback; and he professes not
to regard as particularly attractive or elevating the sight of mankind
scouring and bustling endlessly hither and thither over the face of the
earth, like eager, energetic ants, with little bits of straw or other
rubbish packed on their heads. Ought we not rather, it is asked, to look
on tranquillity, and equilibrium, and regularity, as the normal condition
of things? and in the thousand encomiums which are poured forth upon
steam and speed, do we often take into account the waste and havoc which
they make in “plain living”—how they practically shorten the days of a
man?
The haste and hurry of modern English civilization, it has been elsewhere
observed, ever increasing and carrying us more impetuously forward, tend
to deaden all capacity for simpler enjoyments, and all sense of the worth
of a tranquil life on which the eyes of all the world are not fixed. And
whenever, as a reflective discourser remarks, people set their heads to
constant work, we may be perfectly certain that they are losing more than
they gain, and are sinking in the scale at once of meditative and social
beings. The accomplished author of an essay on Leisure—the cultivation of
which as an art is thought to be in danger of dying out amongst us—says
of that activity which never relaxes sufficiently to allow time for a
calm and more or less passive contemplation of life as a whole, that it
is “apt to degenerate into mere hand-to-mouth fussiness or drudgery,
and can be justified only by necessity.” The very repose of leisure is
accordingly pronounced a by no means purely selfish enjoyment—it being
one of the most communicable, nay, contagious, of pleasures; for there
are people, we are reminded, whose company is as restful as sleep, in
whose presence hurry seems like a bad dream when it is past, and whom
one leaves with a sense of refreshment and renewed energy such as is
produced by a good night’s rest. And this writer contends that to afford
such refreshment to others may often be turning time to better account
than to crowd it with self-chosen business. Not that the fact is not
duly insisted upon that too little work is as fatal as too much to that
lightness and alacrity of spirit which are needed for the conversion of
spare time into hours of leisure worthy to be so called. Some natures,
indeed, and they are of a high order, sometimes of the highest, find one
leisure hour at a time as much as they can away with, and anon
“The hour of rest is gone,
And urgent voices round them cry,
‘Ho, lingerer, hasten on!’
“And has the soul, then, only gained,
From this brief time of ease,
A moment’s rest, when overstrained,
One hurried glimpse of peace?”
Nay something better and more abiding than that.
But to conclude. The notion, as expounded by an essayist on “Short
Cuts,” that if a thing is to be done at all, “then ’twere well it were
done quickly,” admirable as it may be on the Exchange, is justly said
to rub the delicacy and bloom off life when it is made the ruling maxim
in all other relations and positions: a life with leisure hours in it
for watching and examining all that we pass being a much more enviable
and rational lot than a swift rushing from one goal to another, from one
sort of fame or power or opulence to another and more remote. When the
ambitious hero in Sir Henry Taylor’s dramatic poem declares in the storm
and stress of his career,
“We have not time to mourn,”
“The worse for us!” is his good counsellor’s rejoinder:
“_He that lacks time to mourn lacks time to mend._
_Eternity mourns that._ ’Tis an ill cure
For life’s worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow’s held intrusive and turn’d out,
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.
Yet such the barrenness of busy life!
From shelf to shelf Ambition clambers up
To reach the naked’st pinnacle of all,
While Magnanimity, absolved from toil,
Reposes self-included at the base.”
_A PROPHYLACTIC KNIFE TO THE THROAT._
PROVERBS xxiii. 2.
King Solomon’s discreet counsel to him that feasts with royalty, to
put a knife to his throat, if he be a man given to appetite, may be
advantageously enlarged in its application to diners-out, or for the
matter of that, to diners at home, all and sundry. Sitting to eat with a
ruler, the guest is admonished to consider diligently what is before him;
and at the same time to be not desirous of the great man’s dainties, for
they are deceitful meat. Any and every man given to appetite will do well
to chew the cud of this bitter fancy; and the prophylactic application of
a knife to the throat, forbidding rash ingress and intemperate speed of
swallow, is wholesome for all estates and degrees of men among us, and
might beneficially be a standing order for all times.
Adam Smith, in his “Theory of the Moral Sentiments,” calls it “indecent”
to express any strong degree of those passions which arise from a certain
situation or disposition of the body; because the company, not being
in the same disposition, cannot be expected to sympathize with them;
and he mentions violent hunger as being, though upon many occasions
not only natural, but unavoidable, yet “always indecent; and to eat
voraciously is universally regarded as a piece of ill manners.” There
is, however, he allows, some degree of sympathy, even with hunger, and
we may add, even on the part of a ruler at whose table sits the man
given to appetite. Lewis the Fourteenth, himself a gourmand, and, which
is different, an enormous eater, liked to see a dinner guest disposing
wholesale of the royal cates, if only by way of keeping himself in
countenance, while achieving the like result. Royalty has, indeed, again
and again been addicted to surfeiting, and sometimes of a memorably
fatal sort. Alexander Jannæus died of gluttony, during the siege of
Ragaba. Soliman, the seventh khalif of the race of the Ommiyades, died
of a surfeit at Chalcis, in Syria, while preparing to lead an army to
Constantinople.[29] Of the emperor Jovian, we read in Gibbon, that one
night, at the obscure town Dadastana, after indulging himself with a
redundant supper, he retired to rest, and was next morning found dead
in his bed—an event ascribed by some, though not by all, to the quality
of the mushrooms, _plus_ the quantity of wine, which he had swallowed
in the evening. The same historian rather more than suspects that the
mortal disease of Athanaric the Goth “was contracted amidst the pleasures
of the imperial banquets,” by Theodosius provided. Pope Benedict XI.
is said to have died of a surfeit of fruit—some beautiful fresh figs,
of which he was very fond, being offered to him in a silver basin by a
veiled novice, as if from the abbess of the convent of St. Petronilla,
in Perugia: “The pope, not suspecting a gift from such a hand, ate them
eagerly, and without having them previously tasted.” That he died of
poison, few in that age, as Milman says, would venture to doubt, but
the poisoning power of arrears of undigested food has never been quite
rated at its full value. The same hesitation between fruit surfeit and
poison, obtains in the case of King John, whose death, by one account
due to the fatal drug administered by a Cistercian monk, by another is
attributed to an intemperate indulgence at supper in fruit and new cider.
The Emperor Frederick III. contracted his last illness, some say, by a
surfeit of melons. And is there not, in the case of our Henry I., what
has been called that tale of royal excess so concisely and pathetically
told in nursery history? “He never smiled again, and died of a surfeit of
lampreys.” The _regicide_ lampreys, Moore calls them in one place; and
in another, after citing Hume’s remark on them, as “a food which always
agreed better with his [Henry’s] palate than his constitution,” a dish so
indigestible, that a late novelist, at the end of his book, could imagine
no more summary mode of getting rid of all his heroes and heroines
than by a hearty supper of stewed lampreys. In yet another the same
squib-writer has a cruel simile, “just as honest King Stephen his beaver
might doff to the fishes that carried his kind uncle off.” To a surfeit
of red herrings is ascribed the death of Robert Greene, the dramatist.
The trap for the life of the Emperor Antoninus Pius was baited, as De
Quincey expresses it, with toasted cheese. Kaiser Karl VI. was the victim
of a voracious repast on mushrooms stewed in oil.
When Hadrian found his illness on the increase, and his end approaching,
he removed to Baiæ, where, “in spite of the prescriptions [or
proscriptions?] of his physicians, he began to eat and drink according
to his pleasure.” The excesses of Charles V. in the same way are
exceptionally notorious. Of that “little, spare, aguish, peevish,
supper-eating” sovereign, Frederick the Great, who loved his dishes the
more they tormented him, it is on record, that on the approach of death,
“this warrior full of courage and sage speculation,” could not resist the
customary pepper and sauce piquante, though he knew it would inevitably
result in a nightmare, “turning his bed into a nest of monsters.” So
with the Duke Augustus commemorated by Perthes: “All medical skill was
in vain, for this half crazy prince could not deny himself the stimulus
of the hottest spices.” Mr. Tennyson’s dying Northern Farmer is only too
true a type of his kind:—
“What atta stannin’ theer for, an’ doesn bring ma the yaäle?
Doctor’s a’tottler, lass, an a’s hallus i’ the owd taäle;
I weänt breäk rules for doctor, a knaws naw more nor a floy;
Git ma my yaäle I tell tha, an’ gin I mun doy I mun doy.”
Swift is giving Pope a significant and not uncalled-for hint, when he
writes to express his uneasiness at ever hearing of the poet’s being
out to dinner: “For the least transgression of yours, if it be only two
bits and one sup more than your stint, is a great debauch; for which
you certainly pay more than those sots who are carried dead drunk to
bed.” An entry in Mrs. Trench’s diary begins, “Dined at the Duke of
Queensberry’s. He is very ill—has a violent cough, but _will_ eat an
immense dinner, and then complains of a _digestion pénible_.” Another
of his quality has been described as taking all sorts of pains to get
a little enjoyment which must produce for him a world of misery. “One
of his passions which he _will_ not resist, is for a particular dish,
pungent, savoury, and multifarious, which sends him almost every night
into Tartarus.” Mr. Thackeray’s moribund old Madame Bernstein _will_ have
her supper luxurious, “nor could any injunction of ours or the doctor’s
teach her abstinence.” The Sir Miles St. John of another popular fiction
does himself to death after the same manner: “He would have his own
way; and he contrived to coax or to force his doctor into an authority
on his side.” For doctors are not all of the kind that Sancho Panza had
to deal with when governor of Barataria. _The Doctor_ cites the case of
an eminent member of “the faculty,” who could never refrain from eating
toasted cheese, though he was subject to an alarming pulmonary complaint
which was uniformly aggravated by it, and which terminated fatally at an
age by no means advanced. Another he relates, of a physician who, at an
autumnal dessert never ceased eating all the filberts he could lay his
hands upon, while candidly acknowledging what indigestible and hurtful
things they were.
Not a doctor apparently of medicine, but (_proh pudor!_) of divinity, was
that Cambridge don of whose end Gray makes memorable mention, as having
gone to his grave with five fine mackarel (large and full of roe) in his
inside. “He ate them all off at one dinner; but his fate was a turbot on
Trinity Sunday, of which he left little for the company besides bones.
He had not been hearty all the week; but after this sixth fish he never
held up his head more.” Like Milton’s Eve, in one sense at least:—
“Greedily he ingorged without restraint,
And knew not eating death.”
Dr. Johnson’s friend, Thrale, is a noteworthy example, or warning, of the
man of appetite, who _will not_ restrain it; will not put a knife to his
throat, but prefers sending a full laden fork in that direction. His wife
describes his natural disposition to conviviality as degenerating into
a preternatural desire for food. “No one could control his appetite.”
“Burney and I and Queeney tease him every meal he eats, and Mrs. Montagu
is quite serious with him; but what _can_ one do? He will eat, I think;
and if he does eat, I know he will not live.” The lampreys that were one
too many for Henry the king, were one too many for Thrale the brewer. He
begged some of an old friend, and the old friend complied, despite the
frowns and negative signals of the ladies of the house—whom following
out of the room, the too compliant visitor thus made his apology to Mrs.
Thrale, “I understand you, Madam, but _must_ disobey. A friend I have
known thirty-six years shall not ask a favour of me in his last stage
of life and be refused. What difference can it make?” Tears stood in
_his_ eyes, and Mrs. Thrale’s own—_les larmes dans la voix_—prevented
all reply. What difference did it make? That day was Mr. Thrale’s last.
The tone of the apology reminds us of General Paoli’s answer to Boswell,
when whispering his fear lest Johnson, very aged and very ailing, might
be hurt by the amount and variety of what he was despatching at the
general’s table, “where he loved to dine.” Boswell begged Paoli not to
press him. Why urge a too willing horse? “Alas!” said the host, “see
how very ill he looks: he can live but a very short time. Would you
refuse a slight gratification to a man under sentence of death?” And the
general cited approvingly the “humane custom” in Italy, by which those
in Johnson’s position were indulged with having whatever they liked
best to eat and drink, even with expensive delicacies. A parallel case
we have in Sir Walter Scott, during his melancholy sojourn in Italy, as
Sir W. Gell describes his dining at a Roman palace, and his own fears
lest, from the hospitality of the Torlonia family, and “with servants on
all sides pressing him to eat and drink, as is their custom at Rome,”
Sir Walter might be induced to eat more than was safe for his malady.
“Colonel Blair, who sat next him, was requested to take care that this
should not happen. Whenever I observed him, however, Sir Walter appeared
always to be eating; while the duchess, who had discovered the nature of
the office imposed on the colonel, was by no means satisfied, and after
dinner observed that it was an odd sort of friendship which consisted in
starving one’s neighbour to death, when he had a good appetite, and there
was dinner enough.”
The selfish club-man _par excellence_ has been depicted as earthing
himself from pursuit in the sanctuary of his club, there to eat his fill
unmolested, with no remonstrant at hand to remind him of the gout when
enjoying his turtle, or to talk of cupping when the glass of champagne is
at his lips. “There he may eat his asparagus _tout à l’huile_—there he
may pepper his cream-tart,” and none to say him nay. Drawn with pitiless
realism from the life is Acton Bell (Anne Brontè)’s picture of the dying
master of Wildfell Hall, whose extreme dread of death, when and while it
seems imminent, renders easy his wife’s task of curbing his unruly greed,
but who becomes intractable as the danger to dear life seems receding.
“I watch and restrain him,” she writes, “as well as I can, and often get
bitterly abused for my rigid severity; and sometimes he contrives to
elude my vigilance, and sometimes acts in opposition to my will.” William
Collins, the painter, notes in his diary a certain “dinner at C⸺’s,”
where he “sat next to H⸺, who took some highly seasoned omelet. I asked
him how he could venture on such stuff; he said he could not resist it,
though he knew how much he should suffer from it. He took a great deal
of wine, to overcome the effects of the omelet, and assured me he should
be ill for four days after such a dinner, and that he always suffered in
the same way after dining with C⸺! How absurd such weakness appears, and
yet how common it is!” George Herbert’s counsel is never out of date,
any more than King Solomon’s, in the matter of putting a knife to one’s
throat, if edacious and a diner-out:—
“Look to thy mouth: diseases enter there....
... Carve, or discourse; do not a famine fear.
Who carves is kind to two, who talks to all.
Look on meat, think it dirt, then eat a bit;
Then say withal, Earth to earth I commit.”
_HAZAEL’S ABHORRENT REPUDIATION OF HIS FUTURE SELF._
2 KINGS viii. 13.
Why wept Elisha in the presence of Hazael, when that envoy from the sick
king of Syria courted the man of God, in his sovereign’s behalf, with
a consignment of every good thing of Damascus, forty camels’ burden?
Courteous and gentle was Benhadad’s messenger who came to inquire of
the Lord of Elisha, if the royal Syrian should recover of the disease
which had brought him so low. Why wept the prophet, when his prophecy
had been uttered, ominously vague? “Go, say unto him [Benhadad], Thou
mayest certainly recover. Howbeit the Lord hath showed me that he shall
certainly die.” And he settled his countenance stedfastly, until he was
ashamed.
“And Hazael said, Why weepeth my lord? And he answered, Because I know
the evil that thou wilt do unto the children of Israel; their strongholds
wilt thou set on fire, and their young men wilt thou slay with the sword,
and wilt dash their children,” etc. And Hazael said, “But what! is thy
servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?”
Yet Hazael went home, and on the very morrow commenced his justification
of the seer’s previsionary tears, by spreading a thick wet cloth on the
face of his master, so that Benhadad, who else would have recovered,
died, and Hazael reigned in his stead.
Well might the man of God weep, nor could anything be more natural,
or at least naturally assumed, than the shuddering repudiation, the
deprecating protest, of the envoy that now was, the king—and dog—that
to-morrow should be.
“Lui-même, à son portrait forcé de rendre hommage,
Il frémira d’horreur devant sa propre image.”
The man who is weak, observes Miss Lee in the “Canterbury Tales,”
is always in danger of becoming a villain; and she exemplifies this
liability in the instance of Villars, who, by indulging a passion
calculated to enfeeble his understanding and corrupt his heart, is
soon to be found touching that point which his high tone of romantic
refinement had once induced him to believe it impossible he should
even approach. But he protests too much who strenuously protests, with
protestation heaped on protestation, against any such possible lapse and
collapse on his part; and there are cases of this kind, of which one may
say with Molière—
“Que c’est être à demi ce que l’on vient de dire,
Que de vouloir jurer qu’on ne le sera pas.”
Martial is in the right in answering the inquiry of Priscus, how would
he live if he became rich and great all at once, with another query, Who
can say beforehand what his future conduct will be? _Quemquam posse putas
mores narrare futuros?_ If Priscus were to become a lion, what sort of
one would he turn out to be? Perhaps like Hazael, a dog.
In sight of a corpse suspended to a tree, the “miserable remnant of a
wretch that was hanged there for murder,” Robert, in one of Tobin’s
dramas, protests to his mother that, robber though he be, _he_ is no
murderer; she replies:—
“You are a robber;
And he who robs, by sharp resistance pressed,
Will end the deed in blood: ’twas so with him;
He once possessed a soul quick as your own
To mercy, and would quake, as you do now,
At the bare apprehension of the act
That has consigned him to yon blasted tree.”
Dr. Hamilton somewhere adverts to a sort of gambling in our large
cities which does not look particularly repulsive—not being carried on
in “hells,” and pleading the sanction of some titled names; the results,
however, of which are hanging like a millstone round the neck of many
a once promising young man; while, to say nothing of those whom it
has reduced to beggary or blackguardism, numbers of its victims must
be sought in the Portland hulks or Dartmoor prison. “They went to the
race-course, or, without going there, they laid wagers on horses, and
sooner or later they lost more than they could pay, and in dread of
dishonour they took means to get the money at the very suggestion of
which, once upon a time, they would indignantly have exclaimed, ‘Is thy
servant a dog?’ and after a few miserable makeshifts, only adding sin to
sin, there came detection and ruin and disgrace.” It is of the riotous
living of prodigal sons that the same preacher is treating, when he
shows, in his graphic way, how speedily riot, whether coarse or refined,
wastes the reveller’s substance—not only sapping the constitution, and
softening the brain, and shattering the nerves, and enfeebling the
mind, but exhausting the estate, and soon bringing the spendthrift to
poverty. And, as the discourser goes on to say, if the passion still
urges, and the fear of God has departed, wild methods will be used to
meet the demand and assuage the frantic craving. “Keepsakes will be sold
or pledged, to part with which would, once upon a time, have looked like
sacrilege.” Perhaps money will be taken from the till, and so on and on,
or rather downwards and downwards, deeper and deeper, till the lowest
deep is sounded, and darkness is the burier of the dead.
It has been remarked by one of the most reflective of our popular
authors, that there is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first
turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the
change, for this reason—that the second wrong presents itself to him
in the guise of the only practicable right. “The action which before
commission has been seen with that blended common-sense and fresh
untarnished feeling which is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked
at afterwards with the lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which
all things that men call beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of
textures very much alike.” Europe, it is suggestively added, adjusts
itself to a _fait accompli_; and so does an individual character—until
the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution.
Recording the appointment of Bonaparte to succeed Scherer in command of
the French forces on Genoese territory, Southey observes that although
the former had given indications of his military talents at Toulon, and
of his remorseless nature at Paris, “the extent either of his ability
or his wickedness was at this time known to none, and perhaps not even
suspected by himself.” Of all the lessons derived from the history
of human passion, says Lavalette, the most important is the utter
impossibility which even the best men will always experience of stopping,
if they are once led into the path of error. If, a few years before they
were perpetrated, the crimes of the first French Revolution, he goes on
to surmise, could have been portrayed to those who committed them, “even
Robespierre himself would have recoiled with horror.” Men, in the case
suggested, are seduced at first by plausible theories, which their heated
imaginations represent as beneficial and easy of execution: “they advance
unconsciously from errors to faults, and from faults to crimes, till
sensibility is destroyed by the habitual spectacle of guilt, and the most
savage atrocities come to be dignified by the name of state policy.”
The world, and the spirit of the world, observes Sir Fowell Buxton in
one of his letters, are very insidious; “and more than once I have
seen a person who, as a youth, was single-eyed and single-hearted, and
who, to any one who supposed he might glide into laxity of zeal, would
have said, ‘Am I a dog?’ in maturer age become, if not a lover of the
vices of the world, at least a tolerator of its vanities.” But as M. de
Sainte-Beuve sententiously puts it, in one of his maxims after the manner
of La Rochefoucauld, “La plupart des défauts qui éclatent dans la seconde
moitié de la vie existaient en nous tout formés bien auparavant; mais
ils étaient masqués, en quelque sorte, par la pudeur de la jeunesse.”
The faults of after-life were there, and only the modest reserve and
self-restraint of youth kept them under cover. With riper years comes
less regard for others, and the cover is taken off.
A clerical essayist on “Future Years,” “can well believe,” he tells us,
“that many a man, could he have a glimpse in innocent youth of what he
will be twenty or thirty years after, would pray in anguish to be taken
before coming to _that_!” “Mansie Wauch’s glimpse of destitution was bad
enough; but a million times worse is a glimpse of hardened and unabashed
sin and shame.” And it would be no comfort, we are reminded—it would be
an aggravation in that view—to think that by the time you have reached
that miserable point, you will have grown pretty well reconciled to
it—_that_ being the worst of all.
Hazael stands out in large type, black letter type, or red letter, if
you will—the hue of blood—a degraded instance of the degrading power of
guilt—a warning of the stealthy yet swift aggression of criminal impulse,
or criminal policy, seducing, subduing, and transforming its subjects,—
“Till creatures born,
For good (whose hearts kind Pity nursed)
Will act the direst crimes they cursed
But yester-morn.”
_THE OPEN RIGHT HAND’S SECRET FROM THE LEFT._
ST. MATTHEW vi. 3.
To some of us, to very many, it may seem that the Sermon might well be on
a Mount, that set forth such a text as this: “But when thou doest alms,
let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” The atmosphere is
of other altitudes than here below. We may not sound a trumpet before
us, as the hypocrites did in the synagogue and in the streets, to have
glory of men; and verily, every man his own trumpeter, they had their
reward. But as to keeping our open-handed doles and donations a secret,
as it were, from our other self; as to concealing from the left hand
the furtive bounties and stealthy almsgiving of the right, that is a
practical transcendentalism mostly undreamt of in our philosophy.
Yet are there, and ever will be, those—else had this earth of ours lost
the salt of the earth, and wherewith then should it be salted?—who—
“Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.”
The larger number of benefactors, who, as the caustic French wit,
Chamfort, puts it, pretend to conceal themselves after effecting a deed
of kindness, betake themselves to flight and a hiding-place only as
Virgil’s Galatea did, with a decided wish to be seen first: _Et se cupit
ante videri._ Another of Chamfort’s cynical _maximes et pensées_ runs
thus: “Il y a peu de bienfaiteurs qui ne disent comme Satan, _Si cadens
adoraveris me_.” Whom the vulgar succour, they oppress, says Crabbe. They
have as little sympathy with, or interest in, the rule of keeping the
right hand’s largesse a secret from the left, as with Peter of Aragon’s
famous refusal to let Pope Martin IV know what were his designs against
the infidel. Peter implored the blessing of the Holy Father on his scheme
of action; “but if he thought his right hand knew his secret, he would
cut it off, lest it should betray it to his left.” And the vulgar mean
the commonalty, the many, the _polloi_. The doer of good, therefore, who
does it by stealth, is the exception to a rule; and as an exception he is
treated in literature and life as what is called a “character.” Goldsmith
makes a highly pronounced character of his man in black, whose hand is
open as day to melting charity, while he professes to keep it closed
tight as wax and hard as steel. He bullies in words a petitioner for
aid, while he is but studying what method he shall take to relieve him
unobserved. “He had, however,” writes the Chinese citizen of the world,
“no easy part to act, as he was obliged to preserve the appearance of
ill-nature before me, and yet relieve himself by relieving the sailor.”
And by contrivance he gains his end. The mandarin’s curiosity to know
“what could be his motives for thus concealing virtues which others take
such pains to display,” is natural, and finds natural expression; and
thereby hangs the tale of the “reluctantly good” Man in Black. Smollett,
again, makes one of his heroes, though young and pleasure-loving,
retrench his expenses in order to help the needy: “Numberless were the
objects to which he extended his charity in private. Indeed, he exerted
this virtue in secret, not only on account of avoiding the charge of
ostentation, but also because he was ashamed of being detected in such
an awkward, unfashionable practice by the censorious observers of this
humane generation. In this particular he seemed to confound the ideas of
virtue and vice; for he did good as other people do evil, by stealth; and
was [like the man in black] so capricious in point of behaviour, that
frequently, in public, he wagged his tongue in satirical animadversions
upon that poverty which his hand had, in private, relieved.” It cannot be
affirmed of him that he exemplified, in detail, all the attributes of a
portrait from life, but after death, by Cowper; but some of them he did:
“Yet was thy liberality discreet,
Nice in its choice, and of a tempered heat;
And though in act unwearied, _secret still_,
As in some solitude the summer rill
Refreshes, where it winds, the faded green,
And cheers the drooping flowers, _unheard_, _unseen_.”
When a biographer can accredit the subject of his narrative with a
disposition to hide his bounty, he is usually apt enough to catch at so
catching a quality. Wellington, we are told, though his name so rarely
figured on subscription lists, was very liberal in his charities, and was
not unfrequently victimized by impostors. During the Irish famine he is
said to have distributed at least £10,000 among the relief committees;
but “he never said a word about it at Exeter Hall.” Free gifts by
stealth are often characteristic of such natures as Byron’s; of whom,
for instance, we read that, soon after Lord Falkland’s death, the poet
reminded the unfortunate widow that he was to be godfather to her infant
[Byron a sponsor!—but let that pass]; and that after the “christening” he
inserted a five-hundred pound note in a breakfast cup; but in so cautious
a manner that it was not discovered until he had left the house.
Montesquieu was even hard and harsh in his repudiation of thanks from
those he helped; his kindness was accordingly (to speak by quibble) less
than kind; insomuch that one critic recognises in him “un de ces dieux
bienfaiteurs de l’humanité, mais qui n’en partagent point la tendresse.”
Grimm is another example of a satirical tongue with an open hand, only
the hand was opened behind his own back: _il sut être bienveillant en
secret_. Amid James Watt’s donations in aid of sound and useful learning,
testifies one biographer, were not wanting others prescribed by true
religion, for the consolation of the poor, and relief of the afflicted;
but these works were done in secret, and with injunctions that his name
should not be made known. Goethe seems to have preserved profound secrecy
with respect to some signal exercises of his beneficence. Cowper tells
Unwin, in one of his letters, that a recent endeavour of that good pastor
to relieve the indigent of his flock would probably have succeeded better
“had it been an affair of more notoriety than merely to furnish a few
poor fellows with a little fuel to preserve their extremities from the
frost.” “Men really pious delight in doing good by stealth;[30] but
nothing less than an ostentatious display of bounty will satisfy mankind
in general.” The Olney bard, in after years, had pleasant dealings with
a signal exemplar of the benefactor by stealth. He was made the almoner
of a charitable stranger, to whom he thus refers in a letter to John
Newton: “Like the subterraneous flue that warms my myrtles, he does good
and is unseen. His injunctions of secrecy are still as rigorous as ever,
and must therefore be observed with the same attention.” A year later: “I
shall probably never see him,” writes Cowper, in relating a fresh tide
of benefactions; but “he will always have a niche in the museum of my
reverential remembrance.” Even without _that_, the Unknown had his reward.
“Charity ever
Finds in the act reward, and needs no trumpet
In the receiver.”
_TO-MORROW._
ST. JAMES iv. 13, 14.
The rich man in the parable was self-complacently far-sighted in his
foresight, when he took stock of his much goods laid up for many years;
but that very night his soul was to be required of him. Take thine ease;
eat, drink, and be merry, was his easy-going style of self-communing:
many are the years in store for thee, and all of these well stored
with whatever makes this life worth the living. And just in the same
easy-going style is pitched the prospective self-assurance of the
worldlings censured by St. James. “Go to now, ye that say, to-day or
to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and
buy, and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the
morrow. For what is your life? it is even a vapour that appeareth for a
little time, and then vanisheth away.” Boast not thyself of to-morrow,
for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. To-day, while it is
called to-day,—hardly this can be called thine. But to-morrow, whose is
that? Even the uttermost sensualist owns it to be none of his, when he
sets up for his motto, at once a reminder to live fast and a _memento
mori_,—Let us eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we die. So far he is
at least verbally wiser than his brethren of the cup and the platter,
whose style is, “Come ye, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves
with strong drink; and to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more
abundant.” Little reck they of the platitude that all flesh is grass,
which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven.
Macbeth’s threefold To-morrow is a triplet that by no means goes
trippingly off the tongue:—
“TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.”
So muses the usurper, besieged in his last fastness, while the cry is
still, _They come_—even the enemy and the avenger; a cry varied by one
of women bewailing their mistress dead. He has supped full of horrors;
and the cry of “The queen, my lord, is dead,” but elicits for response,
“She should have died hereafter; there would have been a time for such a
word.—_To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow._”...
In some such mood was usurping Gloster, on the eve of destruction,
pitching his tent on Bosworth Field, and meditating,—
... “Here will I lie to-night;
[_Soldiers begin to set up the King’s tent._
But where to-morrow?—Well, all’s one for that.”
To the meanest private in rank and file the to-morrow that shall bring on
a battle cannot but be a momentous thought. As his grace of York says, on
the eve of Hotspur’s encounter with the king’s forces at Shrewsbury,—
“To-morrow, good Sir Michael, is a day
Wherein the fortune of ten thousand men
Must ’bide the touch.”
While there’s life there’s hope, and hope is, by the nature of it,
intent on to-morrow. As with hopes, so with fears. And hopes and fears
together make up the sum of what has interest in life. No wonder, then,
if to-morrow is a frequent word with the poet-philosopher of human life;
and that in comedy and in tragedy alike, it serves his turn. Be it a
wedding for to-morrow or an execution for to-morrow, Shakspeare iterates
and reiterates the phrase, with all the dramatic realism that informs
and vivifies his creations. Is it the wedding of Hero with Claudio, for
instance? “When are you married, madam?” asks Ursula of the bride; who,
with affected levity, replies,—
“Why, every day; to-morrow. Come, go in;
I’ll show thee some attires; and have thy counsel,
Which is the best to furnish me to-morrow.”
Little she recks of what is to betide her ere to-morrow dawn. Or is it an
execution? Hear Angelo’s decree against another (quite another) Claudio:
“Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son,
It would be thus with him;—he must die to-morrow.
_Isab._ To-morrow! O, that’s sudden! Spare, him, spare him;
He’s not prepared for death.”
Many scenes later we have the Provost imparting his fate to the doomed
man:—
“Look, here’s the warrant, Claudio, for thy death:
’Tis now dead-midnight, and by eight to-morrow
Thou must be made immortal.”
Presently the disguised duke comes in, and asks of the Provost,—
“Have you no countermand for Claudio yet,
But he must die to-morrow?
_Prov._ None, sir; none.”
One may wonder whether Macbeth, brooding on the vague and vasty gloom of
that word, bethought him of the fatal first use of it in his incipient
designs against his sovran. The gracious Duncan, he tells his wife, on
reaching home, is to become his guest to-night:
“_Lady M._ And when goes hence?
_Macb._ To-morrow,—as he purposes.
_Lady M._ O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!”
Reason good, or rather, in a bad sense, reason of the worst, had Macbeth
to brood in after-days, when the morrow that never came to Duncan,
had come blood-stained to _him_,—on the far-reaching capacities of
so memorable a phrase. But from Shakspeare turn to other sources of
illustration.
Truth as well as pathos has been justly ascribed to the following
expansion of a very natural sentiment—“the fear of personal oblivion
in one’s own home”—artistically rendered by one of a gifted family of
artists:
“I listened to their honest chat;
Said one: ‘To-morrow we shall be
Plod, plod along the featureless sands
And coasting miles and miles of sea.’
Said one: ‘Before the turn of tide
We will achieve the eyrie-seat.’
Said one: ‘To-morrow shall be like
To-day, but much more sweet.’
‘To-morrow,’ said they, strong with hope,
And dwelt upon the pleasant way;
‘To-morrow,’ cried they, one and all,
While no one spoke of yesterday.
Then life stood still at blessed noon,
I, only I, had passed away:
‘To-morrow and to-day,’ they cried:
I was of yesterday.”
It is a critical point in Mr. Charles Reade’s story of what he calls very
hard cash, when Noah Skinner, the fraudulent banker’s clerk, old and
dying, proposes to himself, and resolves to deliver up, to-morrow, the
receipt for fourteen thousand pounds, his criminal possession and crafty
retention of which has caused such profound and wide-spread misery.
“A sleepy languor now came over him; ... but his resolution remained
unshaken; by-and-by waking up from a sort of heavy dose, he took, as it
were a last look at the receipt, and murmured, ‘My head, how heavy it
feels.’ But presently he roused himself, full of his penitent resolution,
and murmured again brokenly, ‘I’ll—take it to—Pembroke-street to—morrow:
to—mor—row.” Fool—like other us fools of nature—that night his soul was
required of him. The to-morrow found him, and so did the detectives, dead.
Among other visitors and applicants at the mystical Intelligence Office
thrown open to our gaze by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there totters hastily
in a grandfatherly personage, so earnest in his uniform alacrity that
his white hair floats backwards as he hurries up to the desk, while his
dim eyes catch a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This
venerable figure explains that he is in search of To-morrow.
“I have spent all my life in pursuit of it,” adds the sage old gentleman,
“being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store
for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste, for
unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally
escape me.”
“This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend,” said the Man of
Intelligence, “is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father
into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit, and you will
doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts which you expect,
he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays.”
The grandsire is obliged to content himself with this enigmatical
response, and hastens forth with a quick clatter of his staff upon the
floor; and as he disappears, a little boy scampers through the door in
chase of a butterfly, which has got astray amid the barren sunshine of
the city. Had the old gentleman, suggests our ever-suggestive moralist,
been shrewder, he might have detected To-morrow under the semblance of
that gaudy insect.
_J’ai vécu_—I managed to keep alive—was the Abbé Siéyès’ answer to those
who, in after days, asked him how he spent his time in the Reign of
Terror. And it is in allusion to his position at that season of peril,
when no one could reckon on a morrow—_nul ne pouvait se promettre un
lendemain_—that he quotes the _vers charmants_ made in 1708 by Maucroix,
then fourscore and upwards:—
“Chaque jour est un bien que du Ciel je reçoi!
Jouissons aujourd’hui de celui qu’il nous donne:
Il n’appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu’à moi,
Et celui de demain n’appartient à personne.”
“What shall we be doing to-morrow at this time?” said Ducos, as the
Girondins were whiling away their last evening here on earth. And each of
them replied as the humour took him, or the subject impressed him. The
favourite answer seems to have been, We shall sleep after the fatigues
of the day. To some the feeling may have been, too literally and very
bitterly, what Wordsworth versified as he gazed from Rydal Mount on a
slowly-sinking star:
“We struggle with our fate,
While health, power, glory, from their height decline,
Depressed; and then extinguished; and our state,
In this, how different, lost Star, from thine,
That no to-morrow shall our beams restore!”
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. For some time had the Emperor
Francis—Maria Theresa’s consort—been threatened with an apoplexy, when,
on the morning of the 18th of August, 1764, being pressed by his sister
to be blooded, he answered, “I am engaged this evening to sup with
Joseph, and will not disappoint him; but I promise you I will be blooded
to-morrow.” At the opera in the evening he was taken ill. Retiring, he
was struck with apoplexy, and died at Joseph’s feet, for he had fallen
from Joseph’s arms. At his feet—like one of old time—he bowed, he fell,
he lay down: at his feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell
down dead.
Boast not thyself of to-morrow. Hardly less hackneyed in the ear of
scholar and schoolboy, yet hardly less impressive as truisms with
ever-living truth in them, are Horace’s
Quis scit an adjiciant hodiernæ crastina summæ
Tempora Di superi?
(who knows whether the powers above will add a morrow to the day that now
is?), and Seneca’s Never was man so in favour with the gods as to be able
to promise himself a morrow:
Nemo tam divos habuit faventes,
Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri.
When Archias, the polemarch at Thebes, dissolved in wine and pleasure,
received from his pontifical namesake at Athens a full and particular
account by letter of the conspiracy of Pelopidas and the exiles, who were
even then counting the minutes ere they struck the blow,—although the
messenger expressly urged his excellency to read the missive forthwith,
as the contents were of instant import, Archias only smiled a tipsy
smile, and said, “Business to-morrow.” Then he put the unopened letter
under the bolster of his couch, and resumed his colloquy with his host,
Philidias, who was in the plot, and who was taking good care to ply the
polemarch with wine. Business to-morrow. To-morrow as he purposed! Oh,
never should sun that morrow see.
_Si hodie non es paratus, quo modo cras eris? CRAS est dies incertus:
et qui scis si crastinum habebis_? To-morrow, in this its prospective,
procrastinating sense, is denounced by Mr. Sala, with all due asperity,
as a wretched, cowardly, idiotic subterfuge and apology—a “suicidal
delusion and pitfall.” Yes, to-morrow I will begin to learn Syro-Chaldaic
(we overhear him saying): I will read the novel of the day to-day.
To-morrow I will dine on a mutton-chop and a glass of water. To-day I
will ask the _chef_ at the club to send me up a pretty little dinner,
not forgetting that irresistible _choufleur au gratin_, and bid the
butler bring me that curious pommard with the iron-grey seal. To-morrow
I will finish my _magnum opus_, my “Treatise on the Books of Job and
Ecclesiastes in their relation to Human Wisdom and Knowledge.” To-day
flippant rubbish or frothy egotism shall flow from my pen. To-morrow I
will pay my tailor. To-day I will order a new coat. In fine: “To-morrow I
will atone for the wrong, and pray for strength to continue in the right.
To-day I will follow my devices, and listen to the promptings of the
world, the flesh, and the devil. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.”
For many years, the late Alfred de Vigny continued slowly amassing
poetical materials, though publishing nothing, and murmuring always, like
André Chenier,—
“Rien n’est fait aujourd’hui, tout sera fait _demain_.”
The morrow has come, wrote the _Journal des Débats_, in recording his
death, and his artist hands are cold in the grave.
Says the Cordelier to the condemned Thief in Mat Prior’s derry-down
ballad,—
“Courage, friend; to-day is your period of sorrow;
And things will go better, believe me, to-morrow.”
But what says the Thief in reply?
“To-morrow? our hero replied in a fright:
He that’s hanged before noon, ought to think of to-night.”
But Prior will supply us with more than one study of the subject. Here is
a variation, for instance, in matter, manner, and metre:—
“The hoary fool, who many days
Has struggled with continued sorrow,
Renews his hope, and blindly lays
The desperate bet upon to-morrow.
“To-morrow comes; ’tis noon, ’tis night;
This day like all the former flies:
Yet on he runs, to seek delight
To-morrow, till to-night he dies.”
The gaming allusion of the first stanza reminds us of the picture of
a certain devotee at the _roulette_ table at Hombourg, who kept his
seat—tranquil, immovable, vigilant,—the Napoleon of _roulette_; in whose
victorious progress Marengos and Austerlitzes succeeded each other, as
if Moscow and the Beresina were phantoms—as if to-morrow would never
come. To-morrow; ay, that dread to-morrow that comes to all: the fateful
_Demain_ of Victor:
“Demain est la sapin du trône,
Aujourd’hui c’en est le velours.”
Yes, to-morrow is the coarse deal, with its ten sacks, that forms the
framework of the throne, as to-day is its velvet and gilding.
“Demain c’est le coursier qui s’abat plein d’écume;
Demain, O conquérant, c’est Moscou qui s’allume
La nuit comme un flambeau:
C’est not’ vieille garde qui jonche au lointain la plaine,
Demain c’est Waterloo! Demain c’est Ste. Helène!
Demain c’est le tombeau!”
And yet to-morrow was, for good or bad, for better for worse, a favourite
phrase with Napoleon. His last words to Murat at nightfall, in the hope
of battle with the Russians on the Dwina next day, were, “To-morrow, at
five, the sun of Austerlitz!” After the combat of Reichenbach, which lost
him Duroc, he sat alone, in moody meditation, neither speaking nor to be
spoken with; appealed to in vain for orders by Caulaincourt and Maret:
“To-morrow—everything,” was the only answer their most urgent demands
could wring from him, in his hour of dejection and theirs of need. In
another mood was the emperor when, after Leipsic, he pressed the Austrian
cabinet to side with him, and at once. If they were wise, he said, they
would do so forthwith. They could do so, he told their representative,
that evening. To-morrow it might perhaps be too late; for who could
foretell the events of to-morrow?
So thought Sunderland, in that “agony of terror,” almost over-wrought
or over-coloured, perhaps, by Macaulay, which impelled him to resign
office, in a sort of frenzied haste. He had asked some of his friends to
come to his house that he might consult them; they came at the appointed
time, but found that he had gone to Kensington, and had left word that he
should soon be back. When he joined them, they observed that he had not
the gold key which is the badge of the Lord Chamberlain, and asked where
it was. “At Kensington,” answered Sunderland. They found that he had
tendered his resignation, and that it had been, after a long struggle,
accepted. They blamed his haste, and told him that since he had summoned
them to advise him on that day, he might at least have waited till the
morrow. “To-morrow,” he exclaimed “would have ruined me. To-night has
saved me.”
A signal contrast the despairing minister presents to the poet’s picture
of credulous hope which ever promises a morrow better than to-day (like
the voluptuaries branded by the Hebrew prophet, who hug themselves in the
assurance that To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant):
... “Credula vitam
Spes fovet, ac melius cras fore semper ait.”
They say that To-morrow never comes. The great Greek father with the
golden mouth seems to have based an ethical warning on this thought,
when he bids us defer not till to-morrow, for to-morrow is a vanishing
quantity. Μὴ εἰς τὴν αὔριον ἀναβάλλου· ἡ γὰρ αὔριον οὐδέ ποτε λαμβάνει
τέγος. The moral is one with that of the Latin satirist—though _he_ makes
to-morrow come fast enough, one _per diem_,—and go quite as fast as it
came:
... “Cum lux altera venit,
Jam cras hesternum consumpsimus; ecce aliud cras
Egerit hys annos.”
Matter-of-fact people will tell you that To-morrow does come, and fix
by their stop-watch the instant of its arrival. Nay, they can appeal to
the _primus inter poetas_ for poetical verification of their view. Says
the Messenger to the Provost, while it is yet dark, on the morning which
is appointed to be Claudio’s last, “Good morrow; for, as I take it, it
is almost day.” And so with the peers who enter sleepless King Henry’s
chamber, at the hour they name:
“_Warwick._ Many good morrows to your majesty.
_K. Hen._ Is it good morrow, lords?
_War._ ’Tis one o’clock, and past.
_K. Hen._ Why then, good morrow to you all, my lords.”
But, in its own sense, the saying holds good, and is good sense too,
that To-morrow never comes. One might take for emblem of its import the
touching story told by Southey, of a lady on the point of marriage, whose
affianced husband usually travelled by the stage-coach to visit her, and
who, going one day to meet him, found instead of her betrothed an old
friend, despatched to announce to her his sudden death. She uttered a
scream, and piteously exclaimed, “He is dead!” But then all consciousness
of the affliction that had befallen her ceased. From that fatal moment
she had daily, for fifty years, at the time Dr. Uwins wrote, and “in all
seasons, traversed the distance of a few miles, where she expected her
future husband to alight from the coach; and every day [adds the doctor,
writing in the then present tense] she utters in a plaintive tone, “He is
not come yet! I will return to-morrow.” _To-morrow, and to-morrow, and
to-morrow_—that to her never was, but always was to be.
Why, and how, To-morrow never comes, might be discussed in a strain of
transcendental metaphysics. Mr. Carlyle, in a memorable chapter headed
Natural Supernaturalism, expounds in his mystic suggestive way the
philosophic thesis, that Time and Space are but creations of God,—with
whom as it is a universal HERE, so it is an everlasting Now. And as
regards Man: is the Past annihilated, or only past? is the Future
non-extant, or only future? “The curtains of Yesterday drop down, and the
curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both _are_.
Pierce through the Time-element, glance into the Eternal.”
It is but a glance the strongest eye can take, in that direction. But
even a glance may secure a glimpse of things which filmy, unpurged,
downlooking eye hath not seen, nor ear heard—for they seem to involve
unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. To-morrow
thou hast never seen; to thee it has never come. But it shall come.
And it that shall come, will come; and will not tarry. Wait the great
teacher, Death. _CRAS iterabimus æquor_: to-morrow we shall be sounding
our dim and perilous way across the dark waters of that fathomless sea.
If the prospect appals, happy he that can adapt to his own hopes, in
serenest confidence, yet eager anticipation,—as he speculates on what a
day, and the Better Land, may bring forth: To-morrow, to fresh woods and
pastures new.
_THE DIVINE AUTHORSHIP OF ORDER._
1 CORINTHIANS xiv. 33, 40.
Practically, the amount of confusion prevalent in the church of Corinth,
arising from irregularities incident to the exercise of “tongues,”
and to the undisciplined energies of a mixed congregation, appears to
have almost rivalled the disorder in the theatre of Ephesus, when the
whole city was filled with confusion, and some cried one thing, and
some another; for the assembly was confused, and the most part knew
not wherefore they were come together. So, when the whole church of
Corinth were come together into one place, and all spoke with tongues,
to outsiders that for the nonce stepped inside they must appear mad. All
things were done indecorously and in most admired disorder. Now, St. Paul
was for having all things done decently and in order. “For God is not the
author of confusion, but of peace.” Order is Heaven’s first law. The same
apostle is prompt to remind the Thessalonians that he behaved himself not
disorderly among them; and this he did because he heard that there were
some among them which walked disorderly—ἀτάκτως. The apostolic canon for
both Corinth and Thessalonica, and all other churches, is, Πὰντα δὲ κατὰ
τάξιν γινέσθω. Let them all walk by this same rule, and all mind this
same thing.
* * * * *
As with the sect of Pythagoreans, virtue was defined to be a harmony,
unity, and an endeavour to resemble the Deity,—so the whole life of man,
they taught, should be an attempt to represent on earth the beauty and
harmony displayed in the order of the universe. It was the doctrine of
Pythagoras himself, that by action as well as by thought the individual
as well as the state should represent in themselves “an image of the
order and harmony by which the world was sustained and regulated.” But as
Prior puts it, when he considers the heavens, the starry worlds of God’s
ordaining, or ordering,—
“How mean the order and perfection sought
In the best product of the human thought,
Compared to the great harmony that reigns
In what the Spirit of the world ordains!”
Lord Lytton suggestively pictures to us one of his characters alone in
the streets by night, striding noiselessly on, under the gaslights, under
the stars; gaslights primly marshalled at equidistance; stars that seem
to the naked eye dotted over space without symmetry or method—“Man’s
order, near and finite, is so distinct; the Maker’s order, remote,
infinite, is so beyond man’s comprehension of what _is_ order.” Chauncy
Hare Townshend expresses the same idea in an address to the stars:—
“Distance deceives the sight. Ye move and sway
With life; yet are your hoverings on the brink
Of ruin but the freedom and the play
That binds your dance of beauty, link to link,
In woven joy that shall not fail nor shrink.
... Thrones arise and sink,
Earth is transformed beneath you: ye remain,
Clasping distracted man with Order’s sacred chain.”
So Wordsworth, addressing as it were a deified idea of Duty, pays this
homage:—
... “Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through Thee are fresh and strong.”
Well may Hooker speculate on what would become of man, were Nature to
intermit her course, and leave altogether, though but for a while, the
observation of her own laws; if the frame of that heavenly arch erected
over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres
should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn
themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of
heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should, as it
were through a languishing faintness, begin to stand and rest himself;
if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of
the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture—“See we not
plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of Nature is the stay
of the whole world?” Again to quote from “The Mystery of Evil,” the same
star-gazer speaking:—
“Do I not climb in you, O blessèd host,
The way of symbols, shining steps to God?
When most man knows you, he is certain most
One law unswerving reigns from star to clod.”
“Of law,” says Hooker, at the close of his first book of Ecclesiastical
Polity, with an eloquence which has ever been most admired by the
most admirable masters of English prose,—“Of law there can be no less
acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the
harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the
very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from
her power: both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever,
though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent,
admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.” Considering when he
wrote, what he wrote, and to what purpose and in what spirit he wrote,
there seems to us a beautiful consistency in Richard Hooker’s deathbed
meditations, as related in the familiar memoir by Izaak Walton. Found
by his trustiest visitor, “deep in contemplation, and not inclinable to
discourse,” and asked what was the subject of his present thoughts, he
replied, “That he was meditating the number and nature of angels, and
their blessed obedience and order, without which, peace could not be in
heaven; and oh, that it might be so on earth!”
There is not, affirms a modern divine, a corner of the world, nor
a process of nature, nor a piece of God’s handiwork of any kind
whatever, on which His love of order is not written with a plainness
not to be mistaken. “System and method, law and order, symmetry and
punctuality, are conspicuous everywhere; indicating at once the value
attached to these things in the mind of God, and his dislike for their
opposites—confusion, fitfulness, irregularity.” Nor is the Divine love of
order a quality that ever leads to stiffness, formality, or monotony; for
it is shown to be constantly associated with beauty, variety, and freedom.
M. Jules Simon interpolates into his argument for the vast preponderance
of good over evil in the world, a casually expressed identification of
good with order: “le bien, c’est-à-dire, l’ordre, car dans le monde le
bien et l’ordre ne font qu’un.”
“Some think Disorder means God’s moral plan;
But Evil oscillates in certain bounds.
Ten thousand causes check the rage of man:
His utmost crimes a wall of brass surrounds;
Mere weariness exhausts War’s yelling hounds;
And, if all fail, Death comes with his great wave,
That levels all the hollows and the mounds
Of human life. Who then shall be so brave
As of Confusion found in God’s large thoughts to rave?”
Readers familiar with the writings first and last of Mr. Carlyle, will
readily call to mind many a terse utterance in vindication of the Divine
authorship and Divine authority of order. _Dis_order he pronounces to be
a thing which “veracious created Nature, even because it is not Chaos and
a waste-whirling baseless Phantasm,” rejects and disowns. “_Dis_order,
insane by the nature of it, is the hatefullest of things to man, who
lives by sanity and by order.” “All Anarchy, all evil, all injustice,
is, by the nature of it, ... suicidal, and cannot endure.” “Arrangement
is indispensable to man; Arrangement, were it grounded only on that old
primary evangel of Force, with Sceptre in the shape of Hammer!” Such
sentences admit of almost infinite multiplication. “Anarchy, hateful as
Death, is abhorrent to the whole nature of man; and so must itself soon
die.” Hence this philosopher’s partiality for “heroes,” even of the least
estimable type, provided they have will and force to replace confusion
by order. Cortès is not among the specified Heroes of his special
Hero-worship; but he deserves a place by reason of the preamble to that
code of ordinances, as the conqueror of Mexico himself terms them, which
he set forth in restraint of his army: the essential purport of this
preamble being, that in all institutions, whether Divine or human (if the
latter have any worth), order is the great law.
It was in support of the cause of social order that Luther took to
exposing the dangers due to ignorant innovators, and strenuously declared
that “God Himself constituted certain authorities to direct the world;
for it is a great feature in His magnificent system, that there shall be
order here below.” Doctor Martin may, in this respect, be called a man
after our Hero-worshipper’s own heart; such another as the one of whom
he wrote,—“Wheresoever Disorder may stand or lie, let it have a care;
here is the man that has declared war with it, that will never make peace
with it. Man is the Missionary of Order; he is the servant, not of the
Devil and of Chaos, but of God and the universe.” And Christian doctrine
teaches that the order and beauty of the outward world are symbols of
that inward order and symmetry, that peace and purity of heart, that
universal harmony between God’s will and man’s will, which it is one
great object of Christianity to establish.
“Then quick I ran my glance about the globe,
To find Religion link’d with Order’s aim,
Ruling by love and light,”
says the Christian poet, who has, however, to deplore the disappointments
of his quest. Of all orderly things that are beautiful in God’s eyes, it
has been said, there can be none so beautiful as an orderly or holy soul.
“Once in this world the sight presented itself in spotless beauty and
brilliancy.” Everything there seen was in its place: reason, conscience,
will, feeling, instinct, appetite, “all most beautifully arranged; each
was in perfect health, and all were in thorough harmony with the will of
God.” But that was God manifest in the flesh. Order incarnate. Without
Him, in the material world, was not anything made that was made. Apart
from Him, the moral world is without form and void, and darkness covers
the face of its deep. Order, in fine, is the indispensable postulate of
every given cosmos. In the words of Schiller—
“It is the keystone of the world’s wide arch;
The one sustaining and sustained by all,
Which, if it fall, brings all in ruin down.”
Of the Church as a family, George Herbert, ever quaint in his devotion,
sings or says—after a depreciation of his own unruly thoughts:
“But, Lord, the house and family are Thine,
Though some of them repine.
Turn out these wranglers, which defile Thy seat:
For where Thou dwellest all is neat.
“First Peace and Silence all disputes control,
Then _Order_ plays the soul;
And giving all things their set forms and hours,
Makes of wild woods sweet walks and bowers.”
So Dryden traces to harmony this universal frame—a cosmos evolved from
chaos, from a heap of jarring atoms that, at the Divine summons,—
“_In order_ to their stations leap.”
Shaftesbury contends that the admiration and love of order, in whatever
kind, is “naturally improving to the temper, advantageous to social
affection, and highly assistant to virtue—which is itself no other than
the love of order and beauty in society.” In the meanest subjects of the
world, he goes on to say, the appearance of order gains upon the mind,
and draws the affections towards it. “For ’tis impossible that such a
Divine order should be contemplated without ecstasy and rapture; since
in the common subjects of science, and the liberal arts, whatever is
according to just harmony and proportion is so transporting to those
who have any knowledge or practice in the kind.” In another place he
elaborates the thesis, that whatever things have order, have unity of
design, and concur in one, and are parts constituent of one whole—just as
a symphony is a certain system of proportioned sounds. It is noteworthy
that Pythagoras deduced his celebrated theory of the music of the
spheres from his assumption that everything in the great arrangement
(κόσμος) which he called the world must be harmoniously arranged (and
that, accordingly, the planets were at the same relative distance as the
divisions of the monochord, etc.) Divine as the philosophy of Plato is
commonly esteemed, there are, on the other hand, occasional glimpses in
it of what one of his commentators calls the “appalling doctrine” that
God alternately governs and forsakes the world—the world when he forsakes
it, suddenly changing its orbit, so that all things are in disorder, and
mundane existence is totally disarranged: “only after some time do things
settle down to a sort of order, though of a very imperfect kind.” Spinoza
takes order to be a thing of the imagination, as also he does right and
wrong, useful and hurtful—these being merely such, he argues, in relation
to us. But this would not prevent him, from his stand-point, assenting to
the ethical import of order—as expounded for instance by the Shakspearian
Ulysses:
“The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place, ...
Office, and custom, in all line of order....
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy.”
Order, writes Southey, is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body,
the peace of the city, the security of the State. Diogenes held with the
Dorian lawgivers, that order (κόσμος) is the basis of civil government.
As the beams to a house, it has been said, as the bones to the microcosm
of man, so is order to all things. Balzac is treating of _harmonie
politique_ when he says that harmony is the poetry of order, and that
“the peoples” have a keen need of order. The racy author of the “Biglow
Papers” discourses in his shrewd, homely style, on the indispensableness
(not that he uses such a word) of orderly established law:—
“Onsettle _that_, an’ all the world goes whiz,
A screw is loose in everything there is.”
Mr. Carlyle, in his apology for Knox in the act of pulling down
cathedrals—as if he were a seditious rioting demagogue—urges that he was
precisely the reverse of that. Knox, he maintains, wanted no pulling down
of stone edifices, but wanted leprosy and darkness to be thrown out of
the lives of men. “Tumult was not his element; it was the tragic feature
of his life that he was forced to dwell so much on that.” Every such man,
on Mr. Carlyle’s showing, is the born enemy of disorder—hates to be in
it; but what then? “Smooth falsehood is not order; it is the general sum
total of disorder. Order is truth—each thing standing on the basis that
belongs to it. Order and falsehood cannot subsist together.” And it is
in treating of another of his heroes elect, that the same philosopher
contends on behalf of such others of them as seem to have worked as
revolutionary men, that nevertheless every great man, every genuine
man, is by the nature of him a son of order, not of disorder—a seeming
anarchist, yet to his whole soul anarchy is hostile, hateful. “His
mission is Order; every man’s is. He is here to make what was disorderly,
chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order.” Is
not all work of man in this world, we are emphatically asked, a making of
Order?
The Abbé Duval, writing to Mme. Récamier, as her spiritual counsellor,
bids her engrave this elementary truth on her heart of hearts: “Gravez
au-dedans de vous-même cette première vérité que la religion veut
_l’ordre_ avant tout.” Whatsoever doth make manifest is light, and it
is light that reveals a cosmos where before, in the words of Thomson, a
formless grey confusion covered all:—
“As when of old (so sung the Hebrew bard)
Light, uncollected, through the chaos urged
Its infant way; nor Order yet had drawn
His lovely train from out the dubious gloom.”
That a scrupulous regard for order, in some sort, is nevertheless
compatible with a very low standard of moral worth, is recognised and
illustrated by poet Crabbe—prose-poet the good parson was, not quite in
the accepted sense—in a series of pithy, if not pungent rhymes:—
“The love of order—I the thing receive
From reverend men, and I in part believe—
Shows a clear mind and clean, and whoso needs
This love, but seldom in the world succeeds;
And yet with this some other love must be,
Ere I can fully to the fact agree;
Valour and study may by order gain,
By order sovereigns hold more steady reign;
Through all the tribes of nature order runs,
And rules around in systems and in suns:
Still has the love of order found a place
With all that’s low, degrading, mean, and base,
With all that merits scorn, and all that meets disgrace:
In the cold miser, of all change afraid,
In pompous men in public seats obeyed;
In humble placemen, heralds, solemn drones;
...
Order to these is armour and defence,
And love of method serves in lack of sense.”
Exceptions allowed for, as in every rule, yet is the rule sufficiently
approved, that order is heaven’s first law. The poet of “The Angel in
the House” in style, and spirit, and sentiment, how salient a contrast
to Crabbe, utters the conceit (_poeticè_) in one of his tender preludes,
that—
“Sweet Order has its draught of bliss
Graced with the pearl of God’s consent,”—
a conceit that allows of wide application, as do many of those of so
suggestive a writer.
But to conclude. When the judicious Hooker—to call him by his
conventional epithet—lay a-dying, he expressed his joy at the near
prospect of entering a World of Order. The author of “The Book of the
Church” emphasises the import of holy Richard’s “placid and profound
contentment,” by reminding us that because he had been employed in
ecclesiastical polemics, and because his life had been passed under the
perpetual discomfort of domestic discord, the happiness of heaven must
have seemed in Hooker’s estimation, to consist primarily in Order, as,
indeed, in all human societies this is the first thing needful.
_SWEET SLEEP, AND ITS FORFEITURE._
PROVERBS iii. 24.
To him that keepeth sound wisdom and instruction is the promise given,
not only that he shall walk in his way safely, and his foot shall not
stumble,—this for daytime and its activities,—but further, as regards
night-time and its contingencies, that when he lies down he shall not
be afraid; yea, he shall lie down, and his sleep shall be sweet. So He
giveth His beloved sleep, of whom the Psalmist said, “I laid me down and
slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.” Surely, in order that one
may pray with full purpose of heart the prayer, Let me die the death of
the righteous, and let my last end be like his! one should live the life
that may warrant the nightly petition, Let me sleep the sleep of the
just, and let mine eyes close quietly in slumber even as his.
Macbeth, within this minute a murderer, _ipso facto_ realizes the
appalling truth, that between him and placid sleep there is, from
henceforth and for evermore, a great gulf fixed, as impassable as abysmal.
“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,⸺’
_Lady M._ What do you mean?
_Macb._ Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house:
‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep; and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more!’”
How sleeps Lady Macbeth after that night? Ask her physician and
waiting-woman, and watch with them the sleep-walking scene. “To bed,
to bed, to bed.” But what avails _that_ to the somnambulist, ever in
semblance washing her hands, and complaining of the smell of blood
upon them still, and that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten
them? Now and then one meets with a sceptic as to lost sleep being the
inevitable sequent upon crime; and no doubt there are exceptions. Mr.
G. Wingrove Cooke, in his letters from Chinese waters, thus describes
the captive Mandarin, Yeh, whose fellow-passenger to Calcutta he was:
“He goes to bed at eight o’clock, and while we are reading or writing
or playing chess, he sleeps the sleep of infancy—an unbroken slumber,
apparently undisturbed by visions of widowed women and wailing orphans.
This man-killer, after slaying his hundred thousand human beings, enjoys
sweeter sleep than an innocent London alderman after a turtle dinner.”
Perhaps that is not saying much,—considering what a turtle dinner
comprehends and superinduces. But the next sentence says a good deal; it
is to be hoped, a great deal too much: “So false are traditions; so false
are the remorseful scenes of Greek and English tragedies.” One would be
sorry, for the dignity of human nature, to believe that all is fiction
the poets tell us of cases in which _non avium citharæque cantus_, or any
other aids and appliances, _somnum reducent_. “Wherefore to me,” asks
Clytemnestra,—
... “is solacing sleep denied?
And honourable rest, the right of all?
So that no medicine of the slumbrous shell,
Brimmed with divinest draughts of melody,
Nor silence under dreamful canopies,
Nor purple cushions of the lofty couch,
May lull this fever for a little while.”
Impressive in history, not romance, as Plutarch tells it, is the story of
Pausanius as a haunted man, from the hour that Cleonice fell dead at his
feet, pierced by his sword. “From that hour he could rest no more.” Her
spectre perturbed him every night. Henceforth, nor poppy, nor mandragora,
nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, could ever medicine him to that
sweet sleep which he owed yesterday. As a guilty spirit says of guilt, in
one of Landor’s fragments,—
“It wakes me many mornings, many nights,
And fields of poppies could not quiet it.”
Modern fiction abounds with examples to the purpose. There is Colonel
Whyte Melville’s remorseful woman of the world bidding her young friend
good night, and meaning it all the more because her own good nights are
dead and gone: “What would I give to yawn as honestly as you do, and to
sleep sound once again, as I used to sleep when I was a girl!” There is
Mr. Trollope’s Lady Mason, so wistfully, so vainly longing for rest—to be
able to lay aside the terrible fatigue of being ever on the watch. From
the burden of that necessity she has never been free since her crime was
first committed. “She had never known true rest. She had not once trusted
herself to sleep without the feeling that her first waking thought would
be one of horror, as the remembrance of her position came upon her.” As
with the royal lady pictured by the laureate,—
“Many a time for hours
In the dead night, grim faces came and went
Before her, or a vague spiritual fear—
Like to some doubtful noise of creaking doors,
Heard by the watcher in a haunted house,
That keeps the rust of murder on the walls—
Held her awake. Or if she slept, she dream’d
An awful dream ...
... and with a cry she woke.
And all this trouble did not pass, but grew.”
There is Donatello, in Hawthorne’s “Transformation,” succumbing to a
stupor, which he mistakes for such drowsiness as he has known in his
innocent past life. There is Albert Maurice, in “Mary of Burgundy,”
gazing on the Vert Gallant of Hannut as he lay in a deep, sweet sleep—so
calm and tranquil, though within the walls of a prison, suffering from
injuries, and exposed to constant danger; gazing with a sense of envy and
regret, “which few, perhaps, can appreciate fully, who have not felt
the sharp tooth of remorse begin its sleepless gnawings on the heart. He
would not have disturbed such slumbers for the world; and, withdrawing
again with a noiseless step, he retired to his own chamber, and cast
himself down upon his bed, to snatch, at least, that heated and disturbed
sleep, which was all the repose that he was ever more to know on earth.”
To such as him can nothing bring back, in the hour and power of darkness,
more than an embittered memory of times
“When that placid sleep came o’er him
Which he ne’er can know again.”
An innocent comforter in a modern tragedy offers a disquieted spirit the
assurance, as regards the object of his disquiet, that “’twill away in
sleep.” But his answer is,—
“No, no! I dare not sleep—for well I know
That then the knife will gleam, the blood will gush,
The form will stiffen!”
From the night of the massacre of Glencoe, Glenlyon, as Macaulay tells
us, was never again the man that he had been before that night. The
form of his countenance was changed; and “in all places, at all hours,
whether he waked or slept, Glencoe was for ever before him.” As with a
distinguished foreigner of a later generation, _Depuis ce moment, point
de sommeil, point de repos; il croyait toujours voir un glaive arrêté sur
sa tête_. In such cases, the sleepers start from broken slumbers, as if
starting back from the edge of a precipice; for,—
“Their whole tranquillity of heart is gone;
The peace wherewith till now they have been blest
Hath taken its departure. In the breast
Fast following thoughts and busy fancies throng;
Their sleep itself is feverish, and possest
With dreams that to the wakeful mind belong.”
“Something like a stupid sleep oppresses me,” writes one of Henry
Mackenzie’s characters; “last night I could not sleep. Where are now
those luxurious slumbers, those wandering dreams of future happiness?
Never shall I know them again.” Falkland avows to Caleb Williams, the
involuntary master of his master’s fatal secret, that “from the hour the
crime was committed” he has not had an hour’s peace: “I became changed
from the happiest into the most miserable being that lives; sleep has
fled from my eyes.” And Caleb Williams himself testifies in an after
chapter, “The ease and light-heartedness of my youth were for ever gone.
The voice of an irresistible necessity had commanded me to ‘sleep no
more.’” They that do murder, says Roscoe’s Violenzia,—
“Never sleep more, never more taste of peace,
Quaff poison in their drink, see knives in the dark,
And ever at their elbow horror walks,
Shaking them like a palsy.”
The bitter contrast—ah, for the change ’twixt now and then!—is forcibly
worded by Bosola in the “Duchess of Malfi”:—
“O sacred innocence, that sweetly sleeps
On turtle’s feathers! whilst a guilty conscience
Is a perspective that foreshows us hell.”
_ONCE DENIED, THRICE DENIED._
ST. MATTHEW xxvi, 69, _sq._
Lie engenders lie. Once committed, the liar has to go on in his course of
lying. It is the penalty of his transgression, or one of the penalties.
To the habitual liar, bronzed and hardened in the custom, till custom
becomes second nature, the penalty may seem no very terrible price
to pay. To him, on the other hand, who, without deliberate intent,
and against his innermost will, is overtaken with such a fault, the
generative power of a first lie to beget others, the necessity of
supporting the first by a second and a third, is a retribution keenly to
be felt, while penitently owned to be most just.
Though it was afar off that Peter followed his Master to the
high-priest’s house, yet he did follow; and, we may be sure, with little
thought, and still less intention, of denying Him even once. But as he
sat by the fire and warmed himself, the identification of him by a
certain maid as certainly a disciple of Christ was boldly met by the
affirmation, or negation, “Woman, I know Him not.” The lie was uttered;
the winged word of falsehood was on its way. And there an end, he
perhaps hoped. But after a little while, another bystander recognised
him, and asserted the damaging recognition, “Thou art also of them.”
Another denial was the consequence: “Man, I am not.” An hour passed
away, and Peter, in sullen misery and bewilderment, self-consciously an
abject coward and confirmed liar, had to deny for the third time Him he
had denied once and again. “Of a truth,” affirmed another of the mixed
company, “this fellow also was with Him; for he is a Galilean.” And
Peter said, “Man, I know not what thou sayest.” And then the cock crew.
And then the Lord turned and looked upon Peter. And at that look—so
upbraidingly expressive, so pathetically recalling recent protestations
of unfaltering allegiance, and the concurrent prediction of lapse and
abandonment—what could Peter do, but with shame and confusion of face,
and with a heart full to bursting, go out, and weep bitterly.
When he thought thereon, he wept: thought of the Master’s look, that
recalled to him the vehement assurance of loyalty met by the foretelling
of his fall. Thought, too, of the graduation of his denials; a first
involving a second, and the second exacting yet a third. The third was
the cost of the first. He had not counted the cost then. He had to pay it
now.
It was part of the prophet’s burden of woes against the doomed city, that
she had “wearied herself with lies.” Easily uttered, they may multiply
at a rate to trouble the teller of them, and weary him, if only with
the necessity of inventing new ones to back the old. He must ever be
devising fresh vouchers for his impaired and imperilled credit. He must
continually be endorsing his forged notes, and forging fresh ones that
will stand inspection. _Fallacia alia aliam trudit._ And this is weary
work.
“En quel gouffre de soins et de perplexité
Nous jette une action faite sans equité.”
And as with actions, so with words. The same speaker of the foregoing
couplet utters elsewhere the lament,—
“Ma fourbe est découverte. Oh! que la vérité
Se peut cacher longtemps avec difficulté!”
So we read in Molière. And Corneille has a play (not original) entirely
devoted to the illustration of this subject, showing _qu’il faut bonne
mémoire acrès qu’on a menti_; the Menteur κατ’ ἐξοχὴν, being one who
_entasse fourbe sur fourbe_, and is constrained by the law of his nature,
at least of habit, which is second nature, to be ever adding to the
heap of lies to which he has committed himself. A Spanish proverb—and
_Le Menteur_ is from the Spanish—declares that “for an honest man half
his wits is enough, while the whole are too little for a knave;” the
ways, that is, as Archbishop Trench expounds the adage, of truth and
uprightness are so simple and plain, that a little wit is abundantly
sufficient for those who walk in them; whereas the ways of falsehood and
fraud are so perplexed and tangled, that sooner or later all the wit of
the cleverest rogue will not preserve him from being entangled therein—a
truth often and wonderfully confirmed in the lives of evil men.
Among the aphorisms of Dean Swift we read: “He who tells a lie is not
sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent
twenty more to maintain that one.”
It has been called the severe, but appropriate, punishment of historians
who desert the paths of truth for those of paradox, to be compelled to
defend the falsehood to which they have committed themselves against the
ever-accumulating evidences of the truth. Mr. Robertson, of Brighton,
feelingly sketches the case of one who, being unprepared and accosted
suddenly, says hastily that which is irreconcileable with strict
truth; then to substantiate and make it look probable, misrepresents
or invents something else; and so has woven round himself a mesh which
will entangle his conscience through many a weary day and many a
sleepless night.[31] One burden laid on fault, he goes on to show, is
that chain of entanglement which seems to drag down to fresh sins. “One
step necessitates many others. One fault leads to another, and crime to
crime. The soul gravitates downward beneath its burden. It was profound
knowledge which prophetically refused to limit Peter’s sin to once.
‘Verily I say unto thee ... thou shalt deny me thrice.’”
Mr. Froude shows us Queen Elizabeth stooping to “a deliberate lie.” At
times, he says, writing of her embarrassed policy in 1565, she “seemed
to struggle with her ignominy, but it was only to flounder deeper into
distraction and dishonour.” In October of that year she publicly denied
that she had encouraged the rebellion in Scotland. In November, we read,
“Never had Elizabeth been in greater danger; and the worst features of
the peril were the creations of her own untruths.” Again, in May, 1566:
“Meanwhile Elizabeth was reaping a harvest of inconveniences for her
exaggerated demonstrations of friendliness” to the Queen of Scots. Mary
taking her at her word, “Vainly Elizabeth struggled to extricate herself
from her dilemma; resentment was still pursuing her for her treachery
in the past autumn.... She could but shuffle and equivocate in a manner
which had become too characteristic.”[32] She was but paying the price of
lies—the being constrained to go on lying still. It is certain, affirms a
popular essayist, that nobody yet ever did anything wrong in this world
without having to tell one or more falsehoods to begin with: the embryo
murderer has to tell a lie about the pistol or dagger, the would-be
suicide about the poison he purchases; and in fine, “the ways down which
the bad ship Wickedness slides to a shoreless ocean must be greased with
lies.”[33]
English reviewers not long since were prompt to recognise in Balzac’s “La
Marâtre,” as revived to Parisian popularity, what they rightly accounted
wonderful, a moral immaculate and beyond reproach. And what is that
moral? “The necessity of a life of lying as a punishment for the one
great lie of a mercenary marriage.” One great lie is put out to interest,
and the interest is compound. One great lie involves a ramification of
others, great or small, if there be comparatives of magnitude in such
matters; and memory, if not conscience, is for ever on the stretch. The
sad expedient of renewed issues is a necessity. As with the involved
victim in one of Crabbe’s Tales:—
“Such is his pain, who, by his debt oppress’d,
Seeks by new bonds a temporary rest.”
To another section, and with another starting-point from Holy Writ, may
be referred some remaining illustrations of the subject.
_LINKED LIES._
GENESIS xxvii. 19-24.
Jacob in Esau’s goodly raiment, and his smooth skin overlaid with
goatskins, was duly prepared for a consistent course of deception.
But the lie upon lie he had to tell before his end was gained,
must have sorely tried what of conscience he then had. The primary
falsehood,—distinctly enounced in answer to his blind sire’s “Who
art thou?” “I am Esau, thy firstborn,” come back from the chase with
the venison Isaac had desired of his firstborn,—this initial lie had
immediately to be backed by another. How had he found it so quickly?
There is something revolting in the style of the unfaltering fabrication
at once ready to hand, “Because the Lord thy God brought it to me.” Then
ensued that solution of the old man’s misgivings by a manual examination
of the disguised pretender; it was Esau’s hirsute skin, sure enough,
though the voice was Jacob’s. But the blessing was given. And even
after that eventful benediction, the patriarch, with a yet lingering
apprehension, renewed the pointed question, in its directest form, “Art
thou my very son Esau?” And Jacob said, “I am.” Lie linked to lie, in a
concatenation accordingly.
_Solent mendaces luere pœnas malefici_, says Phædrus: liars usually pay
the penalty of their guilt. And Mrs. Browning vigorously states one
distinctive penalty, where she speaks of those who—
... “Pay the price
Of lies, by being constrained to lie on still.”
The author of “Romola” powerfully illustrates in that remarkable book
the embarrassments involved in one cowardly departure from truth. In
the chapter headed “Tito’s Dilemma,” the occasion arises for Tito to
fabricate an ingenious lie; an occasion “which circumstance never
fails to beget on tacit falsity.” Many chapters farther on we find him
experiencing the inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves
for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually
determines character; and it becomes a question whether all the resources
of lying will save him from being crushed by the consequences of his
habitual choice. At another juncture we read: “Tito felt more and more
confidence as he went on; the lie was not so difficult when it was once
begun; and as the words fell easily from his lips, they gave him a
sense of power such as men feel when they have begun a muscular feat
successfully.” The penalty is enforced a few pages later. “But he had
borrowed from the terrible usurer Falsehood, and the loan had mounted and
mounted with the years, till he belonged to the usurer, body and soul.”
Again: “To-night he had paid a heavier price than ever to make himself
safe.”[34]
In the American story of “The Gayworthys,” the like moral attaches to the
course of one unhappy woman who lets herself slide, half involuntarily,
into deeper wrong: she holds her peace; she makes herself passive. “Her
very soul lied to itself in its false, bewildered reasonings; that is
the inherent retribution of false souls.” There are some acts of folly,
remarks the most popular, probably, of contemporary English penwomen,
which carry falsehood and dissimulation at their heels as certainly as
the shadows which follow us when we walk towards the evening sun; and we
very rarely swerve from the severe boundary-line of right without being
dragged ever so much farther than we calculated upon across the border.
Corneille’s celebrated play, “Le Menteur,”—but for reading which Molière
asserts his belief that he would never have written a comedy himself,—is
“conveyed” from a Spanish original, and has itself been Englished by
Fielding; the ingenuity of the piece consisting in the manner in which
one lie is made to call for another, until their wholesale employer is
inextricably caught in the toils.
“This is the curse of every evil deed,—
That, propagating still, it brings forth evil,”
laments the elder Piccolomini, in Schiller’s trilogy. The commission of
one wrong, says Owen Feltham, puts a man upon a thousand wrongs, perhaps,
to maintain that one: injury, with injury is defended; and we commit
a greater, to maintain a less. “A lie begets a lie, till generations
succeed.” Mr. Carlyle sternly moralises on the growth of accumulated
falsities,—“sad opulence descending by inheritance, always at compound
interest, and always largely increased by fresh acquirement on such
immensity of standing capital.” One lie, says Owen, must be thatched with
another, or it will soon rain through.
Benvenuto Cellini records in his autobiography, the bitter experiences
he endured in being tempted to lie to the duke, his patron, lest he
should forfeit the favour of the duchess—he who “was always a lover of
truth and an enemy to falsehood, being then under a necessity of telling
lies.” “As I had begun to tell lies, I plunged deeper and deeper into the
mire,”—till a very Slough of Despond it became to him.
Fool that he was, exclaims Mr. Trollope, of one of his characters in
“Framley Parsonage:” “A man can always do right, even though he has done
wrong before. But the previous wrong adds so much difficulty to the
path—a difficulty which increases in tremendous ratio, till a man at last
is choked in his struggling, and is drowned beneath the waters.” Mr.
Thackeray sermonises to the same effect: “And so, my dear sir, seeing
that after committing any infraction of the moral laws, you must tell
lies in order to back yourself out of your scrape, let me ask you whether
you had not better forego the crime, so as to avoid the unavoidable, and
unpleasant, and daily-recurring necessity of the subsequent perjury?” And
the cleverest character this master of social satire ever drew, confesses
how it jarred on her to begin telling lies to a confiding, simple friend:
“But that is the misfortune of beginning with this kind of forgery. When
one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge another to take up the
old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably
multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every day.”
Jeremy Taylor quaintly says of the devil in the ancient oracles, “When
he was put to it at his oracles, and durst not tell a downright lie, and
yet knew not what was truth, many times he was put to the most pitiful
shifts, and trifling equivocations, and acts of knavery, which, when they
were discovered, ... it made him much more contemptible and ridiculous
than if he had said nothing or confessed his ignorance.”
A lie has been called a two-edged sword without a hilt, which is sure
to slip and cut the hand that holds it. “After telling one lie, we
are sure to tell another; and usually, after spinning a silly, very
complicated, and disgusting web, which entangles and chokes us, we find
out that if we had told the truth, it would have been much the easier and
better plan.” Lying is likened, again, to borrowing of money-lenders;
for the credit which we get by it we have always to pay heavily for;
and at last we find that the interest by far exceeds the principal,
and we get so inextricably involved that we never fully recover. “He
who tells a lie,” says Pope, “is not sensible how great a task he
undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain
that one.” Johnson observes that nobody can live long without knowing
that falsehoods of convenience or vanity are very lightly uttered, and
when once uttered are sullenly supported. He reminds us that Boileau,
who desired to be thought a rigorous and steady moralist, having told
a petty lie to Lewis the Fourteenth, continued it afterwards by false
dates, thinking himself obliged in honour to maintain what, when he said
it, was so well received. Pope himself is taxed with similar mendacity
by Mr. de Quincey, who charges him, on a certain literary question,
with knowingly “preparing for himself a dire necessity of falsehood....
Once launched upon such a course, he became pledged and committed to
all the difficulties which it might impose. Desperate necessities would
arise, from which nothing but desperate lying and hard swearing could
extricate him.” And at a subsequent stage in the _facilis descensus_
he is described, rather imaginatively, as feeling, and groaning as he
felt, that fresh falsehoods were in peremptory demand. “This comes of
telling lies,” is supposed to be his bitter reflection: “one lie makes a
necessity for another.”
The Leucippus of Beaumont and Fletcher thus admonishes an intimate:—
“My sin, Ismenus, has wrought all this ill:
And I beseech thee to be warned by me,
And do not lie, if any man should ask thee
But how thou dost, or what o’clock ’tis now;
Be sure thou do not lie, make no excuse
For him that is most near thee; never let
The most officious falsehood ’scape thy tongue,
For they above (that are entirely Truth)
Will make the seed which thou hast sown of lies,
Yield miseries a thousand-fold
Upon thine head, as they have done on mine.”
_A TIME TO WEEP, AND A TIME TO LAUGH._
ECCLESIASTES iii. 4.
As to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the
sun,—for as Shakspeare words it, “How many things by season seasoned are
to their right praise and true perfection!”—be sure that the Wise King
includes laughter and weeping in the list. “A time to weep, and a time to
laugh.” Acquainted with grief, he had also been familiar with merriment.
He had said in his heart, Go to, now, I will prove thee with mirth; but
the result was that he said of laughter, It is mad; and of mirth, What
doeth it?—For all this, he freely recognises a time to laugh, so that one
keep to the time. So much depends, here, on the due observance of times
and seasons. It is with the frivolous habit of laughing out of season,
and at all seasons, that the following notes are concerned.
The laureate’s is a good keynote to begin with:—
“Prythee weep, May Lilian!
Gaiety without eclipse
Wearieth me, May Lilian.”
So with Barry Cornwall and his Hermione:—
“Something thou dost want, O queen!
(As the gold doth ask alloy,)
Tears,—amidst thy laughter seen,
Pity,—mingling with the joy.”
Such a conjunction as the courtier records of Cordelia in “King
Lear”—sunshine and rain at once: “her smiles and tears were like a better
day: those happy smiles that played on her ripe lip, seemed not to know
what guests were in her eyes:” “in brief, sorrow would be a rarity most
beloved, if all could so become it.” Nothing, we often hear it said, is
so tedious as uniformity; and under the bright sky of Italy one sometimes
sighs for a cloud. “A gay writer, who,” says Horace Walpole, “should only
express satisfaction without variety, would soon be nauseous.” Johnson’s
Papilius winds up his confession, in the “Rambler,” with a whine on the
melancholy necessity of supporting that character by study, which he
gained by levity; having learned too late that gaiety must be recommended
by higher qualities, and that mirth can never please long but as the
efflorescence of a mind loved for its luxuriance, but esteemed for its
usefulness. There must be fruitage as well as blossomy “efflorescence;”
as Cowper is fain to enforce, when in the closing lines of the “Task,”
he records how he once, when called to dress a sofa with the flowers of
verse, played awhile with that light task, obedient to the fair:—
... “but soon, to please her more,
Whom flowers alone I knew would little please,
Let fall the unfinished wreath, and roved for fruit.”
Mark Mrs. Browning’s picture of the Lady Geraldine:—
“In her utmost lightness there is truth—and often she speaks lightly—
Has a grace in being gay, which even mournful souls approve,
For the root of some grave earnest thought is understruck so rightly
As to justify the foliage and the waving flowers above.”
So with Lord Lytton’s Helen Mainwaring, the sunny gladness of whose
nature must have vent like a bird’s, though he forbids us to fancy
that that gladness speaks the levity which comes from the absence of
thought: “it is rather from the depth of thought that it springs, as
from the depth of a sea comes its music.” Well and wisely Molière’s
Cléonte exclaims, “Veux-tu de ces enjouements épanouis, de ces joies
toujours ouvertes? et vois tu rien de plus impertinent que des femmes qui
rient à tout propos?” Such a _femme_ as the same author’s Zerbinette, a
self-convicted giggler in and out of season, yet whose confession may be
twisted into an example the other way, when she says, “J’ai l’humeur
enjouée, et sans cesse je ris: mais, tout en riant, je suis sérieuse sur
de certains chapitres.”
Among the writings of M. de St. Evremond there is an essay on the Idea
of a Woman that never was, nor ever will be found. Emilia he calls this
all too perfect, impossible she. And amongst the foremost of Emilia’s
fine qualities he reckons the co-existence of seriousness _au fond_ with
vivacity of mien. “For we find that the gayest humour doth, at length,
become tiresome; ... the most effervescent liveliness either disgusts or
wearies you.” In the case of the celebrated Duchesse de Longueville, De
Retz notices the exquisite effect of the sudden bursts of gaiety which
would at times dispel her habitual but not inexpressive languor. Mdlle.
de Scudéry, in her “Clélie,” was painting a well-known, perhaps too
well-known, contemporary in the person of Clarice, when, “parmi toute
cette disposition qu’elle a pour la joie,” she ascribes to this charmer,
_qui rit si aisément_, a facile faculty of tear-shedding: _elle sait
pleurer_, whenever occasion justifies weeping. As Lady Eastlake says, in
her little treatise on Music, a change of key is the most powerful engine
in the hands of a musician: we cannot bear the monotony of one key long,
even the most joyful: “Gaiety without eclipse wearieth me, May Lilian.”
We long for “a mournful muse, soft pity to infuse.” The Hon. Miss
Byron takes the liberty of telling the sister of Sir Charles Grandison
that “Your brother has hinted, Charlotte, that he loves you for your
vivacity, and should still more, if you consulted time and occasion.”
The affections are justly said to be more readily called into play by a
mixture of mirth and melancholy; ours being a twofold life, the union of
mortal with immortal, we covet happiness, yet turn back anon to the more
majestic form of sorrow. There is a form of cheerfulness which, we are
assured, nobody can stand:—
“Send me hence a thousand miles
From a face that always smiles;”
people ostentatiously and pretentiously cheerful being not unfrequently
foolish people: their spirits of a brisk but thin quality—nothing about
them in good working order. “For, in truth, the most fortunate existence
has cares enough to make gravity our normal condition.” Roland Graeme, in
the “Abbot,” earnestly assures his vivacious companion, “Ay, but, fair
Catherine, there are moments of deep and true feeling, which are worth
ten thousand years of liveliest mirth.” Melancholy Minna is a fine relief
by contrast to laughter-loving Brenda; and it is suggestively told us of
the old Udaller, their sire, that he liked his graver damsel better in
the walk without doors, and his merry maiden better by the fireside; and
that if he preferred Brenda after the glass circulated in the evening, he
gave the preference to Minna before noon. So with Molly and Cynthia in
“Wives and Daughters:” Molly always gentle, but very grave and silent;
Cynthia merry, full of pretty mockeries, and hardly ever silent—only this
constant brilliancy became a little tiresome in everyday life, being not
the sunshiny rest of a placid lake, so much as the “glitter of the pieces
of a broken mirror, which confuses and bewilders.” The union of what can
be harmonized of the two distinctive characters, is sure to be engaging
in no ordinary degree. As in the Beryl of “George Geith.” “You imagine,”
says Beryl, on one occasion, “because it is necessary to my existence to
laugh at people’s oddities, that I never feel for their woes. You think,
because I have a quick sense of the ludicrous, that I have no eyes for
grief. And there you do me an injustice.” Such as Beryl will be found
to take exception to predominant levity in the masculine gender, after
the manner of the fair tenant of Wildfell Hall: “I do wish he would be
sometimes serious,” she writes of her endeared Arthur: “I cannot get him
to write or speak in real, solid earnest. I don’t mind it now, but if it
be always so, what shall I do with the serious part of myself?” Tired
out with such companionship, a complainant in one of Lovell Beddoes’
tragedies exclaims,—
“I’m weary of their laughter’s empty din.
Methinks, these fellows, with their ready jests,
Are like to tedious bells, that ring alike
Marriage or death.”
Rather than have her uniformly saccharine and smiling, Ben Jonson’s
Curius avowedly would have his mistress “angry sometimes, to sweeten off
the rest of her behaviour.”
* * * * *
Sir Walter Scott, in one page of his Diary, noting the break-up of
a hilarious group of guests at Abbotsford, adds the avowal, “I am
not sorry, being one of those whom too much mirth always inclines to
sadness.” Even the bright extremes of joy, as Thomas Hood the elder words
it, bring on conclusions of disgust:—
“There is no music in the life
That sounds with idiot laughter solely;
There’s not a string attuned to mirth
But has its chord in melancholy.”
Leigh Hunt tenderly tells one of his grandchildren how, when _he_ was
a child, and in excessive spirits, his dear mother would sometimes say
to him, “Leigh, come and sit down here by me, and let us try to think a
little.” Better that than _riant sans cesse_, even for a child. When I
was a child, says the apostle, I thought as a child. Thinking was not
out of the question even then, though it might, and by comparison with
the man’s it must, be childish thinking. For children as for men, a time
to laugh and a time to weep. True, there are differences of gifts and
temperaments:—
“To some men God hath given laughter; but tears to some men He hath
given:
He bade us sow in tears, hereafter to harvest holier smiles in Heaven;
And tears and smiles, they are His gift: both good, to smite or to
uplift.
He knows His sheep: the wind and showers beat not too sharply the
shorn lamb:
His wisdom is more wise than ours: He knew my nature—what I am:
He tempers smiles with tears: both good, to bear in time the
Christian mood.”
_DISALLOWED DESIGNS._
PROVERBS xix. 21.
“There are many devices in a man’s heart; nevertheless, the counsel of
the Lord, that shall stand.” Even the counsels of the prudent He bringeth
to nought. “There is no wisdom, nor understanding, nor counsel, against
the Lord,” nor any that prospers without Him. Without Him, where is the
wise? where is the scribe? What, after all, is the wisdom of the children
of this world, wiser in their generation than the children of light? Hath
not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For it is written, “I will
destroy the wisdom of the wise.” Nay; unworldly wisdom, in its forming
of plans, and elaboration of schemes, and devising of devices, enjoys no
privileged immunity from failure, at the veto of Him who chargeth His
angels with folly. “L’homme propose, Dieu dispose.” The Divine disposal
of human proposals is ofttimes very summary and entire.
The proverb, “Man proposes, God disposes,” is believed by one learned in
such lore to be naturalised in every nation of Europe:—thus the Spanish,
“La gente pone, y Dios dispone;” the German, with its corresponding
jingle, “Der Mensch denkt’s, Gott lenkt’s,” etc., so deeply upon all men
is impressed the sense of Hamlet’s assertion of a Divinity that shapes
our ends, rough-hew them how we will. Molière’s shrewd-spoken Dorine
enounces a truism when reminding Damis that,—
“On n’exécute pas tout ce qui se propose;
Et le chemin est long du projet à la chose.”
A wise man endeavours, it has been said, by considering all
circumstances, to make conjectures and form conclusions: but the smallest
accident intervening (and in the course of affairs it is impossible to
foresee all) often produces such turns and changes, that at last he is
just as much in doubt of events as the most ignorant and inexperienced
person. What Shakspeare in his sonnets calls “millioned accidents” creep
in between design and result, between plan and performance, between
scheme and issue, and “blunt the sharpest intents.” As the old moralising
poet, modernised by Dryden, puts it—
“But see how Fortune can confound the wise,
And when they least expect it, turn the dice.”
Fortune, or fate, is the popularly recognised agent in these reversals
and collapses; and subtile philosophers speculate curiously on the
plenipotent character of this agency. One such, for example, predisposed
to paradox may-be, yet no heedless or hasty penman, affirms, that if you
look closely into the matter, it will be seen that whatever appears most
vagrant, and utterly purposeless, turns out, in the end, to have been
impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswerving track. Chance
and change, he goes on to remark, love to deal with men’s unsettled
plans, not with their idle vagaries. So that, as he argues the matter, if
we desire unexpected and unimaginable events, we should contrive an iron
framework, such as we fancy may compel the future to take one inevitable
shape; for then comes in the unexpected, and shatters our design in
fragments.
The biographer of Columbus, narrating the story of his shipwreck in 1492,
describes him as passing, with his usual excitability, from a state of
doubt and anxiety to one of sanguine anticipation, and thus coming to
consider his present misfortune as a providential event mysteriously
ordained by Heaven to work out the success of his enterprise. At once,
therefore, he began to look forward to glorious fruits to be reaped
from this seeming evil, and laid his plans accordingly. “Such was the
visionary yet generous enthusiasm of Columbus, the moment that prospects
of vast wealth broke upon his mind. What in some spirits would have
awakened a grasping and sordid avidity to accumulate, immediately filled
his imagination with plans of magnificent expenditure. But how vain
are our attempts to interpret the inscrutable decrees of Providence!
The shipwreck, which Columbus considered the act of Divine favour, to
reveal to him the secrets of the land, shackled and limited all his
after-discoveries.” For it is shown to have linked his fortunes, for the
remainder of his life, to this island, which was doomed to be to him a
source of cares and troubles, to involve him in a thousand perplexities,
and to becloud his declining years with humiliation and disappointment.
“Le ciel agit sans nous en ces événements,
Et ne les régle point dessus nos sentiments.”
It is instructive to note in the memoirs of Gabriel Naudé, that great
scholar’s exultant anticipation of the public opening of the library he
had mainly helped to form. He must have reckoned on that day as a _beau
jour_ for him, the happiest day of his life; and he arranged a fête
accordingly, to be celebrated with his most intimate friends. But that
very day broke out the public troubles of the Fronde; and barricades in
the streets of Paris ill accorded with Gabriel Naudé’s cherished hopes.
“Ainsi vont les projets humains sous l’œil d’en haut qui les déjoue.” The
Scotch ploughman-poet, eyeing the mouse and its “wee bit housie, too, in
ruin,” as turned up by his plough, gave racy utterance to but a trite
reflection, when, apostrophising the “wee sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous
beastie,” he thus moralised his song:—
“But, mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley,
And leave us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promised joy.”
As the good friar in Shakspeare has it,—
“A greater power than we can contradict
Hath thwarted our intents,”
well laid and discreetly devised as they seemed to be.
And as with the seemingly laudable plans of the prudent, so with the
arrogant designs of the self-confident. The enemy said, “I will pursue,
I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied
upon them; I will draw my sword; my hand shall destroy them.” Thus said
the enemy, even Pharaoh’s host, on the shores of the Red Sea. But then
sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the Lord: “Thou
didst blow with Thy wind, the sea covered them; they sank as lead in the
mighty waters.” It is but an emphasised reading of the standard text,
that the Lord bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought, and maketh
the devices of the people of none effect, and casteth out the counsel
of princes. Whereas, turning from man proposing to God disposing, “The
counsel of the Lord shall endure for ever, and the thoughts of His heart
from generation to generation.” The same is He of whom it is written that
He turneth wise men backwards, and maketh their knowledge foolish.
Wordsworth, ever a moralist, moralised his song when, at a critical
juncture in the legend of the “White Doe of Rylstone,” he interposed this
reflection:—
“But quick the turns of chance and change,
And knowledge has a narrow range;
Whence idle fears, and needless pain,
And wishes blind, and efforts vain.”
For a closing variation on the present theme, a worse might be found than
this from the play within the play of “Hamlet:”—
“But, orderly to end where I begun,—
Our wills, our fates, do so contrary run,
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.”
But, with a slight change of title and text, the same theme is pursued,
in the section next ensuing, through another fugue-course of variations.
_MAN DEVISING, GOD DIRECTING._
PROVERBS xvi. 9.
“A man’s heart deviseth his way; but the Lord directeth his steps.”
Man devises, God directs; man proposes, God disposes. There is a way
that seemeth right unto a man, and practicable, plausible, easy of
accomplishment, and sure of success. But the counsel of the Lord puts a
veto on the scheme; and the counsel of the Lord, that shall stand.
Luther charges it against princes and potentates in his day, that when
they take in hand an enterprise, they do not pray before they begin, but
set to work calculating: three times three make nine, twice seven are
fourteen—so-and-so will do so-and-so—in this manner will the business
come to a prosperous issue: “but our Lord God says unto them, For whom
then do ye hold me? for a cypher? Do I sit here above in vain, and to no
purpose? Ye shall know, that I will twist your accounts about finely, and
make them all false reckonings.”
Says old Alice, in “Mary Barton,” “I sometimes think the Lord is against
planning. Whene’er I plan over much, He is sure to send and mar all
my plans, as if He would ha’ me put the future into His hands. Afore
Christmas-time I was as full as full could be of going home for good
and all; yo has heard how I’ve wished it this terrible long time....
Many a winter’s night did I lie awake and think that, please God,
come summer, I’d go home at last. Little did I think how God Almighty
would baulk me for not leaving my days in His hands, who had led me
through the wilderness hitherto.” It is very like Rousseau to say, in
reference to a fully determined project of his, for the fulfilment of
which nothing was wanting but “ce qui ne dépend pas des hommes dans les
projets les mieux concertés,”—that “on dirait qu’il n’y a que les noirs
complots des méchants qui réussissent; les projets innocents des bons
n’ont presque jamais d’accomplissement.” But who can hope for anything
like contentment, as Mr. Helps somewhere asks, so long as he continues
to attach that ridiculous degree of importance to the events of this
life which so many people are inclined to do? Observe, he bids us, the
effect which it has upon them: they are most uncomfortable if their
little projects do not turn out according to their fancy—nothing is to
be angular to them—they regard external things as the only realities;
and as they have fixed their abode here, they must have it arranged to
their mind. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu assures one of her correspondents
that never had she been so little mistress of her own time and actions as
since she lived alone; and going on to account for this, she observes,
“Mankind is placed in a state of dependency, not only on one another
(which all are in some degree), but so many inevitable accidents thwart
our designs and limit our best-laid projects.” The poor efforts of our
utmost prudence, and political schemes, she fancies must appear in the
eyes of some superior beings, like the pecking of a young linnet to break
a wire cage, or the climbing of a squirrel in a hoop. If to this bit of
morality from the greatest of lady letter-writers in England, a parallel
passage may readily be cited from the greatest of lady letter-writers in
France, there is a characteristic difference, in the tone of religious
feeling, conspicuous generally by its absence in Lady Mary’s case, but
a pervading, though underlying, force in that of Madame de Sévigné. The
latter describes on one occasion the “cruel derangement” of her family
plans, so nicely arranged, and so ripe for completion; then adds, if with
a sigh, with a sigh of gentle resignation, “La Providence le veut ainsi.
Elle est tellement maitresse de toutes nos actions, que nous n’exécutons
rien que sous son bon plaisir, et je tache de ne faire de projets que le
moins qu’il m’est possible, afin de n’être pas si souvent trompée; car
qui compte sans elle compte deux fois.” How vain, exclaims the author of
“Destiny,” are all our schemes for futurity! Human wisdom exhausts itself
in devising what a higher Power shows to be vanity. We decide for to-day,
and a passing moment scatters our decisions as chaff before the wind. We
resolve for to-morrow, to-morrow comes but to root up our resolutions.
We scheme for our works to remain monuments of our power and wisdom, and
the most minute, the most trivial event is sufficient to overturn all
our purposes, and cast down to the dust the thoughts and the labours of a
life. Truly, “it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.”
Were the affairs of this world to be guided implicitly by human wisdom,
suggests one of Scott’s sententious doctors of divinity, or were they
uniformly to fall out according to the conjectures of human foresight,
events would no longer be under the domination of that time and chance
which happen unto all men; since we should, in the one case, work out
our own purposes to a certainty, by our own skill; and, in the other,
regulate our conduct according to the views of unerring prescience.
“But man is, while in this vale of tears, like an uninstructed bowler,
so to speak, who thinks to attain the jack by delivering the bowl
straightforward upon it, being ignorant that there is a concealed bias
within the spheroid, which will make it, in all probability, swerve away,
and lose the cast.” The future, in the words of a later fiction, is not
a blank sheet of paper, for us to write any story we please upon, but a
wonderful chart, mapped out by a Divine and unerring hand.
Ούδέ τις ἀνθρώπων ἐργάζεται, ἐν φρεσὶν εἰδὼς
Ἐς τέλος, εἴτ’ ἀγαθὸν γίγνεται εἴτε κακὸν.
Πολλάκι γαρ δοκέων θήσειν κακόν, ἐσθλὸν ἔθηκε,
Καί τε δοκῶν θήσειν ἐσθλόν, ἔθηκε κακόν.
Ὀυδέ τῳ ἀνθρώπων παραγίγνεται ὅσσ’ ἐθέλησεν.
When Mr. Thackeray propounds the query, Who can foresee everything, and
always? and returns his own answer (a sufficiently safe one), Not the
wisest amongst us,—he does so in reference to the counsels of the worldly
woman who governed and directed the Newcome family; which counsels bore
results so different from what that elderly lady desired, and foresaw.
And he proceeds to point his moral by the tale of a French king’s fall.
“When his majesty, Louis XIV., jockied his grandson on to the throne of
Spain (founding thereby the present revered dynasty of that country), did
he expect to peril his own, and bring all Europe about his royal ears?
Could a late King of France, eager for the advantageous establishment
of one of his darling sons, and anxious to procure a beautiful Spanish
princess, with a crown and kingdom in reversion, for the simple and
obedient youth, ever suppose that the welfare of his whole august race
and reign would be upset by that smart speculation?” The master of irony
professes to take only the most noble examples to illustrate the conduct
of such a noble old personage as her ladyship of Kew, who brought a
prodigious deal of trouble upon some of the innocent members of her
family, whom no doubt she thought to better in life by her experienced
guidance, and undoubted worldly wisdom. We may be as deep as Jesuits, he
continues,—may know the world ever so well, lay the best ordered plans,
and the profoundest combinations,—and by a certain not unnatural turn
of fate, we, and our plans and combinations, are sent flying before
the wind. “We may be as wise as Louis Philippe, that many counselled
Ulysses whom the respectable world admired so; and after years of patient
scheming, and prodigies of skill; after coaxing, wheedling, doubling,
bullying wisdom, behold, yet stronger powers interpose: and schemes and
skill and violence are nought.” As Schiller’s Wallenstein puts it, in his
rather heathenish way—
“For jealous are the powers of destiny.
Joy premature, and shouts ere victory,
Encroach upon their rights and privileges.
We sow the seed, and they the growth determine.”
“Il y a,” in the words of a masterly French moralist, “je ne sais quelle
_force cachée_, a dit Lucrèce (ce que d’autres avec Bossuet nommeront
Providence), qui semble se plaire à briser les choses humaines, à faire
manquer d’un coup l’appereil établi de la puissance, et à déjouer la
pièce, juste au moment ou elle promettait de mieux aller.” O fate of
fools! exclaims Zara, in the “Mourning Bride,”—“officious in contriving;
in executing, puzzled, lame, and lost;” a rebuke which Selim deprecates
in his reply:—
“Prescience is Heaven’s alone, not given to man.
If I have failed in what, as being man,
I needs must fail, impute not as a crime
My nature’s want.”
So with the resolute undertaking of Argantes, in Tasso, to slay Tancred,
the slayer of his betrothed; all the people applauding his resolve, and
rejoicing in the assurance that this—
“... boaster stout
Would kill the prince who late had slain his love.
O promise vain! it otherwise fell out.
Men purpose, but high gods dispose above;
For underneath his sword this boaster died,
Whom there he scorned and threatened in his pride.”
In Homer, again, how grieves Achilles, and, impetuous, vents to all his
myrmidons his loud laments?
“By what vain promise, gods! did I engage,
When, to console Menætius’ feeble age,
I vowed his much-loved offspring to restore;
Charged with rich spoils to fair Opuntia’s shore.
But mighty Jove cuts short, with just disdain,
The long, long views of poor designing man!”
_A PURSEBEARER’S PROTEST AGAINST PURPOSELESS WASTE._
ST. JOHN xii. 5.
It was very costly ointment of spikenard that Mary took and anointed
therewith the feet of Jesus, so that the house was filled with the
odour of the ointment. So costly, that it set one of His apostles to
work, counting the cost. Judas Iscariot was this ready reckoner. He
was conversant with figures. He was the pursebearer of the apostolic
circle, and knew, it seems, how and when and why to keep a tight finger
on the purse-strings. The wasted contents—waste he accounted it—of that
alabaster box might have been sold for three hundred denarii, and the
proceeds given to the poor. As pursebearer he protested. And nominally
his protest was in behalf of the poor.
Referring to that text in Exodus which tells how the people brought much
more than enough for the service of the work which the Lord commanded to
make, the question was put by a divine who, being dead, yet speaketh:
When will the earth again hear that glad announcement? Yet, until we
bring more than enough, he said, at least until there is kindled in
us a spirit which will make us desire to do so, we shall never bring
enough. “And ought we not? Your economists will say _No._ They who would
think the sun a useful creature, if he would come down from the sky and
light their fires, will gravely reprehend such wasteful extravagance.”
This last figure of speech has its parallel in Mr. Carlyle’s estimate
of “the uses of this Dante:” he declines to say much about his “uses;”
he holds that an influence working, like Dante’s, into the depths of
our existence, and feeding through long times the life-roots of all
excellent things whatsoever, is not to be very satisfactorily computed
by “utilities.” Dante shall therefore be invaluable, or of no value: “We
will not estimate the sun by the quantity of gas-light it saves us.”
Judas the pursebearer was, as a French divine characterizes him,
_exact_, _positif_, _calculateur_; one who habituated himself to compute
everything by a ready-money standard, and to appraise every action by
the rule of immediate utility. He might be accurate to a fraction in
his reckoning of what that “wasted” ointment would have fetched in the
market; but, had not his heart been already in some sort ossified, he
would have comprehended that “au dessus de l’utile il y a le beau, et
au dessus du calcul le dévouement, et qu’ à une âme qui déborde d’une
joie extraordinaire il faut des moyens extraordinaires aussi pour
exprimer ce qu’elle éprouve. Judas a perdu le sens des réalités purement
spirituelles, qui lui paraissent vagues, parce que, comme l’infini, elles
résistent aux chiffres.”
When Dr. Justus Jonas told Dr. Martin Luther of a certain potent
landholder, who said to Duke John Frederic, when commending to him the
gospel of Christ, “Sir, the gospel pays no interest,”—“Have you no
grains?” was Luther’s interrogative comment,—citing the words of the
swine at the lion’s feast, when invited to feast on recondite dainties.
Even so, said Dr. Martin, there are inveterate worldlings who, when
invited to the spiritual feast of fat things well refined, “turn up their
snouts, and ask for guilders. Offer a cow nutmeg, and she will reject it
for old hay.”
It is a too true bill of indictment against the mass of men, that,
knowing that two and two make four, and that four is of a higher value
than three, they practically conclude, carrying out into practice the
conclusion, that to amass is to become wealthy, and that to bestow is
to become the poorer. With this arithmetic the children of this world
are wise in their generation, and add field to field, house to house,
to some purpose. But by what right, asks a voice from the sanctuary, do
they take upon themselves to pronounce on such qualities and realities
as devotion and charity, as detachment from the “good things of this
life” and renunciation of indulgence to the senses? If they witness a
deed of noble self-sacrifice, they can but wag their heads, in shocked
surprise and bewilderment at such a blunder in arithmetic, _une telle
faute de calcul_. “Ils ne comprennent pas qu’on puisse soupirer après
d’autres biens que ceux de la matière, après d’autres vérités que celles
de l’arithmétique.” There are many, very many more things than are dreamt
of in their philosophy; dreaming, indeed, is rather out of their way; and
perhaps philosophy too, for the matter of that.
Coleridge, denouncing the “moral” consequences of Napoleon’s tyranny, as
far more to be dreaded than the worst of those outward and calculable
evils, which chiefly shock the imaginations of men, is out of all
patience with such objections as, “What _good_ will the Tyrolese do
themselves by their heroic resistance?” “What are the Spaniards fighting
for?” etc.,—as if man were made only to eat above ground, and be
eaten; as if we had no dignity to preserve, no conscience to obey, no
immortality to expect.
What good can it do him? demands the vulgar fine lady in “Cecil,” who
hears that a certain well-to-do man of genius has written a book. A man,
she argues, writes for money or distinction: what can be this man’s
object? he don’t want to be made a baronet, nor does he want to increase
his income. Where can be the _use_ of writing? And where, she is (by
cross-questioning) answered, can be the use to the aloe of its flower,
to the mine of its gold? Oldbuck of Monkbarns might have done worse than
parody, as he did, the “brutal ignorance” of your _cui bono_ querists of
the baser sort, in the strain of Gray’s Bard,—
“Weave the warp and weave the woof,
The winding-sheet of wit and sense;
Dull garment of defensive proof
’Gainst all that does not gather pence.”
That a new machine, a new experiment, the discovery of a salt, or of a
bone, should, in England, receive a wider homage, than the most profound
speculation from which no obvious results are apprehended,—this way
of contemplating affairs Mr. Buckle was prompt to own as certainly
productive of great good. But he also took care to declare it to be,
with equal certainty, a one-sided way, satisfying a part only of the
human mind—many of the noblest intellects craving for something which it
cannot supply. There are mortals who, as a clerical essayist has said,
cannot understand or sympathise with the gratification arising from a
study of graceful and beautiful objects; who think that the supply of
animal necessities is all that any man (but themselves, perhaps) can
need. What more can he want? they exclaim, if the man be well-fed, and
well-dressed, and well-lodged. Why, if he had been a horse or a pig, is
the answer, he would have wanted nothing more; but the possession of a
rational soul brings with it pressing wants which are not of a material
nature, not to be supplied by material things, and not felt by pigs and
horses. And the craving for surrounding objects of grace and beauty is
held to be one of these. Mr. Emerson, in his far-going way, goes so far
as to say, as regards the “base rate at which the highest mental and
moral gifts are held” in his country,—that let a man attain the highest
and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die
by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, “and all America
will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the
education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the
best use to put a fine person to, is, to drown him to save his board.”
M. de Tocqueville somewhere observes, that to cross almost impenetrable
forests, to swim deep rivers, to encounter pestilential marshes, to
sleep exposed to the damp air of the woods,—these are efforts which an
American easily conceives, if a dollar is to be gained by them—that is
the point; but that a man should take such journeys from curiosity, he
cannot understand. The German poet is often cited for his remark, that
the Cow of Isis is to some the divine symbol of knowledge, to others but
the milch cow, only regarded for the pounds of butter she will yield. An
English sympathiser exclaims, “O tendency of our age, to look on Isis as
the milch cow! Gaze on the goddess,” he bids a sordid aspirant, “and get
ready the churn and thy scales, and let us see what butter will fetch
in the market.” When Judge Haliburton’s typical Yankee is asked by the
old minister what he thinks of Niagara, and forthwith expatiates on the
“grand spec” it offers for factory purposes—for carding mills, fulling
mills, cotton mills, grain mills, saw mills, plaster mills, and never a
want of water for any or all of them, his pastor upbraids him with almost
sacrilege in that style of talk; exclaiming, “How that dreadful thirst
of gain has absorbed all other feelings in our people, when such an idea
could be entertained for a moment! It [Niagara] is a grand spectacle, it
is the voice of nature in the wilderness, proclaiming to the untutored
tribes there of the power and majesty and glory of God.... Talk not
to me of mills, factories, and machinery, sir, nor of introducing the
money-changers into the temple of the Lord.”
_LIGHT AT EVENING-TIME._
ZECHARIAH xiv. 7.
The promise, or prediction, to be found in the words of the son of
Berechiah, that “at evening-time it shall be light,” is gratefully
accepted by devout souls in perhaps a strained and wrested sense; but
a sense so comforting, so full of tenderness and beauty, that one is
fain to believe the words may favour, if they cannot be said to warrant,
this “accommodation of Scripture.” Divines are fain to give technical
divinity the go-by for the nonce, while, as they confess, the deepening
twilight seldom fails to suggest to them this cheering promise, a promise
which “tells how the Christian’s day shall end, how the day of life may
be somewhat overcast and dreary, but light shall come on the darkened
way at last.” In the same spirit are welcome the words of Amos, the
herdsman of Tekoa, concerning One who turneth the shadow of death into
the morning. To Him the darkness and the light are both alike; and at His
bidding, when despondent sufferers are in a horror of great darkness, and
say surely the darkness shall cover them,—even the night shall be light
about them; and in some sort to them, even as to Him, the night shineth
as the day; or at least, in the language of Zechariah, there is light,
which if not clear, is yet not dark; neither wholly day nor night, but
twilight—soft, soothing, tranquillizing—instead of the dreaded darkness
which may be felt. Even thus He brings the blind by a way that they knew
not, making darkness light before them.
Even thus, at the last, He delivers them who through fear of death were
all their lifetime subject to bondage. Bunyan exemplifies such in Mr.
Fearing, the pilgrim, who at the entrance of the Valley of the Shadow
of Death was “ready to die for fear.” But the valley was quiet from
troublers. “I suppose those enemies here had now a special check from our
Lord, and a command not to meddle until Mr. Fearing had passed over it.”
“And here also I took notice of what was very remarkable—the water of
that river was lower at this time than ever I saw it in all my life; so
he went over at last, not much above wetshod.
“_Honesty_: Then it seems he was well at last?”
“_Greatheart_: Yes, yes; I never had a doubt about it.”
Often, observes Schleiermacher in one of his letters, the last radiant
moment is called rapidly into being, even in souls wherein the eternal
Light has not always shone with bright effulgence.
Biographers of Dr. Johnson tell us how, when at length the moment,
dreaded through so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed away
from his mind; how his temper became unusually patient and gentle, and
he ceased to think with terror of death, and of that which lieth beyond
death, and spoke much of the mercy of God and of the propitiation of
Christ. One might apply to him in effect the lines of the poet of the
Seasons.
“Joy seized his withered veins, and one bright gleam
Of setting life shone on her evening hours.”
Meditating on various senses in which the words of the promise of light
at evening-time speak truly, in which its great principle holds good, the
signal blessing shall come when it is needed most and expected least,
Dr. Boyd, thinks mainly how sometimes, at the close of the chequered and
sober day, the Better Sun has broken through the clouds and made the
flaming west all purple and gold. He pictures the chamber of death, while
hushed and mournful gazers see also the summer sun in glory going down.
“But it is only to us who remain that the evening darkness is growing,
only for us that the sun is going down.” As the evening falls on us, but
not on the departing believer; as the shadows deepen on us, but not on
him; as the darkness gathers on us, but not on him; the “glorious promise
has found its perfect fulfilment, that ‘at the evening-time there shall
be light.’”
Secular literature has its analogous instances. Dr. Holmes describes
Elsie Venner’s storm-tossed, vagrant spirit as composed and serene at
the last; the cold glitter died out of the diamond eyes, and the stormy
scowl disappeared from the dark brows. “It seemed to her father as if
the malign influence—evil spirit it might almost be called—which had
pervaded her being had at last been driven forth or exorcised,” and that
the tears she now shed were “at once the sign and the pledge of her
redeemed nature. But now she was to be soothed and not excited. After her
tears she slept again, and the look her face wore was peaceful as never
before.” And the devoted father, to whom her life-long career had been
until now a perturbing trial, now thanked God for the brief interval of
peace which had been granted her, and for the sweet communion they had
enjoyed in these last days. There are those of whom it may be said that
it comes to pass, when midday is over, and they cast wistful glances, and
perhaps even reproachful petitions heavenwards, until evening-time, that
there is from above neither voice, nor any to answer, nor seemingly any
that regardeth; but with evening-time comes an answer and comes light.
Applicable to the subject, in this sense, are the lines in “Paracelsus,”
on one who lived without God in the world:—
“Then died, grown old; and just an hour before—
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes—
He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said, that in spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June.”
Of Margaret Arundel, in “The Gordian Knot,” we read, in her hour of
household desolation and distress, that could we have seen her fair face,
now pale with pain, now flushed with emotion, we should have pitied her;
but “it may be that some superior intelligence witnessed her suffering,
and pitied her not; knowing that all she was to undergo was but the
fiery trial destined for those for whom in the evening there is light.”
Stephen Blackpool, in “Hard Times,” who has found life “aw a muddle,”
and meets with his death in the pit, is tranquillized with light at the
last—light which he identifies with the star that shone upon him while he
lay mangled in the old shaft. “Often as I coom to myseln, and found it
shinin’ on me down there in my trouble, I thowt it were the very star as
guided to our Saviour’s home. I awmost think it be the very star.” His
rescuers lift him up, and he is overjoyed to find they are about to take
him in the direction whither the star seems to him to lead. Very gently
they carry him along the fields and down the lanes; but it is soon a
funeral procession. “The star had shown him where to find the God of the
poor; and through humility and sorrow and forgiveness, he had gone to
his Saviour’s rest.” It is not every life the early prime of which has
been blissful enough to warrant the exclamation,—
“Ne’er tell me of glories serenely adorning
The close of our day, the calm eve of our night:
Give me back, give me back, the wild freshness of morning,
Its smiles and its tears are worth evening’s best light.”
For sometimes the light comes at evening-time that has never come before.
Cellini opens his autobiography with a placid record of the enjoyment
of his present lot, in life’s decline, in contrast with the storms and
turmoil of his previous course. We read of James Watt, that not until he
had reached what is termed the grand climacteric of man’s life did he
know real freedom from bodily infirmities; and that his spirits became
more equable as the principal causes of his anxiety and occasional
depression were removed; so that although he was destined to be one of
those “who are so strong that they come to fourscore years,” his strength
even then, while it could scarcely be termed “labour,” was certainly
very far from “sorrow.” The cloud which had so long hung over him was
gently lifted up, and the curtain parted, to disclose a happier scene.
“It is curious that even physical ease and enjoyment should come so
late; but so it was. The term which commenced with his release from the
evils of active business was a serene and golden time, in which he found
repose”—with the softening retrospect of a struggle past and a victory
won. John Galt, in “The Entail,” exemplifies a kindred experience in the
widow Walkinshaw, whose deliverance from an all but lifelong thraldom,
late in the day as it came, yet came in time enough to “allow the
original brightness of her mind to shine out in the evening with a serene
and pleasing lustre.”
Dr. Boyd quotes the dying speech of a poor English day labourer, than
which, he affirms, few sentences ever touched him more with their
hopeless pathos: “Wut wi’ faeth, and wut wi’ the earth goin’ round the
sun, and wut wi’ the railways all a-whuzzing and a-buzzing, I’m clean
muddled, confoozled, and bet!” It is Stephen Blackpool again in spirit,
and to the letter. With that sentence the dying man is said to have
feebly turned to the wall, and spoken no more. “Well, let us hope that
light came at the evening-time upon that blind, benighted way.”
Among the dying words of Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, honourably known by
her “Memoirs of Port Royal,” and other works, the remark is preserved
that she had often in her life been inclined to occupy herself with the
prospect close at hand, from finding the bleak, hard outline of the
eternal hills cold and barren to her sight; but that, as she drew nearer,
God’s mercy made His light to shine full upon them, so that she could now
perceive they were covered with magnificent trees of the forest, and were
rich in fruit and flowers far more pleasant than those close at hand, and
yet a continuation of them.
A commentator on the text of “promised light at evening-time,” explains
that by evening is understood the gradual withdrawal of the light; it is
the lessening light that makes the evening-time: because of _that_ the
daisies close, and the birds fly to their nests, and a hush comes over
nature. And it is just because evening is the time when, in the ordinary
course of things, the light is going and the darkness is coming, that
there is found to be anything remarkable in the text of _um den Abend
wird es licht seyn_, as Luther’s version runs. The promise, or prophecy,
is that “light shall come at a time when it is not natural, when in the
common course of things it is not looked for.” It would be no surprise,
as this divine proceeds to remark, that light should come at noonday: we
expect it then, it is just what we are accustomed to see. “But if, when
the twilight shadows were falling deeper and deeper, ... with a sudden
burst the noonday light were to spread around,—that would be a surprise.”
One of his personal illustrations of its import is the instance of
the Christian poet who passed away almost in despair,—the gloom that
overshadowed his spirit enduring almost to the end: “but even in the
last moment there came a wonderful change”—and they tell us how even on
his dead face there remained, till it was hidden for ever, a look of
bright and beautiful and sudden surprise; the reflection of that light at
evening that had been long in coming, but had come at last. At eventide
light may break forth as the morning; light rising in obscurity, and
darkness becoming as the noonday.
Light in darkness—light springing up out of darkness—the blessedness of
this is emphatically recognised both by signal example and in special
promise, in Holy Writ. When the hand of Moses was stretched out toward
heaven, and darkness fell over the land of Egypt, even darkness which
might be felt—a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt for three
days—the Egyptians saw not one another, neither rose any from his place
for three days. But all the children of Israel had light in their
dwellings. “When I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto
me.” “For thou wilt light my candle; the Lord my God will enlighten my
darkness.” In the same Psalm that tells how clouds and darkness are round
about Him, the Father of lights, is contained the exulting assurance,
that “light is sown for the righteous.” The light of the righteous
rejoiceth, when the lamp of the wicked hath been put out. Well may
spiritual aspirations be fervent for light to be sent forth, to lead and
to guide to His holy hill and tabernacle, lest the feet of the wayfarer
slip in a way that he knows not; and, above all, when they stumble on the
dark mountains, or lose their footing in the swelling of Jordan.
_Lux è tenebris_—who will not prize it? who does not need it? For—
“What am I?
An infant crying in the night,
An infant _crying for the light_,
And with no language but a cry.”
An exceeding bitter cry this crying for the light sometimes is, in such
as those, for instance, whom Robertson of Brighton describes as “turning
from side to side,” feeling with horror the old, and all they hold dear,
crumbling away—the ancient light going out—more than half suspecting
the falsehood of the rest, and with an earnestness amounting to agony,
leaving their home, like the Magians, and inquiring for fresh light.
Turning from side to side, with the wailing note of interrogation, “Who
will show us any good?” And then, more earnestly than ever, “Lord, lift
Thou up the LIGHT of Thy countenance upon us.” In vain we turn from side
to side. To whom should we go but unto Thee? Turn us again, O Lord God of
hosts; show the LIGHT of Thy countenance, and we shall be saved.
Observable for special application is what Locke makes observable as a
general fact, that new-born children always turn their eyes to that part
whence the light comes, lay them how you please.
When the blind are operated on for the restoration of sight, it is
suggestively remarked by an eminent author, that the same succouring
hand which has opened to them the visible world, immediately shuts out
the bright prospect again for a time, a bandage being passed over the
eyes, lest in the first tenderness of their recovered sense, they should
be fatally affected by the sudden transition from darkness to light.
But, as he goes on to say, between the awful blank of total privation of
vision, and the temporary blank of vision merely veiled, there lies the
widest difference. “In the moment of their restoration the blind have
but one glimpse of light, flashing on them in an overpowering gleam of
brightness, which the thickest, closest veiling cannot extinguish. The
new darkness is not like the void darkness of old: it is filled with
rapid, changing visions of brilliant colours and ever-varying forms,
rising, falling, whirling hither and thither with every second.” And thus
is it made evident that even when the handkerchief is passed over them,
the once sightless eyes, though bandaged fast, are yet not blinded as
they were before. All the more, however, they now dread the blankness
of that total eclipse, now that, as it were, to them that walked in the
shadow of death, light is sprung up. Light, how much the more precious
for that background of blackness of darkness, darkness that still may be
felt!
Light that may be felt, is the theme of blind old Œdipus, in Sophocles,
at the hour of his mysterious departure—the hour and the power of
darkness. Farewell he bids to—
“Light, sweet Light!
Rayless to me—mine once, and even now
I feel thee palpable, round this worn form
Clinging in last embrace.”
Immortal as Homer is the prayer of his Ajax to die, if die he must, in
the light. Contrast with this the _modus moriendi_ of Pompey the Great,
as pictured in Corneille:—
“D’un des pans de sa robe it couvre son visage,
A son mauvais dentin en aveugle obéit,
Et dédaigne de voir le ciel qui le trahit.”
So with the Greek wife in Landor’s Hellenics, who resists the bidding to
fall not on her knees, but to look up:—
“The hand
That is to slay me, best may slay me thus.
I dare no longer see the light of heaven.”[35]
But to die in the light is the almost universal craving. “As a matter of
fact, nothing,” it has been remarked, “is more common than the craving
and demand for light a little before death;” a remark confirmed by the
sad experience of many who have tended and watched the last moments of
a friend. “What more frequent than a prayer to open the shutters, and
let in the sun? What complaint more repeated, and more touching than
that ‘it is growing dark’?” We are told of a sufferer who did not seem
in immediate danger, suddenly ordering the sick room to be lit up as for
a gala. When this was mentioned to the physician, he said, gravely, “No
worse sign.” We all remember the tenor of the last words of Dr. Adam, of
the High School, Edinburgh, as recorded (however variously) by Scott and
Lord Cockburn and others. It was in his bed-chamber, and in the forenoon,
that he died; and finding that he could not see, the old schoolmaster,
believing himself in the familiar school-room, exclaimed, “It is getting
dark, boys; we must put off the rest till to-morrow.” It was the darkness
of death. And to the living, to-morrow, above all, _that_ to-morrow,
never comes.
M. de Lescure, dying of the wounds he had received at the battle
of Chollet, awaited with his usual serenity the advent of his last
hour. “Open the windows,” said he to his wife, who was watching by
his bedside, “is it clear?” “Yes,” she said, “the sun is shining.” “I
have, then,” replied the dying general, “a veil before my eyes.” A
veil that no man could raise. Chateaubriand, in describing the last
hours of his sister, Madame de Beaumont—the Lucile of his “Memoires
d’outre-tombe”—incidentally relates that “she begged of me to open the
window.... A ray of sunshine rested upon her bed, and seemed to rejoice
her spirit.” The same circumstance is related of the dying Emperor
Alexander. So it is of Dr. Channing. Karl Ludwig Sand, on the scaffold,
begged that the bandage over his eyes might be so placed that he could,
until his last moment, see the light. And it was so. Turner’s biographer
tells us that almost at the very hour of the old painter’s death, his
landlady wheeled his chair to the window, that he might see the sunshine
he had loved so much, mantling the river, and glowing on the sails of the
passing boats. “The old painter died with the winter-morning sun shining
upon his face, as he was lying in his bed. The attendant drew up the
window-blind, and the morning sun shone on the dying artist—the sun he
had so often beheld with such love and such veneration,” and painted, at
sundry times and in divers manners, with such force.
Rousseau’s wish, when in a dying state, to be carried into the open
air, that he might have “a parting look at the glorious orb of day,” is
referred to by one of the many biographers of Robert Burns, in recording
that poet’s remark one beautiful evening, when the sun was shining
brightly through the casement. The hand of death was then upon him, and a
young friend rose to let down the window-blinds, fearing the light might
be too much for him. Burns thanked her, with a look of great benignity,
but prayed her to let the sun shine on: “he will not shine long for me.”
Tender and true is the pathos in one of Mrs. Richard Trench’s letters,
touching the death of her endeared child, Bessy, where we read: “The
last phrase she uttered, except those expressive of her latest wants and
pain, was a desire the window-curtain might be withdrawn, that she might
look at the stars.” Sunlight or starlight, it is light we cherish, and
that cherishes us. Light from the first, light to the last. Happy, if the
light we cherish is the shining light, that shineth more and more unto
the perfect day.
Another set of variations on the same theme will form the section next
ensuing.
_WISHED-FOR DAY._
ACTS xxvii. 29.
It was in a ship of Alexandria, sailing into Italy, when sailing was now
dangerous, because of the advanced season; it was during a voyage which
Paul, a passenger, foresaw and foretold would be with hurt and much
damage, not only of the lading and ship, but also of lives two hundred
threescore and sixteen; it was after there had arisen against the ship
a tempestuous wind called Euroclydon, before which the vessel became a
helpless drift; then it was that the crew and passengers, exceedingly
tossed with the tempest, and not comforted—except the apostle, gave up,
with the same exception, all hope of escape, and gloomily awaited the
bitter end. On the third day they cast out the tackling of the ship. And
when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest
lay on them, all hope that they should be saved was then taken away. The
fourteenth night was come, and they were driven up and down in Adria, and
about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country,
and sounded once and again, and found reason to fear lest they should
have fallen upon rocks. So they cast four anchors out of the stern, and
_wished for the day_—ηὔχοντο ἡμέραν γενέσθαι. If ’tis double death to
die in sight of shore, as Shakspeare says, it is also, or nearly, double
death to die in the dark. Some would almost say, Surely the bitterness of
death is past, if light be vouchsafed to the dying, and so the shadows
flee away. Well can they understand a pregnant symbolism in that incident
of patriarchal days, when a deep sleep fell upon Abram as the sun was
going down; and, lo, a horror of a great darkness fell upon him. With
something of a shuddering sympathy can they connect the fact that, on the
day whence all Good Fridays take their name, there was darkness over all
the land unto the ninth hour, with that other fact that about the ninth
hour there was heard a wailing cry, whose echo reverberates through all
space and time, _Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?_
Ever memorable in classical lore is the supplication of the Greek warrior
in Homer, not to die in the dark. Let him see his foe, and see his end,
however imminent, however inevitable. King Edward II., in Christopher
Marlowe’s historical tragedy, left alone in the Berkeley Castle dungeon
with Lightborn, a murderer, exclaims:—
“I see my tragedy written in thy brows;
Yet stay awhile, forbear thy bloody hand,
And let me see the stroke before it comes,
That even then, when I shall lose my life,
My mind may be more steadfast on my God.”
Frequent in historical narrative are instances like that of Labedoyère,
who when brought out to be shot, refused to have his eyes bandaged, and
looking straight at the levelled muskets, exclaimed in a loud voice,
“Fire, my friends!” Marshal Ney, a week or two later, also refused to
have his eyes bandaged. “For five-and-twenty years,” he said, “I have
been accustomed to face the balls of the enemy.” Then taking off his hat
with his left hand, and placing his right upon his heart, he too said in
a loud voice, fronting the soldiers, “My comrades, fire on me.” Murat
fell in a like manner, after a like request,—but gazing to the last on a
medallion which contained portraits of his wife and four children.
What mainly tends to pile up the agony of Goisvintha, in the historical
romance of “Antonina,” when alone in the vaults with the madman Ulpius,
is the distracting absence of light. “Bewildered and daunted by the
darkness and mystery around her, she vainly strained her eyes to look
through the obscurity, as Ulpius drew her on into the recess.... Suddenly
he heard her pause, as if panic-stricken in the darkness, and her voice
ascended to him, groaning, ‘Light, light! oh, where is the light?’” She
is held forth at this crisis, as a terrible evidence of the debasing
power of crime, as she now stands, enfeebled by the weight of her own
avenging guilt, and “by the agency of darkness, whose perils the innocent
and the weak have been known to brave.” It is only your melodramatic
villain that flings forth his flourish in the style of Velasquez in
“Braganza,”—addressing the duke, his judge:—
“Yes, in your gloomiest dungeons plunge me down.
Welcome, congenial darkness! horrors, hail!
No more these loathing eyes shall see that sun
Whose irksome beams light up thy pageant triumph.”
And thus Sir Walter Scott has full warranty for proving the exceptional
courage of his captive Englishman, when subjected to a midnight trial
in the vaults of the _Vehmgericht_, by showing him unappalled by even
the utter darkness of that terrible court. “Even in these agitating
circumstances, the mind of the undaunted Englishman remained unshaken,
and his eyelid did not quiver nor his heart beat quicker, though he
seemed, according to the expression of Scripture, to be a pilgrim in the
valley of the shadow of death, beset by numerous snares, and encompassed
by total darkness, where light was most necessary for safety.” It is only
in an oblique sense that what Euripides says is true, of the coward
being very valiant in the dark—ἐν ὄρφνῃ δραπέτης μέγα σθένει.
Dr. Croly applies the Homeric prayer of Ajax to an incident in the long
war with France, when twenty-seven thousand British were eager, under
Abercrombie and the Duke of York, to attack the French lines, and at the
first tap of the drum a general cheer was given from all the columns.
But the day, we read, had scarcely broke when a dense fog fell suddenly
upon the whole horizon, and rendered movement almost impossible. “Nothing
could exceed the vexation of the army at this impediment, and if our
soldiers had ever heard of Homer there would have been many a repetition
of his warrior’s prayer, that ‘live or die, it might be in the light of
day.’” One is reminded of the lines in Racine:—
“Enfin toute l’horreur d’un combat ténébreux;
Que pouvait la valeur dans ce trouble funeste?”
It has been observed of a certain railway catastrophe, where the crash
and collision occurred in a tunnel—in that very place which nobody, even
on ordinary occasions, passes through without a slight shudder and an
undefined dread of some such disaster as the one in question—that “Ajax’s
prayer has been muttered by many who never heard of Ajax; and if we are
to die, it is at least a mitigation of the hour of fate when it overtakes
us in daylight.”
In tracing, psychologically, the development within us of the sense
of awe, Professor Newman attributes to the gloom of night (_deadly
night_, as Homer terms it), more universally perhaps than to any other
phenomenon, the first awakening of an uneasy sense of vastness. A young
child, as he says, accustomed to survey the narrow limits of a lighted
room, wakes in the night, and is frightened at the dim vacancy. “No
nurse’s tales about spectres are needed to make the darkness awful.”
Nor, he adds, is it from fear of any human or material enemy: it is the
negation, the unknown, the unlimited, which excites and alarms; and
sometimes the more if mingled with glimpses of light.
The last words audible of Goethe were, “_More light!_” The final darkness
grew apace, in the words of his ablest biographer; and he whose eternal
longings had been for more light, gave a parting cry for it as he was
passing under the shadow of death.
“Light! give me more light,” is the cry of the dying woman in “The Dead
Secret,”—whereby hangs that tale. How often Lord Lytton remarks, is
“light!” the last word of those round whom the shades are gathering. And
he says it in reference to the last hours of one of the characters he
has described with most success as well as elaboration, John Burley, who
discourses of what is precious in light, as the darkness closes about
him. When he lies down, and the attendant would withdraw the light, he
moves uneasily. “Not that,” he murmurs, “light to the last!” And putting
forth a wan hand, he draws aside the curtain, so that the light may
fall full on his face. When his only friend returns, and steals back to
Burley’s room on tiptoe, it is to see light stream through the cottage
lattice—not the miserable ray lit by a human hand—but the still and holy
effulgence of a moonlit heaven. Burley has died in sleep—calmly, and
the half open eyes have the look of inexpressible softness which death
sometimes leaves; “and still they were turned towards the light; and the
light burned clear.” Which things are an allegory.
Mr. Dickens intensifies the wretchedness of his prisoner at Marseilles
by the deprivation of light in a prison that, like a well, like a vault,
like a tomb, had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have
kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the
Indian Ocean. What light he does get comes languishing down a square
funnel that blinds a window in the staircase wall, through which the sky
is never seen—nor anything else. What he does see of the “light of day”
he calls the light of yesterday week, the light of six months ago, the
light of six years ago: so slack and dead. Bitter indeed is the import of
the curse, “Let it look for light and have none.” Piteous indeed is the
import of the pathetic remonstrance, “Wherefore is light given to him in
misery?” Graphic indeed is the description of a place “where the light is
as darkness.” Darkness and light are both alike to One only.
The record of the last day in the life of Patrick Fraser Tytler opens as
follows:—“On Sunday, the 23rd, he grew confused in memory, experienced
difficulty in swallowing, and complained of darkness. The curtain was
drawn, and the light of the winter morning was suffered to stream on his
bed; but in vain. He folded his hands, and exclaimed, ‘I see how it is.’”
John Foxe relates this incident in his narrative of the martyrdom of
William Hunter, apprentice to a silk weaver in London, but discharged
from his master’s employment for refusing to attend mass, and finally
condemned to the stake as an incorrigible heretic. “Then said William,
‘Son of God, shine upon me!’ and immediately the sun in the element shone
out of a dark cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look
another way, whereat the people mused, because it was dark a little time
before.”
_THE MORE THAN BROTHERHOOD OF A BOSOM FRIEND._
PROVERBS xviii. 24.
In the last book of the Pentateuch we meet with a verse which,
incidentally, seems to recognise how much more vitally close and intimate
may be the affinity between a man and his bosom friend, than between
the same man and his own brother. The brother is spoken of without
descriptive epithet or adjunct of any kind; while of the friend it is
added, “which is as thine own soul.”[36] An ever memorable verse in the
book of Proverbs has immortalized the truth, that “there is a friend that
sticketh closer than a brother.”
None too many are the testimonies on record of brotherly attachment such
as Columbus signalizes in his correspondence. To his elder son, Diego,
the affectionate father writes concerning the younger, Fernando, then a
stripling midway in his teens, “To thy brother conduct thyself as the
elder brother should unto the younger. Thou hast no other, and I praise
God that this is such a one as thou dost need. Ten brothers would not be
too many for thee. Never have I found a better friend to right or left
than my brothers.” General testimony points the other way. Cicero, who,
himself a good brother, in one place moots the question whether it is
just to prefer our friends to our relations—_quæritur sitne æquum amicos
cognatis anteferre_,—in another decides that friendship is better than
relationship: _præstat amicitia propinquitati_. It has been remarked
by Samuel Bailey, of Sheffield, that parents and children, husbands
and wives, brothers and sisters, reciprocally complain of each other’s
deficiency of affection, and think it hard that the tie of relationship
should not secure invariable kindness and indestructible love: expecting
some secret influence of blood, some physical sympathy, some natural
attraction, to retain the affection of their relatives, without any
solicitude on their part to cherish or confirm it; and forgetting that
man is so constituted as to love only what in some way or other, directly
or indirectly, immediately or remotely, gives him pleasure,—that even
natural affection is the result of pleasurable associations in his mind,
or at least may be overcome by associations of an opposite character,
and that the sure way to make themselves beloved is to display amiable
qualities to those whose regard they wish to obtain.[37] Crabbe has a
terse couplet on—
... “those
Who are called friends because they are not foes;”
meaning by friends, kinsfolk; but such as, though not more than kin, are
less than kind. Dr. Croly’s hero, Marston, soldier and statesman, on
receiving, in his isolation, three letters from three proved friends,
yet comparative strangers, describes himself as feeling, “while holding
their letters in my hand, and almost pressing them to my heart, how much
more strongly friendship may bind us than the ties of cold and negligent
relationship.” So Mr. Thackeray is bitter on what it is to have sham
friends and no sympathy; ties of kindred which bind one, as it were, to
the corpse of friendship, and oblige one to bear through life the weight
and the embraces of this lifeless, cold connection.
Noteworthy among the avowals of Sir Thomas Browne, in his “Religio
Medici,” is this: “I confess I do not observe that order that the schools
ordain our affections,—to love our parents, wives, children, and then
our friends; for, excepting the injunctions of religion, I do not find
in myself such a necessary and indissoluble sympathy to all those of my
blood. I hope I do not break the fifth commandment, if I conceive I may
love my friend before the nearest of my blood, even those to whom I owe
the principles of life.” The father and the son may, as Montaigne says,
be of quite contrary humours, and brothers be without any sympathy with
brothers. So Feltham asserts it to be likeness which makes the true
love-knot of friendship. When we find another of our own disposition,
what is it, he asks, but the same soul in a divided body? “We are then
intermutually transposed into each other; and nature, which makes us
love ourselves, makes us for the same reason love those who are like us;
hence a friend is a more sacred name than a brother.” What avails it, he
further asks, to have bodies of the same original, when the souls within
them differ?
The autobiographer in a modern work of fiction, having occasion to
acknowledge, after being thrust amongst strangers to sicken, and all
but die, that among strangers he received as much sympathy and kindness
as he should have done among his own people, and in his father’s
house,—characterizes this sort of confession as one which people are apt
to make as a reflection upon their relations, “whereas it disgraces only
themselves.” It is a case of rare misfortune, he contends, when we are
not loved by our nearest of kin, in proportion as we desire and deserve
to excite affection. Nevertheless, there is a too ample _consensus_ of
authorities whose testimony affirms, and confirms, the often slight and
slender tenure of mere family ties, as such. “None of your family parties
for me,” quoth one of Justice Haliburton’s shrewd spokesmen; “connections
at best are poor friends, and commonly bitter enemies. If you want
nothing, go to them, and you are sure to get it; if you are in want of
any assistance, go to a stranger friend you have _made for yourself_, and
that’s the boy that has a heart and a hand for you.” The Earl of Dudley,
Bishop Copleston’s correspondent, in one of his always interesting
letters to that prelate, adverting to the death of an uncle who had never
taken the smallest interest in him, or showed him the smallest kindness,
makes the avowal: “And, though I flatter myself that there is no person
more capable of returning affection than myself, yet I fairly own that
I am wholly unable to bestow it quite gratuitously even upon a near
relation.” Richardson harps on this note again and again in his history
of Clarissa. How much more binding and tender, that young lady writes—and
the writing comes of bitter experience—are the ties of pure friendship
and the union of like minds, than the ties of nature! And her chief
correspondent, in commenting on the terms of a kinsman’s assurance, that
he will not see Clarissa “imposed on either by friend or foe,”—interposes
the verbal amendment: “By _relation_ or foe, should he not have said? For
a friend will not impose upon a friend.” Elsewhere the same writer has
to put the home-question: “Would you side with a false brother against a
true friend? A brother may not be a friend; but a friend will be always a
brother.”
It was one of the aphorisms—or call them paradoxes—of M. de Stendhal
(Henri Beyle) that our next of kin are our natural enemies when we enter
the world; the simple matter of fact being, as an Edinburgh reviewer
alleges, that his own character, tendencies, and aspirations had been
invariably opposed to the plans, wishes, and modes of thinking of his
family. Mr. Froude has depicted in Edward Fowler a young man who in his
dealings with every one except with his own family, was frank, generous,
and unselfish; and whose affections, naturally very strong, finding
themselves forced out of their proper channel, poured themselves out on
any one that happened to attract him. A few kind words from his father,
now and then, implying real sympathy and inviting confidence, might,
we are given to understand, have averted in this case, as in so many
others, a bitter result of estrangement and desolation. Perhaps, as Mr.
Disraeli somewhere intimates, with all their anxiety and opportunities
for observation, the parent and tutor are rarely skilful in discovering
the character of their child or charge. “Custom blunts the fineness
of psychological study: those with whom we have lived long and early,
are apt to blend our essential and our accidental qualities in one
bewildering association.” Strange, exclaims Hamilton Aïde, how little we
often know of those who are next us in the battle-ranks through this long
march of life! Our daily familiar life, as George Eliot has remarked,
is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial
words and deeds; and those who sit with us at the same hearth are often
the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken
evil and unacted good. “Strangers yet,” as Lord Houghton has it:—
“After childhood’s winning ways,
After care, and blame, and praise,
Counsel asked, and wisdom given,
After mutual prayers to heaven,
Child and parent scarce regret
When they part—are strangers yet.”
Or as Chauncy Hare Townshend expresses the same relative truth, too
absolutely true:—
“Kindred are oft but kin by name,
Our thoughts they never knew.”
_MANY YEARS TO ENJOY LIFE: THIS NIGHT TO DIE._
ST. LUKE xii. 19, 20.
The rich man was getting richer to his heart’s content. So plentiful was
the produce of his land, that he must needs enlarge his premises. There
was not room enough in his barns for those golden harvests; the barns
must be pulled down, and greater ones built, wherein to bestow all his
fruits and his goods. Happy man he accounted himself that day; happy in
a prosperous present, happier still in a promising future. A future of
happiness not less prolonged than assured. So he would say to his soul
that day, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine
ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” That day he said it. Fool! that night
his soul was required of him.
Woe was denounced by one of old on another of the Dives family, who said,
“I will build me a wide house, and large chambers,” and who cut him out
windows, and ceiled his house with cedar, and painted it with vermilion.
“Shalt thou reign because thou closest thyself in cedar?” Man’s sanguine
and sure “I will”—how little of the future tense there sometimes is about
it after all!
“Tu secanda marmora
Locas sub ipsum funus; et sepulchri
Immemor, struis domos.”
In Homer we see from his tall ship the king of men descend, there fondly
thinking the gods conclude his toil, where, in fact, awaits him murder
most foul and most unnatural. In Homeric figure—
“So, whilst he feeds luxurious in the stall,
The sovereign of the herd is doomed to fall.”
Bitterly the shade of Atrides repeats his tragic story to Odysseus,
telling how, “Alas! he hoped, the toils of war o’ercome, to meet soft
quiet and repose at home. Delusive hope!” for at home the hand was
already upraised to smite him.
The Turkish prince, Alp Arslan, dying of Joseph’s dagger-stroke,
bequeathed an admonition to the pride of kings, which Gibbon has
preserved. “Yesterday, as from an eminence I beheld the numbers, the
discipline, and the spirit of my armies; the earth seemed to tremble
under my feet; and I said in my heart, ‘Surely thou art the king of the
world, the greatest and most invincible of warriors.’ These armies are no
longer mine; and in the confidence of my personal strength, I now fall by
the hand of an assassin.” The inscription on his tomb invited those who
had seen the glory of Alp Arslan exalted to the heavens, to meditate on
its present burial in the dust.
Michelet moralises with trenchant irony on the fate which overtook our
Henry V. on French soil. It is to the “Dance of Death” he refers in the
exclamation, “What sport for death, what a malicious pastime to have
brought the victorious Harry within a month’s reach of the crown of
France! After a life of unremitting toil for that end, he wanted but one
little month added to his existence to be the survivor of Charles VI....
No! not a month, not a day more was to be his.”
Splendid was that festival at Cæsarea at which Herod Agrippa, in the
pomp and pride of power, entered the theatre in a robe of silver, which
glittered, says the historian, with the morning rays of the sun, so as to
dazzle the eyes of the assembly, and excite general admiration. Some of
his flatterers set up the shout, “A present god!” Agrippa did not repress
the impious adulation which spread through the theatre. At that moment he
looked up, and saw an owl perched over his head on a rope, and Agrippa
had been forewarned that when next he saw that bird, “at the height of
his fortune,” he would die within five days. The fatal omen, according
to Josephus, pierced the heart of the king, who, with deep melancholy,
exclaimed, “Your god will soon suffer the common lot of mortality.” He
was immediately struck, in the language of the sacred volume, by an
angel. Seized with violent pains, he was carried to his palace, lingered
five days in extreme agony, being “eaten of worms,” and so died.
Fielding forcibly presents a certain sanguine projector, lusty and
strong, in the heyday of middle age, who reckons confidently on becoming
heir to the estate of a senior of immense wealth, and has all his plans
elaborately prepared for his disposal of the same. Nothing is wanting to
enable him to enter upon the immediate execution of these plans, but the
death of the elder man, in calculating which he has studied every book
extant that treats of the value of lives, reversions, etc.; from all
which he has satisfied himself, that as he has every day a chance of this
happening, so has he more an even chance of its happening before long.
“But while the captain was one day busied in deep contemplations of this
kind, one of the most unlucky, as well as most unseasonable, accidents
happened to him. The utmost malice of fortune could, indeed, have
contrived nothing so cruel, so _mal-à-propos_, so absolutely destructive
to all his schemes.” It was, that just at the very instant when his heart
was exulting in meditations on the happiness which would accrue to him
by the other’s death, he himself was cut off by an apoplexy. As Léontine
complains in “Heraclius,”—
“Et lorsque le hasard me flatte avec excès,
Tout mon dessein avorte au milieu du succès.”
It was just when Kleber was beginning to reap the fruits of his
intrepidity and discretion, that he was cut off by the obscure assassin,
Souliman. One is reminded of Thomson on the massacre of the bees,—
“At evening snatched,
Beneath the cloud of guilt-concealing night,
And fixed o’er sulphur; while not dreaming ill,
The happy people in their waxen cells,
Sat tending public cares, and planning schemes
Of temperance, for winter poor,” etc.
A tory historian, recording the close of the parliamentary session in
July 1827, takes occasion to observe that Mr. Canning now saw every wish
of his heart gratified, having raised himself to the highest position
in the State, and being looked up to in every part of the world as the
protector of the oppressed and the advocate of freedom. In the prime of
life, “his sway in Parliament was unbounded, and he might hope for a
long career of fame, fortune, and usefulness.” _Vanitas vanitatum!_ The
hand of fate was already upon him, and he was to be suddenly snatched
from the scene of his glory, at the very moment when he seemed to have
attained the summit of earthly felicity. Even, however, when death is not
concerned, as in his memorable case, in the sudden and final collapse of
a great career, and the abrupt extinction of exuberant promise, how often
is Cowper’s picture realized, where—
“Runs the mountainous and craggy ridge
That tempts ambition. On the summit, see,
The seals of office glitter in his eyes;
He climbs, he pants, he grasps them. At his heels,
Close at his heels, a demagogue ascends,
And with a dexterous jerk soon twists him down,
And wins them, but to lose them in his turn.”
The picture is, in some sort, and for moral uses, a pendent to that by
another poet, of those who are pushing hard up hill the cumbrous load of
life; just as they trust to gain the farthest steep, and put an end to
strife,—
“Down thunders back the stone with mighty sweep,
And hurls their labours to the valley deep,
For ever vain.”
But this is diverging farther and farther from the direct import of our
theme. More to the purpose is the same poet’s description of Celadon
assuring his betrothed of perfect safety, and triumphantly asserting
her absolute immunity from the perils of the storm, and as exultingly
inferring his own, from his relationship to her; when,—
“From his void embrace,
Mysterious heaven! that moment to the ground,
A blackened corse, was struck the beauteous maid.”
Some innocents, as Cleopatra has it, escape not the thunderbolt.
Innocence, as well as iniquity, may know something of that breach ready
to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at
an instant.
The loving friends of Charlotte Brontè, after her marriage, are described
by one among them as catching occasional glimpses of brightness, and
pleasant peaceful murmurs of sound, telling to them who stood outside,
of the gladness within; and they said among themselves, “After a long
and a hard struggle—after many cares and bitter sorrows—she is tasting
happiness now.” Remembering her trials, they were glad in the idea that
God had seen fit to wipe away the tears from her eyes. “But God’s ways
are not as our ways,” Mrs. Gaskell adds. Just as Currer Bell’s happiness
seemed beginning, and her goodness ripening, came fever, delirium, death.
Mrs. Gaskell’s own career was similarly cut short, just when she was
finishing, but ere yet she had finished, the completest and ablest of her
works; just when public recognition of her merits was growing earnest as
well as general. It is the old, old story. For what, as the old ballad
says,—
“is this worldys bliss,
That changeth as the moon!
My summer’s day in lusty May
Is darked before the noon.”
_GREAT BABYLON BUILT: A BUILDER’S BOAST._
DANIEL iv. 29-33.
Walking in the palace of his kingdom of Babylon—that Babylon of which the
foundations, indeed, had been laid ages ago, but which he had so enlarged
and adorned as to make it one of the world’s wonders—Nebuchadnezzar the
king, elate with pride at the pomp of architectural results, flushed with
the triumph of enterprises so costly, and achievements so manifest to the
eye, gave utterance, in complacent soliloquy perhaps, to the exultant
sense of being a master builder indeed, and of seeing his power reflected
in so gorgeous a form. The king spake and said, “Is not this great
Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom, by the might of
my power, and for the honour of my majesty?”
While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven,
saying, “O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is
departed from thee.” And the sequel we know. How that same hour was the
thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar, and he was driven from men, and did
eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till
his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’
claws,—is it not written in the book of the prophecies of Daniel, whose
name was Belteshazzar, and whom the king made ruler over the whole
province of that same Babylon the Great?
The royal builder’s boast was on the instant reproved by a degradation
literally brutal in its extremity. While the word of complacent
self-glorification was in the king’s mouth, the sentence of bestial doom
went forth against him. Just when he was resting on his laurels, a taint
overtook them. Just when he rejoiced in asserting himself a king of
kings, commenced the working of a curse which levelled him with grazing
flocks and herds.
The lesson is for all time, and for all sorts and conditions of men.
Verifications of it—varying, of course, in kind, and still more in
degree—are rife in records historical and biographical, and in the
unrecorded experiences, the moving accidents, of everyday life. Just when
a man is apt to set up his rest, the fiat goes forth against him which
shatters to its base the structure he has reared. The house he has just
finished building tumbles to pieces like a house of cards. The castle in
whose defences, at last completed, he felt so secure, dislimns like a
castle in the air.
“... The engineer
Who lays the last stone of his sea-built tower,
It cost him years and years of toil to raise,—
And, smiling at it, tells the wind and waves
To roar and whistle now—but, in a night,
Beholds the tempest sporting in its place—
May look aghast.”
Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and
drank wine before the thousand, and displayed the golden vessels which
his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple at Jerusalem,
and was jubilant with the excitement of revelry, and joyously confident
in the stability of his realm; when, in the same hour, there came forth
fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the plaster of the wall
of the king’s palace; and what they wrote was, that God had numbered his
kingdom, and finished it. And in that night was Belshazzar the king of
the Chaldeans slain.
A noble chamber had Pope John XXI. built for himself in the palace of
Viterbo; and by the falling in of the roof he so admired, he was crushed
to death. “John XXI.,” writes Dean Milman, “was contemplating with too
great pride the work of his own hands, and burst out into laughter; at
that instant the avenging roof came down on his head.” The catastrophe
was held at the time to be a special judgment on a reprobate pontiff.
Nebuchadnezzar’s boast, and worse than Nebuchadnezzar’s doom. The mention
of Babylon the Great will serve, with some, to eke out a parallel.
The historian of Mexico tells us of Montezuma, while exacting from his
people the homage of an adulation worthy of an oriental despot, and the
profuse expenditure of whose court was a standing marvel, that “while the
empire seemed towering in its most palmy and prosperous state, the canker
had eaten deepest into its heart.” Ruin was at hand. The hour was come,
and the man; and that man was Hernando Cortès.
Significantly opens a fifth act—for a fifth act is the last—of Ben
Jonson’s “Sejanus,” with the joyous exultations of that prosperous
upstart, in the confidence of power: “Swell, swell, my joys,” he
exclaims,—
“I did not live till now; this my first hour;
Wherein I see my thoughts reached by my power.
...
My roof receives me not; ’tis air I tread;
And, at each step, I feel my advanced head
Knock out a star in heaven!”
and so forth, with other hyperboles of frantic arrogance. His soliloquy
is interrupted by messengers of ill news. Destruction dogs his path; and
very soon the magniloquent braggart has to subdue his tone, and his cue
is then to upbraid the higher powers whom alone he recognises:—
“If you will, Destinies, that after all,
I faint now ere I touch my period,
You are but cruel.”
Of constant recurrence among the commonplaces of biography are such
“buts,” inopportune and inevitable, as Cicero’s biographer prefixes
to a critical paragraph: “But while all things were proceeding very
prosperously in his favour, and nothing seemed wanting to crown his
success, ... all his hopes and fortunes were blasted at once, by an
unhappy rencounter with his old enemy Clodius.”
There is a popular historical fiction in which we see the Cardinal
Alberoni musing on the greatness he has achieved for Spain and for
himself, only to find himself overtaken by ruin and disgrace. The rope
which he has twisted so carefully, proves to be of sand. In another we
see a successful adventurer at the culminating point of his success.
There seems nothing wanting to him in “that supreme moment,” as the
phrase goes. He is in “a tumult of gratified ambition and selfish joy.”
“This glory and grandeur” repay a thousand-fold his patient endeavours
and strenuous schemings. But at this very moment a dark shadow overlays
the sunshine on his pathway; and we look on a changed countenance—“no
longer full of triumph and pleasure, but ghastly pale” at a sudden but
very present and very pressing sense of impending disaster. _Fortuna
vitrea est, tum cum splendet frangitur._
At the opening of the twelfth century all was prosperity with the Emperor
Henry IV.; his turbulent and agitated life seemed, in the words of Dean
Milman, “as if it would close in an august and peaceful end.” But, as an
after page in the history of Latin Christianity is prompt to prove, this
most secure and splendid period in the life of Henry was one calm and
brilliant hour of evening before a night of utter gloom.
Columbus had just welcomed tranquillity in exchange for the troubles and
dangers of his island, when intelligence arrived of the discovery of a
large tract of country rich in mines. He now anticipated the prosperous
prosecution of his favourite enterprise, and was exultant at the turn
of the tide. “How illusive were his hopes!” exclaims his biographer.
“At this moment events were maturing which were to overwhelm him with
distress, strip him of his honour, and render him comparatively a wreck
for the remainder of his days.” Who, the chronicler of the conquest of
Granada may well ask, who can tell when to rejoice in this fluctuating
world? “Every wave of prosperity has its reacting surge, and we are often
overwhelmed by the very billow on which we thought to be wafted into the
haven of our hopes.” _Et subito casu, quæ valuere, ruunt._
Olivarez was requested by his royal master to resign, just at the moment
when the death of Richelieu (1643) opened to him an almost royal road, it
might seem, to success.
“O momentary grace of mortal men,
Which we more hunt for than the grace of God!
Who builds his hope in air of your fair looks,
Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast,
Ready, with every nod, to tumble down
Into the fatal bowels of the deep.”
Such is the state of man, as Shakspeare’s Hastings feels it. And this
is the state of man, as Shakspeare’s Wolsey finds it: to-day he puts
forth the tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, and next day comes
a frost, a killing frost, and,—when he thinks, good easy man, full
surely his goodness is a ripening,—nips his root, and then he falls.
Shakspeare’s Belarius again, will furnish us with another text, of
practical application:—
“... Then was I as a tree,
Whose boughs did bend with fruit: but in one night,
A storm, or robbery, call it what you will,
Shook down my yellow hangings, nay, my leaves,
And left me bare to weather.”
And as with the pride and pomp and circumstance of life, so with life
itself. Typical for all time is the fate of Lycidas:—
“Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind fury with the abhorrèd shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.”
_INVOCATION AND INACTION._
EXODUS xiv. 15.
With the Red Sea close before them, and with Pharaoh and his host close
behind them, what were the children of Israel to do? Was it for this
that Moses had brought them out of the house of bondage, which yet had
its fleshpots and creature comforts after all? What were they to do?
They lifted up their eyes, and saw the sea in front, and the enemy in
the rear; and then they lifted up their voice in querulous fear and
expostulation. Should they go back? Then Moses lifted up his voice, and
bade them stand still, and they should see a great deliverance. But the
will of God was not that they should either go back, or stand still and
merely look on. For “the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto
me? speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.” Invocation
may be excellent in itself, but, as a concomitant, inaction mars it. A
hallowed thing is prayer; but to pray and sit still, when the need is to
go forward and push on, is the sign or stigma of feeble folk.
* * * * *
When Nelson told the King of Naples, in plain terms, that he had his
choice—either to advance, trusting to God for His blessing on a just
cause, and prepared to die sword in hand; or to remain quiet, and be
kicked out of his kingdom; the king made answer that he would go on, and
trust in God and Nelson. Of the same stuff as Nelson, but his superiors
in moral character and in practical recognition of Him that is Holy,
Holy, Holy, as well as Lord God Almighty, were those early English
navigators, characterized by a modern pen as “indomitable God-fearing
men, whose life was one great liturgy.” “The ice was strong, but God
was stronger,” says one of Frobisher’s men, after grinding a night and
a day among the icebergs; not waiting for God to come down and split
them, but toiling through the long hours, himself and the rest fending
off the vessel with poles and planks, with death glaring at them out of
the rocks, and so saving themselves and it. We read in Turell’s Life of
Dr. Benjamin Colman, “that reverend father in our New England Israel,”
as Mr. Lowell calls him, that when the vessel in which he had taken
passage for England was attacked by a French privateer, he “fought like
a philosopher and a Christian, ... and prayed all the while he charged
and fired.” His the practice was, if not on his lips the maxim, to pray
to God and keep his powder dry. It is expressly noted of the Maid of
Orleans, in the _Procès_ on record, that while she rather evaded the
question of resorting to miraculous aids and appliances, and of affecting
supernatural power, she “used the Gallic proverb, _Ayde-toi, Dieu te
aydera_.”
“In daily toil, in deadly fight,
God’s chosen found their time to pray;
And still He loves the brave and strong,
Who scorn to starve, and strive with wrong,
To mend it, if they may.”
Forcible is the portrait drawn in a recent work of fiction, of a man now
steeped in moral degradation, who had once tried to be honest, and prayed
to God to prosper his honesty; but then he only tried to do right in a
spasmodic, fitful kind of way, and expected his prayers to be granted
as soon as uttered, and was indignant with a Providence that seemed
regardless of his entreaties.
Bentley is held to have happily ridiculed the helpless Chorus of Greek
tragedy, who, when a deed of violence was to be acted, instead of
interfering to prevent the atrocity to which the perpetrator had made
them privy, could only, by the rules of the theatre, exhaust their sorrow
and surprise in dithyrambics. He burlesqued this characteristic by
introducing into “The Wishes” a Chorus after the manner of the ancient
Greeks, who are informed by one of the _dramatis personæ_, that a madman
with a firebrand has just entered the vaults beneath the place which they
occupy, and which contain a magazine of gunpowder. The Chorus, instead
of stirring from the dangerous vicinity, immediately commence a long
complaint of the hardship of their fate, exclaiming pathetically, “O
unhappy madman—or rather unhappy we, the victims of this madman’s fury—or
thrice, thrice unhappy the friends of the madman, who did not secure him,
and restrain him from the perpetration of such deeds of frenzy—or three
and four times hapless the keeper of the magazine, who forgot the keys in
the door,” etc., etc.
The cry of Charles and his Paladins at Arles, “Help us, oh blessed martyr
St. Trophimus!” is thus disposed of by Torfrid, Hereward’s forefather,
in the story of the Wake, “What use in crying to St. Trophimus? A tough
arm is worth a score of martyrs here,” in the thick of the fight for dear
life.
When Lord Rea, in 1630, as recorded in a well-known passage from
Rushworth, uttered the pious conventionalism or devout platitude, “Well,
God mend all!” his companion, Sir David Ramsay, impatiently exclaimed,
“Nay,” with an undevout expletive, “Nay, Donald, we must help him to mend
it!” One is reminded of what Mr. Froude says of the Protestant leaders
in Scotland, during the autumn of 1559, when the Queen Regent returned
to Holyrood, once more absolutely victorious: “Notwithstanding all their
talk about God, it had come to this. God had as much interest in them
as they had themselves courage, energy, capacity, understanding, and
perseverance—so much precisely, and not more.” Or again of that homely
thrust in the “Biglow Papers,” where one of the interlocutors, on a
critical occasion, avowing a wish to know where and when to strike, is
thus answered by his plain-spoken mate:—
“‘Strike soon,’ sez he, ‘or you’ll be deadly ailin’,—
Folks thet’s afear’d to fail are sure o’ failin’;
God hates your sneakin’ creturs thet believe
He’ll settle things they run away an’ leave.’”
There is something to be said—indeed in our present sense there is more
to be said, for the farmer than for the clergyman in the story of the
latter congratulating the former on the state of his crops, and finding
him not free from apprehensions, in regard of former bad years—“My
friend,” urged the rector, “trust in Providence.” “Providence! Yes, yes,”
replied the other; “that’s all very well: but give me the doong cart.”
Dr. John Brown relates with zest how one of his faculty was attending
a poor woman in labour—a desperate case, that required a cool head and
a firm will, while the good man, “for he _was_ good,” had neither of
these,—and losing his presence of mind, gave up the poor woman as lost,
and retired into the next room to pray for her. “Another doctor, who
perhaps wanted what the first one had, and certainly had what he wanted,
brains and courage, meanwhile arrived, and called out, ‘Where is Dr. ⸺?’
‘Oh, he has gone into the next room to pray.’ ‘Pray! Tell him to come
here this instant, and help me; he can work and pray too;’” and by the
new-comer’s, the _snell_ working doctor’s, assistance the woman’s life
was saved.
Sir Robert Peel, in his reply to certain suggestions offered by
Lord Kenyon in reference to the potato-disease, coupled with the
recommendation of a “special public acknowledgment of our dependence on
God’s mercy in our present distressed state,” was mildly sarcastic on the
seeming inconsistency of making such an acknowledgment, while at the same
time leaving “in full operation the restraints which man has imposed on
the import of provisions.”
Not likely to be soon forgotten, on either side the Tweed, is Lord
Palmerston’s reply as Home Secretary, to the Presbytery of Edinburgh,
touching the national attitude pending a visitation of Asiatic cholera.
He advised them that it was better to cleanse than to fast. Let them
see to purifying the foul wynds and overcrowded flats tenanted by the
poor, and so get rid of “those causes and sources of contagion which, if
allowed to remain, will infallibly breed pestilence, and be fruitful in
death, in spite of all the prayers and fastings of a united, but inactive
nation.” To apply what a north country bishop says in Shakspeare:—
“The means that Heaven yields must be embraced,
And not neglected; else, if Heaven would,
And we will not, Heaven’s offer we refuse;
The proffered means of succour and redress.”
A recent apologist for the captain of a lost steamship submitted that the
destruction of that fine vessel was what is called in the old-fashioned
language of a charter-party, “the act of God.” Less partial critics, on
the other hand, affirmed it to be the act of the folly and madness of
man,—the term quoted belonging to an age when they who go down to the sea
in ships had not learned the irreverent practice of imputing to the Deity
the direct consequences of human rashness. “Let us, if we can, amend
this folly; or, if we will persist in it, let us at least take the blame
upon ourselves.” They that go down to the sea in ships have, however,
in all ages, though not so much one people as another (English for
instance as Italians), been prone to waste in wailing outcries to patron
saints the energy that, in peril of wreck, they might have expended to
better purpose. The “Colloquies” of Erasmus give a lively sample of this
run-to-waste invocation. The last of the heroes of La Vendée, Charette,
while still a youth, sailed from Brest in a cutter which lost its mast,
and was in imminent jeopardy of going down; the sailors, on their knees,
were praying to the Virgin, and had entirely given up all notion of
exertion, “till Charette, by killing one, succeeded in bringing the
others to a sense of their duty, and thereby saved the vessel.” Lord
Broughton describes a scene of the kind, in a Turkish ship of war: the
Greeks on board called on all the saints, the Mussulmans on Allah; the
captain burst into tears and ran below deck, telling his passengers to
call on God: he rung his hands, and wept aloud, and being asked what
he could do, said he could do nothing. “Could he get back to the main
land?” “If God chooses,” was his answer. “Could he make Corfu?” “If
God chooses.” One thinks of the testy old patrician’s rejoinder in
“Coriolanus” to the tribune’s exclaimer, “The gods be good unto us!” “No;
in such a case the gods will not be good unto us.” In Scott’s tale of
the Crusaders, “I will vow a golden candlestick to the Holy Sepulchre—a
shrine of silver to our Lady of Engaddi—a pall, worth one hundred bezants
to Saint Thomas of Orthez,” cries the Queen in extremity.—“Up, up,
madam,” says Edith; “call on the saints an you list, but be your own
best saint.” In “Ivanhoe,” again, when the Grand Master forbodes the
contingent extinction of his order (the Templars), “Now may God avert
such a calamity!” says the Preceptor. “Amen!” rejoins the Grand Master,
with solemnity, “but we must deserve His aid.”
It is all in keeping with the practical character of the man, the
prayer which on one critical occasion Benvenuto Cellini records his
offering: “Almighty God, favour my cause, for Thou knowest it is a just
one, and that I am not on my part wanting in my utmost efforts to make
it succeed.” On another he tells us how he “told Lionardo, who was
incessantly crying out, ‘Jesus, Jesus!’ that Jesus would assist him, if
he strove to help himself.” Elsewhere again Cellini emphatically asserts
his systematic habit of “always exerting his utmost efforts to extricate”
himself from difficulty, as well as of devoutly recommending himself to
God, by whom alone those efforts could achieve success, and who so often
had delivered him when the best of these had clearly and entirely failed.
Saintly as well as Saint Francis of Sales bids his brethren, “En toutes
vos affaires, appuyez-vous totalement sur la providence de Dieu, par
laquelle seule tous vos desseins doivent réussir; travaillez néanmoins de
votre côté tout doucement pour co-opérer avec icelle.” The counsel is at
one, _au fond_, with that of the heathen stoic in the old play:—
“I am plain, fathers. Here you look about
One at another, doubting what to do,
With faces, as you trusted to the gods,
That still have saved you; and they can do it: but
They are not wishings, or base womanish prayers,
Can draw their aids; but vigilance, counsel, action;
Which they will be ashamed to forsake.
’Tis sloth they hate, and cowardice.”
_CO-OPERANT UNITS._
EPHESIANS iv. 16.
The universal Church is designated by the apostle a body, which whole
body is fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint
supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every
part. And every part in its measure, and according to its imparted power.
Very little are some of the joints and fibres; but every little helps.
Who shall despise the whole of small things? But for the accumulated
atoms, the aggregated littles, where were the body?
“Let me not deem that I was made in vain,
Or that my Being was an accident,
Which Fate, in working its sublime intent,
Not wished to be, to hinder would not deign.
_Each drop uncounted in a storm of rain_
_Hath its own mission_, and is duly sent
To its own leaf or blade, not idly spent
’Mid myriad dimples on the shipless main.
The very shadow of an insect’s wing,
For which the violet cared not while it stayed,
Yet felt the lighter for its vanishing,
Proved that the sun was shining by its shade:
Then can a drop of the eternal spring,
Shadow of living lights, in vain be made?”[38]
As the author of “Felix Holt” says, we see human heroism broken into
units, and are apt to imagine, this unit did little—might as well not
have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units;
in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that
this and the other might be cheaply parted with. “Let us rather raise a
monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken,
and met death—a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who
are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some
of them fall unseen and on barrenness.” Suppose but a solution of that
continuity; the sequel is, darkness that may be felt.
There is a latter-day apologue of a gimlet that grew exceedingly
discontented with its vocation, envying all the other tools in the
carpenter’s basket, and thinking scorn of its own mean duty of
perpetually boring and picking holes everywhere. “The saw and the axe had
grand work to do; and the plane got praise always; so did the chisel for
its carving; and the happy hammer was always ringing merrily upon the
clenching nail.” But for _it_, a wretched, poking, paltry, gimlet, its
work was hidden away, and very little seemed its recognised use. But the
gimlet is assured, on the best authority, that nothing could compensate
for its absence, and is therefore bidden be content, nay happy; for
though its work seems mean and secret, it is indispensable. To its good
offices, the workman is said to look chiefly for coherence without
splitting; and to its quiet influences, the neatness, the solidity, the
comfort of his structure may greatly be ascribed. The apologue has, of
course, its practical application. “Are there not many pining gimlets
in society, ambitious of the honour given to the greater-seeming tools
of our Architect, but unconscious that in His hands they are quite as
useful? The loving little child, the gentle woman, the patience of many
a moral martyr, the diligence of many a duteous drudge, though their
works may be unseen and their virtues operate in obscurity, yet are these
main helpers to the very joints and bands of our body corporate, the
quiet home influences whereby the great edifice, Society, is so nicely
wainscoted and floored without split-boards.”
To recognise one’s being entrusted with but one talent, after all, and
not with five or with ten, as one’s vanity had previously taken for
granted, has even been hailed as, in some sort, a soothing sensation.
When one of us who has been led by native vanity or senseless flattery,
says Dr. Holmes, to think himself or herself possessed of talent,
arrives at the full and final conclusion that he or she is really dull,
it is one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can
enter a mortal’s mind: “All our failures, our short-comings, our
strange disappointments in the effect of our efforts, are lifted from
our bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian’s pack, at the feet of
that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant gifts of
high intelligence,—with which one look may overflow us in some wider
sphere of being.” That the one talent be employed, is the one thing
needful. So feels the girl in one of Charlotte Brontè’s tales, whose
exclamation is, “Mother, the Lord who gave each of us our talents will
come home some day, and will demand from all an account. The tea-pot,
the old stocking-foot, the linen rag, the willow-pattern tureen, will
yield up their barren deposit in many a house: suffer your daughters, at
least, to put their money to the exchangers, that they may be enabled
at the Master’s coming to pay His own with usury.” A man is accepted
according to that he hath, not condemned in respect of what he never
had. Whatsoever his hand findeth to do, that is what a man is to do with
his might, to do with a will,—be it to govern a nation, or to dust a
warehouse. To apply a passage in Ben Jonson’s “Catiline,”
“They are no less part of the commonwealth
That do obey, than those that do command.”
John Newton said that if two angels came down from heaven to execute
a Divine command, and one was appointed to conduct an empire, and the
other to sweep a street in it, they would feel no inclination to change
employments. So again, the same robust divine affirmed that a Christian
should never plead spirituality for being a sloven; “if he be but a
shoe-cleaner, he should be the best in the parish.” As the old servant
tells Ruth, in Mrs. Gaskell’s story, “There’s a right and a wrong way
of setting about everything—and to my thinking, the right way is to
take a thing up heartily, if it is only making a bed. Why, dear ah me!
making a bed may be done after a Christian fashion, I take it, or else
what’s to come of such as me in heaven, who’ve had little enough time on
earth for clapping ourselves down on our knees for set prayers?” This
quaint speaker had laid to heart the lesson once for all enforced upon
her, to do her duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to
call her; her station was that of a servant, and, looked at aright, as
honourable as a king’s: she was to help and serve others in one way, just
as a king is in another. Her parting counsel to Ruth runs thus: “Just try
for a day to think of all the odd jobs as to be done well and truly in
God’s sight, not just slurred over any how, and you’ll go through them
twice as cheerfully,” besides doing them more efficiently. John Brown,
of Haddington, being waited on by a lad of excitable temperament, who
informed him of his desire to become a preacher, and whom the shrewd
pastor saw to be as weak in intellect as he was strong in conceit,
advised him to continue in his present vocation. The young man said,
“But I wish to preach and glorify God.” The old commentator replied,
“My young friend, a man may glorify God making broom besoms; stick to
your trade, and glorify God by your life and conversation.” As it was
said of Bossuet, in the seventeenth century, that he could not walk,
or sit down, or even pluck a currant, without your recognising in him
the great bishop (so asserts a modern French divine, not of Bossuet’s
church), just so the workman and the domestic servant who are animated
by their Master’s spirit, distinguish themselves among their fellows
by a certain air of nobility; under their blouse or their livery may
be seen to shine the signal light of their _aristocratie spirituelle_,
the image of the Most High Himself. However mean their employment,
they go about it with neither disgust nor indifference; but with an
intelligent interest, because, in the sight of God, and indeed in their
own eyes, their occupation is on a level with that of king or emperor.
What constitutes the difference between man and man, is not, urges M.
Colani, the wielding a sceptre or plying a needle, but the being loyal
to the trust, be it great or small, committed to us. This, he contends,
is the only true point of view from which men and women should regard
their occupations,—they should consider themselves as _collaborateurs
du Tout-Puissant_. If their work seem the reverse of noble, let them
ennoble it by this thought, in Wordsworth’s phrase,—
“And with the lofty sanctify the low.”
A Christian nursemaid is pictured, forgetting the thousand _désagréments_
of her humble functions, and reminding herself that in reality she is
in charge of souls, as much as pastor or preacher is, and this _grande
conviction_ suffices to save her from servile dejection. So, again, the
artisan and day labourer may be sustained by the Spirit from on high,
and taught to magnify their calling, in a deep and a wide sense, because
it is what they are called to, and because they respond to the call, in
the spirit of it. They are toilers co-operant to an end; and the end,
the result, is with God. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” But
the whole sonnet of Milton’s which closes with that grand line, is too
germane to the matter, and too largely suggestive in its main issue,
to be omitted here; the sonnet which the blind poet wrote touching his
blindness:—
“When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He, returning, chide;
‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’
I fondly ask: but Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, ‘God doth not need
Either man’s work, or His own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best; His state
Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
_SUBORDINATE, NOT SUPERFLUOUS; OR, DEPRECIATED MEMBERSHIP._
1 CORINTHIANS xii. 22.
Strenuously St. Paul insists on the importance of not overlooking
the feebler members of the body—be it physical, politic, or
ecclesiastical,—and of upholding their rights to due consideration, on
the mere score of membership. Subordinate they may be, but superfluous
they are not. The body would not be a body without them. “Nay, much more,
those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.”
“Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.” If all were
one member, where were the body? But now are they many members, but one
body. And one member differeth from another in honour; yet, without the
seeming minor and meaner ones, for all the abundant honour of the greater
ones, where were the body?
* * * * *
Human society, it has been said, is a vast and intricate machine,
composed of innumerable wheels and pulleys:—every one has his special
handle to grind at; some with great and obvious effects, others with
little or no assignable result; but if the object ultimately produced
by the combined efforts of all is in itself a good one, it is not to
be denied that whatever is essential to its production is good also.
Human society is thus regarded as a body corporate, made up of different
members, each of which has its own special function: one class tilling
the ground, another combining and distributing its produce, a third
making, and a fourth executing laws, and so on, through every class of
society. “If all these functions are properly discharged, the whole
body corporate is in a healthy condition; and thence it follows that
whoever contributes to the full and proper discharge of any one of these
functions, is contributing to the general good of the whole body; so that
a person occupied in them is doing good in the strictest sense of the
words.” An able discourser on social subjects, arguing against a current
crotchet, utterly denies that a girl in a respectable family does not
earn the honourable title of a worker, though she be only employed in
assisting in house-keeping and at the family work-table, just as fairly
and as completely as if she walked to a solicitor’s office for an eight
hours’ daily task of copying briefs and making out bills of costs.
“They work in spirit who for service wait.”
Frederick Robertson glowingly expatiates on the glory of womanhood, as
surely one which, if woman rightly comprehended her place on earth, might
enable her to accept its apparent humiliation unrepiningly; the glory,
as he defines it, of unsensualizing coarse and common things, sensual
things, the objects of mere sense, meat and drink and household cares,
elevating them by the spirit in which she ministers them, into something
transfigured and sublime. “The humblest mother of a poor family, who is
cumbered with much serving, or watching over a hospitality which she is
too poor to delegate to others, or toiling for love’s sake in household
work, needs no emancipation in God’s sight. It is the prerogative and the
glory of her womanhood to consecrate the meanest things by a ministry
which is not for self.” What hundreds and thousands of female invalids
have felt, and almost in the same words said, with Lucy Aikin, when
enfeebled with age and other ailments, “The thought which sits heavy
on my mind is that of my own inutility. Alas! what important end of
existence do I fulfil? To whom is it of any real consequence whether or
not I continue to fill a place in the world? I hope that involuntary
uselessness will not be imputed, and that we may say, ‘They also serve
who only stand and wait.’” A fellow-worker of the same sex, but made of
sterner stuff, in the dedication of a book written in illness, tells her
friend, “You know, as well as I, how withering would be the sense of
our own nothingness, if we tried to take comfort from our own dignity
and usefulness.” And she goes on to say how ridiculous, if it were not
shocking, would be any complacency on the ground of having followed the
instincts of her nature to work, while work was possible,—the issues of
such divinely appointed instrumentality being wholly brought out and
directed by Him who framed and actuated her. To apply the words of Aurora
Leigh:—
... “Though we fail indeed,—
You, I, a score of such weak-workers,—He
Fails never. If He cannot work by us,
He will work over us. Does He want a man,
Much less a woman, think you? Every time
The star winks there, so many souls are born,
Who all shall work too. Let our own be calm:
We should be ashamed to sit beneath those stars,
Impatient that we’re nothing.”
So Mrs. Browning. And pitched in the self-same key is this stanza of her
husband’s:—
“All service ranks the same with God:
If now, as formerly He trod
Paradise, His presence fills
Our earth, each only as God wills
Can work—God’s puppets, best and worst,
Are we; there is no last nor first.”
Wordsworth is eloquently suggestive in those prefatory lines of his,
which weave a moral and infer a solace, from the fact, that the stars
pre-eminent in magnitude, and they that from the zenith dart their beams,
are yet of no diviner origin, no purer essence, than the one he watched
from Rydal Mount, burning like an untended watch-fire on the ridge of
some dark hill-top; or than those which seem
“Humbly to hang, like twinkling winter lamps,
Among the branches of the leafless trees;
All are the undying offspring of one Sire.
Then, to the measure of the light vouchsafed,
Shine, poet, in thy place, and be content.”
If we weave a yard of tape in all humility, says Emerson, and as well
as we can, long hereafter we shall see that it was “no cotton tape at
all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time
and Nature.” Without number, as Archdeacon Hare puts it, are the sutlers
and pioneers, the engineers and artisans, who attend the march of
intellect; many of them busied in building and fitting up and painting
and emblazoning the chariot; others in lessening the friction of the
wheels; while others move forward in detachments, and level the way
it is to pass over, and cut down the obstacles which would impede its
progress. And these too, he proceeds to say, “have their reward. If so be
they labour diligently in their calling, not only will they enjoy that
calm contentment which diligence in the lowliest task never fails to win;
not only will the sweat of their brows be sweet, and the sweetener of
the rest that follows; but, when the victory is at last achieved, they
come in for a share of the glory; even as the meanest soldier who fought
at Marathon or at Leipsic became a sharer in the glory of those saving
days.” Remember, with Owen Meredith,—
“Remember, every man God made
Is different: has some deed to do,
Some work to work. Be undismay’d
Though thine be humble: do it too.”
An elder teacher would qualify the Remember by a Do not forget, that “it
matters infinitely less what we _do_ than what we _are_.” If we cannot
pursue a trade or a science—says a memorable voice from a sick-room,—if
we cannot keep house, or help the state, or write books, or earn our own
bread or that of others, we can do the work to which all this is only
subsidiary; “we can cherish a sweet and holy temper; we can vindicate
the supremacy of mind over body; we can, in defiance of our liabilities,
minister pleasure and hope to the gayest who come prepared to receive
pain from the spectacle of our pain; we can, here as well as in heaven’s
courts hereafter, reveal the angel growing into its immortal aspect,
which is the highest achievement we could propose to ourselves, or that
grace from above, could propose to us, if we had a free choice of all
possible conditions of human life.”
To all those possible conditions, so manifold in their potentialities,
the doctrine applies. The membership is a constant quantity. _Nil me
officit unquam_, says Horace, _Ditior hic, aut est quia doctior; est
locus uni Cuique suus_. And we have Shakspeare’s word for it, that nought
so vile upon the earth doth live, but to the earth some special good doth
give; and though he is speaking of stones and the like, are there not
sermons in stones, as well as good in everything?
Holy George Herbert shall furnish us with a versicle to the purpose. As
ever, he is looking upwards when he says,—
“Indeed the world’s Thy book
Where all things have their leaf assign’d:
Yet a meek look
Hath interlined.
Thy board is full, yet humble guests
Find nests.”
But more pertinent, and less quaintly obscure, is that stanza from
another little lyric of his, in which the Country Parson exalts the
exalting power of a simple trust in God and devotion to His service:
“A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine.”
_THE WRATH-DISPELLING POWER OF A SOFT ANSWER._
PROVERBS xv. 1.
While it is the effect, if not the end and aim, of grievous words to
stir up anger,—“a soft answer turneth away wrath.” Though “the wrath of
a king is as messengers of death, a wise man will pacify it.” “By long
forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.”
When the men of Ephraim, enraged at Gideon’s failing to invoke their aid
when he went to fight with the Midianites, chided with him sharply, his
soft answer was of instant avail to turn away their wrath. What had he
done now in comparison of them? the champion deferentially exclaimed; and
what was he able to do in comparison of them? Was not the mere gleaning
of the grapes of Ephraim better than the entire vintage of Abi-ezer?
“Then their anger was abated toward him, when he had said that.” What
threatened to be a very bone of contention,—well, so soft a tongue as
that of Jerubbaal, who is Gideon, breaketh the bone.
Discussing Lord Aberdeen’s settlement of the vexed question of the right
of search, in 1843, the historian of Europe observes that never was
there a truer maxim than that it requires the consent of two persons to
make a quarrel; a soft word, a seasonable explanation, often turns aside
wrath, and sometimes prevents the most serious wars that threaten to
devastate the world. Æsop Smith says he never knew a downright quarrel
yet, where two people were not in the wrong; “drop your battledore, and
the shuttlecock will fall. ‘A soft answer turneth away wrath.’ No doubt
it does, in nine cases out of ten,”—but not quite always, this authority
affirms; there being some unreasonable quarrellers, who will batter
the peacemaker when he drops his battledore. But as a rule, and on the
authority of an older and still more widely recognised maker of proverbs,
the mere fact of yielding pacifieth great offences.
The historian of the conquest of Peru tells us how Gasca was assailed by
reproaches and invectives which, however, had no power to disturb his
equanimity; he patiently listened, and replied to all in the mild tone of
expostulation best calculated to turn away wrath. “By this victory over
himself,” says Garcilasso, “he acquired more real glory, than by all his
victories over his foes.” As Spenser has it,—
“Words well-disposed
Have secret power t’ appease inflamèd rage.”
Sir Matthew Hale’s celebrated letter of advice includes this counsel,—if
a person be passionate, and give you ill language, rather to pity him
than be moved to anger. We shall find, the pious judge asserts, that
silence, or very gentle words, are the most exquisite revenge for
reproaches; they will either cure the distemper in the angry man, and
make him sorry for his passion, or they will be a severe reproof and
punishment to him. “But at any rate,” adds Sir Matthew, “they will
preserve your innocence, give you the deserved reputation of wisdom and
moderation, and keep up the serenity and composure of your mind. Passion
and anger make a man unfit for everything that becomes him as a man or as
a Christian.”
The fact is, maintains the author of “The Gentle Life,” all hard words
are a mistake: most of our quarrels arise from a total misunderstanding
of each other; and at any rate, hard words will not mend the matter.
One might as well, he says, try to mend glass windows by pelting them
with stones. Soft words, on the other hand, fall like a healing balm on
the hearts of all. “Such power,” in the words of one who loved to be
written, if not to write himself, Leontius, “such power has the least
shadow of a pleasant speech, to do away an ill-feeling of the moment, in
the complacency it produces, both in the giver and receiver.” To apply,
again, a passage from Spenser, descriptive of a damsel’s success in
deterring two doughty knights from mortal encounter, so effective was her
speech to
... “calm the sea of their tempestuous spite:
Such power have pleasing words! Such is the might
Of courteous clemency in gentle heart!”
We are all of us fond of gentle words, once more to quote an _ex titulo_
authority on all that concerns gentle living; and he denies the truth
of the common rough proverb, “Soft words butter no parsnips,” which is
shown to be, after all, an apologetic proverb, meaning that the hearer
is tickled with the politeness, albeit real satisfaction is not yet
made. “Soft words do butter parsnips; and many an oily fellow, whose
talent, industry, and conscientiousness are small, owes his position and
advancement in life to the soft words which drop continually from his
mouth.” The soft answer that avails to dispel wrath, comes of practised
patience; and when patience has its perfect work, it works miracles, as
detailed by that fine old forgotten poet, Decker:—
“It is the greatest enemy to law
That can be, for it doth embrace all wrongs,
And so chains up lawyers and women’s tongues;
...
And last of all, to end a household strife,
It is the honey ’gainst a waspish wife.”
This reminds us of a passage in “The Gordian Knot,” where the gentle
laying of a husband’s hand in an irritated wife’s, or _vice versâ_, is
recommended (by example) as a good plan to adopt in conjugal discussions
when differences arise. The tongue, says our author, is very proud,
abominably proud and sulky, and often refuses to say what the heart
desires should be said; but the fingers know their duty, and are ready
to convey an apologetic or forgiving pressure, which, he makes bold to
assert, “will stop ninety-nine quarrels out of a hundred, if the parties
love one another.”
The greatest, widest, deepest of all observers of human nature puts into
the mouth of one of the sagest of kings this counsel to a younger son, in
respect to his bearing towards the elder:—
... “Blunt not his love; ...
For he is gracious, if he be observed;[39]
Yet notwithstanding, being incensed, he’s flint:
As humorous as winter, and as sudden
As flaws[40] congealed in the spring of day.
His temper, therefore, must be well observed:
Chide him for faults, and do it reverently,
When you perceive his blood inclined to mirth:
But being moody, give him line and scope;
Till that his passions, like a whale on ground,
Confound themselves with working.”
In a later one, again, of his noble series of English history
plays—indeed the latest—Shakspeare makes a ducal politician, astute in
practical psychology as well as in politics, utter this apophthegm, of
his own coinage:—
“Anger is like
A full-hot horse, who being allowed his way,
Self-mettle tires him.”
_A TWICE-TOLD TALE OF YEARS._
ECCLESIASTES vi. 6.
The preacher, whose text was Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, pictures
in one section of his homily a man who has lived many years, “so that
the days of his years be many,” but whose soul is not filled with good,
but aches rather with a gnawing sense of emptiness, so that his many
years, gloomy as they have been, are all too few. “Yea, though he live a
thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one
place?” What more tedious than such a twice-told tale of years? Yet, to
look back upon, how fleet their transit, how imperceptible their lapse,
how petty the sum of them! That tale is soon told, even if told twice.
The days of our life are threescore years and ten, and though men be so
strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but
labour and sorrow; nor do the fourscore seem longer to the retrospective
reviewer than do to the sexagenarian his sixty years, or to the
septuagenarian his threescore and ten. The most popular of contemporary
authors describes a man of seventy-eight, of whom a loveless,
sad-hearted questioner asks whether his seventy-eight years would not be
seventy-eight heavy curses, if he could say to himself, as the questioner
can, “I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or
respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no
regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by.” The
Royal Preacher would apply context as well as text to such a retrospect,
with an “I say, that an untimely birth is better than he. For he cometh
in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered
with darkness. Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known anything:
this hath more rest than the other. Yea, though he live a thousand years
twice told, yet hath he seen no good.”
The same questioner, already cited, asks the same old man if his
childhood seems far off,—if the days when he sat at his mother’s knee
seem days of very long ago? To which the experience of threescore and
eighteen years gives this reply: “Twenty years back, yes: at this time
of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel
in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning.” But he is not one
to feel and say with the French cynic, “Mais enfin la vie se passe, et
mourir après s’être amusé ou s’être ennuyé dix ou vingt ans, c’est la
même chose.” He has not so learned life, and the meaning of life, and its
purpose, and its end.
Infinite is the swiftness of time, says Seneca, as seen by those who
are looking back at time past. _Infinita est velocitas temporis, quæ
magis apparet respicientibus._ Looked forward to, it is another matter
altogether. As Cowper has it, when retracing the windings of his way
through many years,—
“Short as in retrospect the journey seems,
It seemed not always short; the rugged path,
And prospect oft so dreary and forlorn,
Moved many a sigh at its disheartening length.”
But as Cowper elsewhere draws the contrast, in the Latin motto he wrote
for the king’s clock,—
“Quæ lenta accedit, quam velox præterit hora!”
(Slow comes the hour; its passing speed how great!—so Hayley Englished
the line.) “Since this new epoch in my life,” writes Schleiermacher on a
certain occasion, “time seems to fly twice as quickly as before, and I
can quite fancy that when Jatte and I are grown old and grey, we shall
still feel as if only a few days had gone by.” Moore was in his sixtieth
year when Lord John Russell talked with him of the speed with which time
seems to fly; and Moore records in his Diary the question he put, “If you
find it so now, what will you say of it when you are as old as I am?”
The “peculiar melancholy” of the answer given is emphasised in the same
journal.
Another retrospective reviewer pictures our race as struggling ever
onward, toiling up towards some air-built goal never to be attained—while
the past crumbles instantly away behind our steps, like the staircase of
the Epicurean, as we advance in our progress; and every step, which was
of such magnitude when we passed it, is forgotten in the “collectiveness
of retrospection,” insomuch that at times a passing thought would compass
the events of years.
Few and evil the patriarch declares the days of the years of his
pilgrimage to have been, when, in answer to Pharaoh’s “How old art
thou?” the answer is, A hundred and thirty years. Man that is born of a
woman is of few days, said another patriarch, and full of trouble. His
days are swifter than a post, they flee away, they see no good. They
are passed away as the swift ships; they are swifter than a weaver’s
shuttle. _Festinat enim decurrere velox Flosculus angustæ miseræque
brevissima vitæ Portio._ And thus in Juvenal’s pregnant phrase, _obrepit
non intellecta senectus_. Or, as with the ageing subject of the Three
Warnings,—
“Old Time whose haste no mortal spares,
Uncalled, unheeded, unawares,
Brought him on his eightieth year.”
We bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.
In one of his letters to his old friend Mrs. Hughes, Southey commences
a paragraph with the truism, “The last twenty years, to you and me, are
but as yesterday;” and he adds, that if we could but bring ourselves
to feel, as truly as we know, that the next twenty years are but as
to-morrow, that feeling, with a trust in God’s mercy, would be sufficient
consolation under all sorrows. Half a year later we find him writing
to her in the same strain: “It seems but as yesterday when I look back
twenty, thirty, forty, and even more years; the end, therefore, of my
mortal term would seem but as to-morrow if it were rightly looked on to.
A little while, and we shall be young again, beyond all power of time
and change, with those whom we love, and to continue with them for ever
and ever.” Madame de Sévigné utters her pure French hélas! over the like
retrospect of twenty years: “Hélas! est-il possible qu’il y ait vingt-un
ans? il me esembleque ce fut l’année passée; mais je juge, par le peu que
m’a duré ce temps, ce que me paraîtront les années qui viendront encore.”
Home, straight home to every heart comes the homely moral of the bard
addressing the busy, curious, thirsty fly he freely welcomed to his cup,
and whose little life he compared with his longer yet little own:—
“Both alike are mine and thine,
Hastening quick to their decline:
Thine’s a summer, mine no more,
Though repeated to threescore;
Threescore summers, when they’re gone,
Will appear as short as one.”
If for threescore we read fourscore, it would not mar the metre, or the
rhyme or reason.
Man is never so deluded as when he dreams of his own duration, says
Cowper; and he goes on to cite Jacob’s retrospective reviewal of years
elapsed: “The answer of the old patriarch to Pharaoh may be adapted by
every man at the close of the longest life. ‘Few and evil have been the
days of the years of my pilgrimage.’ Whether we look back from fifty or
from twice fifty, the past equally appears a dream; and we can only be
said truly to have lived while we have been profitably employed.” And as
the sovereign lady of French letter-writers has her Hélas! so one of the
princes among English letter-writers has his Alas! to utter on this trite
topic, “Alas, then, making the necessary deductions, how short is life!”
Though the life be made up of a thousand years twice told, the tale is
told so soon, and the teller seems to himself but as a dreamer, and his
little life is rounded with a sleep; like as a dream when one awaketh.
The good emperor Marcus Antoninus, one of those whom a broad
churchmanship is free and fain to recognise as Seekers after God, is
taken to intimate that the difference between a so-called long and a
short life is insignificant, in regard of Eternity, when he indites this
aphorism, among his Meditations: “When frankincense is thrown upon the
altar, one grain usually falls before another; but then the distance of
time is of no moment.” The moments, so to speak, of difference, are not
momentous. Do not all go to one place?
But in the issue, all depends on the using. Happy the few and evil years
of a patriarch, if a patriarch indeed, of a pilgrim going home. Be they
few and evil in one sense, or in another very many,—
“They will appear like moments when he soars
Beyond those sunbreaks.”
DAYBREAK NO SOLACE: NIGHTFALL NO RELIEF.
DEUTERONOMY xxviii. 36, 37.
Not the least impressive of the afflictions denounced against a disloyal
people, in the book Deuteronomy, is that which should make day and night
a fear and a trouble to them; so that in the morning they should say,
“Would God it were even!” and at even, “Would God it were morning!”
There is at once terrible realism and suggestiveness in words but too
familiar to most who have themselves suffered, or watched by the couch
of sleepless suffering. Job utters a complaint of wearisome nights as
appointed to him; so that when he lay down, he said, “When shall I arise,
and the night be gone?” and thus was he full of tossings to and fro unto
the dawning of the day. Like the Psalmist, he cried in the daytime, but
it seemed that God heard not; and in the night season he was not silent,
but it seemed as though from above there was neither voice, nor any to
answer, nor any that regarded. In such cases, one day telleth another of
seeming desolation; and one night certifieth another almost of despair.
And the eventide is longed for in broad daylight, if haply, with mere
change, it may bring relief. But when it has set in, and eve has saddened
into night, there is wearying for daybreak, as possibly the bringer of a
boon that, however, it fails to bring.
A stanza in one of Shakspeare’s poems contains an example to the purpose:—
“Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow,
And time doth weary time with her complaining:
She looks for night, and then she longs for morrow;
And both she thinks too long with her remaining:
Short time seems long in sorrow’s sharp sustaining.
Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps;
And they that watch, see time how slow it creeps.”
And thus runs one of Landor’s imitations from the Greek, of an address to
Hesperus:—
“I have beheld thee in the morning hour,
A solitary star, with thankless eyes,
Ungrateful as I am! who bade thee rise
When sleep all night had wandered from my bower.”
One of, and not the least fearful of, the curses denounced against
Byron’s Manfred is, that to him shall Night deny all the quiet of her
sky; and the day shall have a sun which shall make him wish it done.
Crabbe’s Tale of Edward Shore has to tell how, at one stage of that
sombre career,—
“Struck by new terrors, from his friends he fled,
And wept his woes upon a restless bed;
Retiring late, at early hour to rise,
With shrunken features, and with bloodshot eyes;
If sleep one moment closed the dismal view,
Fancy her terrors built upon the true;
And night and day had their alternate woes,
That baffled pleasure, and that mocked repose.”
The hero of one popular prose fiction describes himself as lying awake
night after night, quivering with his great sorrow—wishing that the
first dull grey of morning would appear at the window; and when it came,
longing for night and darkness once more. Of the heroine in another we
read that “the terrible ‘demon of the bed,’ that invests our lightest
sorrows with such hopeless and crushing anxiety, reigned triumphant
over its gentle victim; and yet, when the daylight crept through her
uncurtained windows, she shrunk from it, as though in her broken spirit
she preferred to hide her distress in the gloom of night, fearful and
unrelieved as was its dark dominion.” How sickening, how dark, exclaims
Keats, in the fantastic diction of “Endymion,” “the dreadful leisure
of weary days, made deeper exquisite by a foreknowledge of unslumbrous
night!” Mr. Tennyson pictures to us the simple maid Elaine, who went half
the night repeating, Must she die?
“And now to right she turned, and now to left,
And found no ease in turning or in rest”—
like one of those depicted by Keble—
“... who darkling and alone,
Would wish the weary night were gone,
Though dawning morn should only show
The secret of their unknown woe.”
Shelley sings of the desire “of the night for the morrow” when expressing
the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow. Gray
vividly depicts the state of mind of one who—
“... starts from short slumbers, and wishes for morning—
To close his dull eyes when he sees it returning.”
Of Mrs. Gaskell’s Jemima we read, that “the night, the sleepless night,
was so crowded and haunted by miserable images, that she longed for day;
and when day came, with its stinging realities, she wearied and grew sick
for the solitude of night.” So with Shenstone’s Jessie:—
“Amid the dreary gloom of night I cry,
When will the morn’s once pleasing scenes return?
Yet what can morn’s returning ray supply,
But foes that triumph, or but friends that mourn?”
_BUYER’S BARGAIN AND BOAST._
PROVERBS xx. 14.
Considering what goes to make up a proverb, it would be strange if,
in the book of Proverbs, part though it be of holy writ, there should
be no touches of the humorous, however restrained and dignified its
manifestation. Shrewd insight into character, finding expression
in phrases of homely vigour, or tranquil irony, or two-edged
sarcasm,—without much of this, what were a book of proverbs? Assuredly
the collected proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel, are
not careful to eschew a touch of humour when the subject invites, or
allows of, not to say requires it. Such a subject we have, and such a
touch of the jocose, in a verse which sets forth so tersely the tactics
of traffickers and bargain-makers; how the bidder depreciates the wares
he is bidding for, until they are his; and how he alters his tone then,
and brags at once of their superior worth, and of his own superior skill
in effecting a purchase. He haggles, and beats them down, and pooh-poohs
them, as all but unsaleable, while yet they are on sale; but so soon as
the bargain is struck, he goes on his way rejoicing, and perhaps calls
his kinsfolk and acquaintance together, to rejoice with him, for he has
bought dirt cheap what was worth its weight in gold. “It is naught, it is
naught, saith the buyer; but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.”
The Paris of “Troilus and Cressida” compliments, or, as may be, upbraids
a subtle Greek with his dexterity in this line of policy:—
“Fair Diomede, you do as chapmen do,
Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy.”
In measure with the intending buyer’s dispraise, is kept up by the
would-be seller a song of praise. As Horace has it, _Laudat venales
qui vult extrudere merces_; and the laudation is apt to be in inverse
proportion to the intrinsic worth of his wares. Good wine may need no
bush; but bad wine, on that showing, may need one as big as a tree; and
the wine merchant is equal to the occasion.
A. K. H. B. has said of men in towns, aware of the value of time, that
by long experience they are assured of the uselessness of trying to
overreach a neighbour in a bargain, because he is so sharp that they
will not succeed. But in agricultural districts such practical essayists
in the art of overreaching are declared to be common enough and to
spare; and it is one of the Recreations of the Country Parson aforenamed
(initially at least) to mark out in detail the course which these
bargain-makers are alleged invariably to follow. “If they wish to buy a
cow or rent a field, they begin by declaring with frequency and vehemence
that they don’t want the thing,—that in fact they would rather not have
it,—that it would be inconvenient for them to become possessors of it.
They then go on to say that still, if they can get it at a fair price,
they may be induced to think of it. They next declare that the cow is
the very worst that ever was seen, and that very few men would have such
a creature in their possession.” And so on,—till the strenuous haggler,
after wasting two hours, telling sixty-five lies, and stamping himself
as a cheat, ends the negotiation, without taking anything at all by his
petty trickery, so complicated and so clumsy withal in its convolutions.
It is in his estimate of the real merits of English horses, that
Fuller discreetly observes, in meting out temperate but cordial praise
of their good points, “And whilst the seller praiseth them too much,
the buyer too little, the indifferent stander-by will give them their
due commendation.” What was true of horseflesh and its breeders and
purchasers, in old Fuller’s day holds good still. Type of a large class
is that manœuvring major in a popular fiction, of whom, and of his,
“bargains” in the stable—mostly sedate, elderly animals—we read, that
certainly, if the animals could have spoken, they would have expressed
their surprise at the difference in the language used by the major when a
buyer and when a seller; for while, as a buyer, he made them out to be,
like Gil Blas’ mule, all faults, as a seller he suddenly came round to
believe in them as paragons of perfection.
Leigh Hunt records as his experience of the Italians at home, that to
cheat you through thick and thin was the universal endeavour—so that a
perpetual warfare was inevitable, in which you were obliged to fight in
self-defence. “If you paid anybody what he asked you, it never entered
into his imagination that you did it from anything but folly. You were
pronounced a _minchione_ (a ninny), one of their greatest terms of
reproach. On the other hand, if you battled well through the bargain,
a perversion of the natural principle of self-defence led to a feeling
of respect for you.” Dispute might increase, it is added; the man might
grin, stare, threaten; might pour out torrents of argument and of
“injured innocence,” as they always do; but be firm, and he went away
equally angry and admiring. “Did anybody condescend to take them in,
the admiration as well as the anger was still in proportion, like that
of the gallant knights of old when they were beaten in single combat.”
Such chaffering, or “prigging,” as Burns calls it (in his satiric touch
at town councillors waddling down the street, in all the pomp of ignorant
conceit,—
“Men wha grew wise prigging owre hops and raisins),”
such haggling, and stickling, and demurring, and deferring, are too truly
said to distinguish the British system of arranging settlements—in which,
embodying completely the Oriental theory of marriage, a woman is dealt
with “as a valuable security, to be exchanged for due consideration.”
A marriage conducted according to the approved principles is therefore
“a matter of sharp, close bargaining. No sooner is the romantic part
of it over, than it is surrendered to the lawyers, who proceed to
chaffer over it and cheapen their adversary’s claim, as they might do
if they were purchasing a cow.” A self-styled Oriental student of the
modern Syrians, in a book bearing that title, graphically sketches
a representative bargaining scene in a café at Damascus, between a
Christian indigo-dealer, in Beyrout costume, and a Jewish dyer; the
former pretending to feel insulted at being offered so low a price, and
the latter pretending to get into a passion at having his time taken
up with a fruitless negotiation. Captain Marryat’s Travels in North
America supply a plurality of parallel passages; now of two misses
“swopping” bonnets, with an assumed indifference and a suppressed ardour
almost ridiculous enough to verge on the sublime; and now of a couple
of Down-Easters, whittling all the while they are bargaining, and doing
both with all their might and main. Fiction-writers who make a study
of character and manners are fond of introducing scenes of this kind.
Scott’s Antiquary chuckles over his feats in cheapening old curiosities,
and delights to tell how often he has stood haggling on a halfpenny,
lest, by a too ready acquiescence in the dealer’s first price, he should
be led to suspect the value Mr. Oldbuck sets upon the article: “And then,
Mr. Lovel, the sly satisfaction with which one pays the consideration,
and pockets the article, affecting a cold indifference, while the hand is
trembling with pleasure!” The bargaining match with Maggie, the Fairport
fishwife, is one of the gems of the story. Mr. Charles Reade offers a
racy pendant in his trafficking encounter between Christie Johnstone,
the pride of Newhaven, and the four Irish merchants who have agreed to
work together, and to make a show of competition, the better to keep
the price down within bounds, but who are no match for woman’s wit and
woman’s tongue, as exercised by Christie. The author of “Doctor Jacob”
depicts in Herr Schmidt a rosy, round man, with eyes that were never in
tune with his mouth; the former being sharp, Jewish, and speculative;
the latter, supine, commercial, and conservative: “He made use of his
eyes when he bought, and of his mouth when he sold, giving his customers
to understand that he was the easiest going man in the world, only
desirous of small profits, and by no means miserable if a gold watch or
any other article went for half its value.” Canon Kingsley enlivens the
adventures of “Hereward” with a certain Dick Hammerhand, the richest man
in Walcheren, who tries to overreach the hero, and fails to his cost; one
stage of the transaction taking this turn: “The less anxious the stranger
seemed to buy, the more anxious grew Dick to sell; but he concealed his
anxiety, and let the stranger turn away, thanking him for his drink,” but
anon renewing the treaty with as much semblance of disregard as he could
put on. The author of “The Gayworthys” works up a clever bit of homely
chaffering between Mrs. Vorse and Widow Horke the strawberry-dealer.
And we find ourselves between a couple of horse-dealers again in “Silas
Marner:” “Bryce of course divined that Dunstan wanted to sell the horse,
and Dunstan knew that he divined it (horse-dealing is only one of many
human transactions carried on in this ingenious manner); and they both
considered that the bargain was in its first stage, when Bryce replied
ironically, [to the other’s boast of a recent high bid,] ‘I wonder at
that now, I wonder you mean to keep him; for I never heard of a man who
didn’t want to sell his horse, getting a bid of half as much again as
the horse was worth,’” etc. Trust Bryce to boast of that horse, and of
that bargain, so soon as he is gone his way, the horse his, and the
bargain made. It must be a distorted type of human nature that resembles
the discontented man of Theophrastus, who, after taking a great deal
of pains to beat down the price of a slave, and after he has paid his
money for him,—instead of boasting, breaks out into the grumble, “I am
sure thou art good for nothing, or I should not have had thee so cheap.”
A companion picture, in its way, but with the difference between an
inveterate grumbler and an impenetrable oaf, is that by Plautus of a fool
with an old grange to sell, of which property he advertises the singular
attractions to draw buyers to bid and buy. Nothing ever thrived on it, he
says; no owner of it ever died in his bed; the trees were all blasted;
the swine died of the measles, the cattle of the murrain, the sheep
of the rot; nothing was ever reared there, not a duckling, or goose.
_Hospitium fuit calamitatis._ It is naught, it is naught, saith the
buyer? No, the seller, in this case.
_GRAY-HAIRED UNAWARES._
HOSEA vii. 9.
Among the reminders and remonstrances which it was the mission of the
prophet, the son of Beeri, in the days of Ahaz and Hezekiah, to deliver
to Ephraim, there was this significant passage, expressive of a reckless
people’s unconscious decline, whose lapses were taken account of on high,
and Ephraim knew it not—“Yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet
he knoweth not.”
Who, asks Hartley Coleridge, ever saw their first gray hairs, or marked
the crow feet at the angle of their eyes, without a sigh or a tear, a
momentaneous self-abasement, a sudden sinking of the soul, a thought that
youth is fled for ever? “None but the blessed few that, having dedicated
their spring of life to Heaven, behold in the shedding of their vernal
blossoms a promise that the season of immortal fruit is near.” Gray
hairs, in an advancing stage of the plural number, may be here and there
upon us before we know of it. But the actual discovery of the first is a
bit of an epoch in one’s life; and if one exclaims Eureka! it is hardly
in the most jubilant of tones or the most exultant of tempers.
Falstaff was surprised into a full purpose of amendment of life when he
lighted on the first white hair on his chin; but only to keep on renewing
the purpose weekly, long after chin and head, too, must have been covered
with silver or snow.
With some the humour is to pass off the discovery in seeming glee; and
perhaps it is the saturnine, melancholy temperament that is likeliest to
do this. For instance, Gerbier relates of Charles the First, that one
morning “as the King was combing his head, he found a white hair, which
he sent to the Queen in merriment. Henrietta Maria immediately wrote
back that Don Carlos would cause many more to come up before the Emperor
gave up the Palatinate.” Had the King not been himself combing his head
on this not too auspicious occasion, the probability is, as courts and
courtiers go, that his first white hair would not thus have been allowed
to attract and invite attention. A courtly dresser would have been
shocked to reveal what he saw, and would have kept the secret with _ex
officio_ conscientiousness. Many and many are the uncrowned heads upon
which gray hairs are gathering here and there—a familiar sight enough to
overseeing (and not overlooking) attendants or friends, but by the owners
themselves unsuspected as yet. Mrs. Browning lets Aurora Leigh espy one
such straggler, which even the neat-handed maid-in-waiting overlooks, at
Lady Waldemar’s toilet:—
“Her maid must use both hands to twist that coil
Of tresses, then be careful lest the rich
Bronze rounds should slip:—she missed, though, a gray hair,
A single one,—I saw it; otherwise
The woman looked immortal.”
It is among the graver of his Recreations that a clerical essayist
pictures to himself man or woman, thoughtful, earnest, and pious,
sitting down and musing, at the sight of the first gray hairs. Here is
the slight shadow, he puts it, of “a certain great event which is to
come;” the earliest touch of a chill hand which must prevail at length.
“Here is manifest decay: we have begun to die. And no worthy human being
will pretend that this is other than a very solemn thought. And we look
backward as well as forward: how short a time since we were little
children, and kind hands smoothed down the locks now grown scanty and
gray.” So in Mrs. Southey’s (Caroline Bowles’) tender, simple verses on
the same trite theme:—
“Some there were took fond delight,
Sporting with these tresses bright,
To enring with living gold
Fingers now beneath the mould
(Woe is me!) grown icy cold.
...
Now again a shining streak
’Gins the dusky cloud to break;—
Here and there a glittering thread
Lights the ringlets, dark and dead—
Glittering light!—but pale and cold—
Glittering thread!—but _not_ of _gold_.
Silent warning! silvery streak!
Not unheeded dost thou speak.
Not with feelings light and vain,
Not with fond, regretful pain,
Look I on the token sent
To declare the day far spent.”
Mr. Thackeray makes his youngish widow, Amelia Osborne, take tranquilly
enough this sort of revelation. “In these quiet labours and harmless
cares the gentle widow’s life was passing away, a silver hair or two
marking the progress of time on her head, and a line deepening ever so
little on her fair forehead. She used to smile at these marks of time.”
Which accords with her placid temperament. Quite otherwise constituted
is Currer Bell’s Madame Beck. “A loud bell rang for morning school. She
got up. As she passed a dressing-table with a glass upon it, she looked
at her reflected image. One single white hair streaked her nut-brown
tresses; she plucked it out with a shudder.” That is an early phase of
the decadence of which Mr. Robert Browning graphically depicts a later
stage:—
“One day, as the lady saw her youth
Depart, and the silver thread that streaked
Her hair, and, worn by the serpent’s tooth,
The brow so puckered, the chin so peaked—
She wondered who the woman was,
So hollow-eyed and haggard-cheeked.”
Mr. Trollope’s Captain Cutwater is the representative of a large
constituency in at least this one salient particular, that he “had no
idea that he was an old man. He had lived for so many years among men
of his own stamp, who had grown gray and bald and rickety and weak
alongside of him,” that when he moved into a younger circle, and settled
there, he ignored the disparity of ages. In Juvenal’s emphatic phrase,
old age steals upon us unawares,—unperceived, unrecognised: _obrepit non
intellecta senectus_. This stealthy in-coming, or on-coming, of old age
is an iterated topic in the classics. Cicero, indeed, had been beforehand
with Juvenal, almost word for word: _non intelligitur quando obrepit
senectus_. There is Ovid, again, with his “stealthy lapse” of age,
beguiling as it wears away: _labitur occulte, fallitque volubilis ætas_;
and with his elsewhere reminder, that time glides on, and with noiseless
years we grow older till we grow old: _Tempora labuntur, tacitisque
senescimus annis_. Without, as Hazlitt says, our in the least suspecting
it, the mists are at our feet, and the shadows of age encompass us.
Leigh Hunt somewhere comments feelingly on the difficulty of learning
how narrow and dim a boundary separates mature from old age; and quoting
his own personal experience, says, that a single illness made the line
of demarcation clear to him. So M. de Ste.-Beuve: _Rien n’est pénible à
démêler comme les confins des ages: il faut souvent que quelque chose
vienne du dehors et coupe court_.
There is all the more force in the kindly wish of Mr. Tennyson’s Will
Waterproof, that the plump object of it may live long, ere from his
topmost head the thickset hazel dies; long, ere the hateful crow shall
tread the corners of his eyes; all the more force as coming from one who
has to own of himself—
“For I had hope, by something rare,
To prove myself a poet;
But, while I plan, and plan, my hair
Is gray before I know it.”
_RESTRAINED ANGER._
PROVERBS xvi. 32.
“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth
his spirit than he that taketh a city.” To be ruled by one’s angry spirit
is cruel bondage indeed, for that taskmaster never spares the lash. To
rule or to be ruled,—that is the question.
“Ira furor brevis est: animum rege; qui, nisi paret,
Imperat: hunc frenis, hunc tu compesce catenâ.”
Marcus Antoninus, in his Meditations, calls rage and resentment marks of
an unmanly disposition; mildness and temper being not only more humane,
but, he contends, more masculine too. And the philosophic emperor wrote
and spoke as one of, what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls, those
“... milder natures, and more free,
Whom an unblamed serenity
Hath freed from passions, and the state
Of struggle these necessitate.”
From that state of struggle many a victor emerges with honourable scars,
but deep. Famous and significant is the story of the physiognomist who
detected in the features of Socrates the traces of that fiery temper
which for the most part he kept in severe control, but which, when it
did break loose, is described by those who witnessed it as absolutely
terrible, overleaping both in act and language every barrier of the
ordinary decorum of Grecian manners. Le Clerc’s _éloge_ of John Locke
includes the remark that if he had any defect, it was the being somewhat
passionate; “but he had got the better of it by reason, and it was very
seldom that it did him or any one else any harm.” Of Rudolf of Hapsburg
we are told that he was by nature warm and choleric, but that as he
advanced in years he corrected this defect. To some of his friends,
expressing their wonder that since his elevation to the imperial dignity
he had restrained the vehemence of his temper, the founder of the House
of Austria replied, “I have often repented of being passionate, never
of being mild and humane.” One of Cromwell’s biographers reports his
“temper exceeding fiery; but the flame of it kept down for the most
part, or soon allayed with those moral endowments he had.” The admirable
Frederick Borromeo was admired for a placability, a sweetness of manner
nearly imperturbable, which, however, as Manzoni reminds us, was not
natural to the devout prelate, but was the effect of continual combat
against a quick and hasty disposition. Lord Clarendon more than once in
his autobiography, plumes himself on having mastered and “suppressed
that heat and passion he was naturally inclined to be transported with.”
“They who knew the great infirmity of his whole family, which abounded
in passion, used to say he had much extinguished the unruliness of that
fire.” Lord Macaulay turns to the advantage of his favourite chancellor
the assertion of his detractors, that the disposition of the great
Somers was very far from being so gentle as the world believed, that he
was really prone to the angry passions, and that sometimes, while his
voice was soft, and his words kind and courteous, his delicate frame was
almost convulsed by suppressed emotion. His brilliant advocate is fain to
accept this reproach as the highest of all eulogies. Again: Sir Archibald
Alison assures us of Sir Robert Peel, that he was by nature afflicted
with a most violent temper, and that so extreme were his paroxysms of
anger, when a young man, that he used, while they were coming on, to shut
himself up alone till the dark fit was over. “By degrees, however, he
obtained the mastery of this infirmity, and this at length so effectually
that he passed with the world, at a distance, as a man of a singularly
cold and phlegmatic temperament.” Lady Holland reports her distinguished
father to have been naturally choleric,—prefacing the statement by a
reflection, that, although it is not the part of a daughter to reveal
faults, yet a fault nobly repaired, or repented of, adds to the respect
and interest which a character inspires. By her showing, then, Mr. Sydney
Smith was by nature quick and hasty, but always struggled against the
failing, and made many regulations to avoid exciting any such emotions;
and when he did give way, it often excited his biographer’s admiration
to see him gradually subduing his chafed spirit, and to observe his
dissatisfaction with himself till he had humbled himself and made his
peace, it mattered not with whom, groom or child. “He could not bear the
reproaches of his own heart.” So Mr. Henry Rogers observes of Locke,
and his success, by dint of “immense pains” taken, in subjugating his
choleric propensity, that his anxiety for its complete subjugation
appears in his never being so angry with another as he always was with
himself—for being angry. Those who are conversant with the journal and
letters of Dr. Chalmers, may remember how often that good man takes
himself to task for infirmities of temper, and how strenuously he
resolves to strive to keep down every tendency to irritation when in
company, to “try to maintain a vigorous contest with this unfortunate
peculiarity of my temper,” to “school down every irritable feeling;” and
how remorsefully he records such instances as getting “into a violent
passion with Sandy,” and getting “ruffled with Jane,” in a manner and to
a degree “quite unchristian.” Passages abound such as, “Now is the time
for reflecting on the evils of intemperate passion;” “erred egregiously
this evening in venting my indignation;” “I may at least ward off the
assaults of anger;” “erred in betraying my anger to my servant and wife;”
“constant visitations of indignancy; this exceedingly wrong: there is not
a greater foe to spirituality than wrath.” “O my God, deliver me from
all rancour and much irritableness,”[41] etc., etc. “Here,” to apply the
lines of Wordsworth’s son-in-law,—
“Here was a temper less by nature tuned
Than harmonized by discipline to rule,
And by religion sanctified to peace.”
The pen is too truly said to be a fruitful source of regrets to some of
us, in regard of the outbreaks of temper we allow it to put on paper; and
never is the sting sharper, says one essayist, than when we realize that
our imprudence is in black and white, beyond our reach, irrevocable. “We
send off our letter, to repent sometimes how bitterly!” _Litera scripta
manet._ Hence the advice of another, never to write in anger, or, at
any rate, to keep your letter till you are cool. We are recommended,
when indignant at any one’s conduct, to write a letter couched in the
strongest terms possible, as satirical and cutting as we can make it,
and having done this, to direct, seal, and put it in our desk for a few
hours, then read it for our own satisfaction, and tear it up. Another
popular authority, earnestly deprecating angry letters, lays down as a
rule to be observed throughout the letter-writing world, that no angry
letter be posted till four and twenty hours shall have elapsed since it
was written. “We all know how absurd is that other rule, of saying the
alphabet when you are angry. Trash! Sit down and write your letter; write
it with all the venom in your power; spit out your spleen at the fullest;
it will do you good: you think you have been injured; say all that you
can say with all your poisoned eloquence, and gratify yourself by reading
it while your temper is still hot. Then put it in your desk, and, as a
matter of course, burn it before breakfast the following morning. Believe
me that you will then have a double gratification.” _Loquitur_ the
perhaps most widely read, and without a perhaps the most prolific, writer
of the day.
When Cœur-de-Lion, in Scott’s “Talisman,” incensed and mortified at the
Templar’s tactics, yet foresaw the penalty of giving way to his headlong
resentment, with a strong effort he remained silent till he had repeated
a pater noster, that being the course which “his confessor had enjoined
him to pursue when anger was likely to obtain dominion over him.” The
familiar “count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram,” in one of Mr. Dickens’
later stories is but another practical application of the selfsame text.
Gibbon adds to his account of the public penance inflicted by Ambrose on
Theodosius, for the massacre of Thessalonica, this remark: “and the edict
which interposes a salutary interval of thirty days between the sentence
and the execution, may be accepted as the worthy fruits of his [the
emperor’s] repentance.” For it was by a hasty resolve that Theodosius
swore in his wrath to expiate the blood of his lieutenant, Botheric,
by the blood of a guilty people; his fiery and choleric temper being
impatient of the dilatory forms of a judicial inquiry. In hot haste he
despatched the messengers of death; but attempted, when it was too late,
to prevent the execution of his own orders. Avenging furiously in haste,
he had to repent at leisure; and he did repent.
It is impossible, perhaps, observed Dean Swift, for the best and wisest
among us to keep so constant a guard upon our temper but that we may
at some time or other lie open to the strokes of fortune. Incensed on
one occasion, “it was natural for me to have immediate recourse to my
pen and ink; but before I would offer to make use of them, I resolved
deliberately to tell over a hundred; and when I came to the end of
that sum, I found it more advisable to defer drawing up my intended
remonstrance till I had slept soundly on my resentments.” We are told
of the celebrated Macklin, that although so particular in drilling the
performers at rehearsals, he was scrupulous in keeping his temper down,
the irritability of which he knew too well; and that on one occasion he
interposed an hour by his stop-watch, all retiring together from the
stage to the green-room, at the end of which time all were in good humour
again, and the rehearsal was resumed. “When the evil effects of hasty
anger approach, the consequences of which may be irretrievable,”—thus
moralizes a fellow-craftsman, John O’Keeffe,—“it would be no harm if all
of us could suppress our own feelings, even for Macklin’s green-room
hour.” His mighty master, Shakspeare, would have supplied him with a
precedent, in the case of good Duke Humphrey, who says as he re-enters,—
“Now, lords, my choler being overblown
With walking once about the quadrangle,
I come to talk of commonwealth affairs.”
Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton’s secretary, Mr. Nixon, on his own showing,
could not refrain from blurting out just what he felt at the moment,
when differences arose between the two. This used to vex Sir Thomas,
who however would say nothing till the next day, and then, when the
secretary thought that the whole matter had passed off (having perhaps
received great kindness in the meantime), the remonstrance would come
out, “What a silly fellow you were, Nixon, to put yourself in such a
passion yesterday! If I had spoken then, we should most probably have
parted. Make it a rule never to speak when you are in a passion, but wait
till the next day.” And we are assured that, if at any time he happened
to transgress this rule himself, he was seriously vexed and grieved,
and could not rest till he had in some way made amends for his want of
self-restraint.
Molière’s Arnolphe propounds the prophylactic rule with emphasis and
discretion:
“Un certain Grec disait à l’empereur Auguste,
Comme une instruction utile autant que juste,
Que lorsqu’une aventure en colére nous met,
Nous devons, avant tout, dire nôtre alphabet,
Afin que dans ce temps la bile se tempère,
Et qu’on ne fasse rien que l’on ne doive faire.”
_EVANESCENCE OF THE EARLY DEW._
HOSEA vi. 3.
By the word of the prophet Hosea, the Divine reproach fell on Ephraim and
on Judah, that their goodness was as a morning cloud, and that as the
early dew it passed away. Bright was the promise of innocent dawn, but
the promise was unfulfilled. A stern moral application lies in the words
of Dante:
“... The will in man
Bears goodly blossoms; but its ruddy promise
Is, by the dripping of perpetual rain,
Made mere abortion: faith and innocence
Are met with but in babes; each taking leave
Ere cheeks with down are sprinkled.”
Adam Smith observes, in his “Theory of Moral Sentiment,” that, in the eye
of nature, it would seem, a child is a more important object than an old
man, and excites a much more lively, as well as a much more universal
sympathy. “It ought to do so,” he adds. “Everything may be expected, or
at least hoped, from the child. In ordinary cases, very little can be
either expected or hoped from the old man.” It is regretful, remorseful
eld that is supposed to utter the lament, in gazing on childish faces and
forms, heaven-encompassed infancy,—
“O little souls! as pure and white
And crystalline as rays of light
Direct from heaven, their source divine;
Refracted through the mist of years,
How red my setting sun appears,
How lurid looks this soul of mine!”
Mrs. Trench writes to the poet of the “Pleasures of Memory,” and with
direct reference to that poem, “In looking back, the only days I
earnestly desire to recall, are those which glided away while I was
‘girt with growing infancy,’ and read in the eyes and the smiles of my
children, who were affectionate and beautiful, a promise of happiness,
such as this world can never fulfil.” A more vigorous poet than Samuel
Rogers, has a vigorous but gloomy stanza on the kindling emotions of
young motherhood, when the wife—
“Blest into mother, in the innocent look,
Or even the piping cry of lips that brook
No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives
Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook
She sees her little bud put forth its leaves—
What may the fruits be yet?—I know not—Cain was Eve’s.”
The fallen young mother in Mrs. Gaskell’s story hails in her child a new,
pure, beautiful, innocent life, which she fondly imagines, in the early
passion of maternal love, she can guard from every touch of corrupting
sin by ever watchful and most tender care. “And _her_ mother had thought
the same, most probably; and thousands of others think the same, and pray
to God to purify and cleanse their souls, that they may be fit guardians
for their little children.”
Juvenal asks, “what morn’s so holy but its sun betrays theft, perfidy,
and fraud.” The thief, the betrayer, the cheat, was once a child. Ovid
urges the dissimilitude between such a man and such a child: _dissimiles
hic vir, et ille puer_. The Abbé Delille expatiates on the attractions of
each Spring-tide, and, by affinity, of each new-born Day, as consisting
in its refreshing redolence of promise—“_qui ne nous fait que des
promesses_.” Fraught with feeling in every line is the following sonnet
addressed by the late Baron Alderson to one of his children on her second
birthday:
“Sweet is the fragrance of the morning hour,
Sweet is the sun’s first radiance, sweet the year,
In the spring’s early promise, sweet the flower,
Seen in its buds, ere yet its leaves appear—
But sweeter far, my angel babe, to me
Is that blue eye that speaks thy opening mind,
That beams with new quick thoughts, yet undefined,
That tell of what is now and what may be.
O may the God who taught us that, like thee,
We should be pure and spotless, bless thee still;
Lay on thy infant head His hand, to free
Thine heart from sin, and form thee to His will,
Cleanse thee from aught that’s evil or defiled,
And keep thee as thou art, my darling child.”
George Eliot somewhere speaks of a promise void, like so many other
sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in
Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew
side by side with the ripening peach—impossible to be fulfilled when
the golden gates had been passed. Mr. Dickens says of the faint image
of Eden which is stamped upon our hearts in childhood, that it “chafes
and rubs in our rough struggles with the world, and soon wears away; too
often to leave nothing but a mournful blank remaining.” Elia, the essay
writer, is no way backward to own the demerits and even delinquencies
of himself as Elia, the middle aged man; but for the child Elia, that
“other me,” there, in the background,—he must take leave to cherish the
remembrance of that young master—with as little reference, he protests,
to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child
of some other house, and not _his_ father’s son. “I know how it shrank
from any the least colour of falsehood. God help thee, Elia, how art thou
changed! Thou art sophisticated. I know how honest, how courageous (for a
weakling) it was—how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful. From what
have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself!”
Stupid changelings of forty-five, their name is Legion, for they are
indeed many. Glance with Shenstone at the shiny row of plump promissory
faces in the dame school:—
“Even now sagacious foresight points to show
A little bench of heedless bishops here,
And there a chancellor in embryo,
Or bard sublime, if bard may e’er be so,
As Milton, Shakspeare, names that ne’er shall die!”
So, to apply the words of Hazlitt, if we look back to past generations
(as far as eye can reach), we see the same fears, hopes, wishes, followed
by the same disappointments, throbbing in the human heart; and so we may
ever see them (if we look forward) rising up for ever, and disappearing
like vapourish bubbles. Capable of application even are Joanna Baillie’s
lines assimilating the stupid changelings aforesaid to a dull cat in
contrast with its sprightly, mercurial kittenhood:—
“Ah! many a lightly sportive child,
Who hath like thee our wits beguiled,
To dull and sober manhood grown,
With strange recoil our hearts disown.”
_Il y a en chacun de nous_, writes Sainte-Beuve, _un être primitif,
idéal, que la nature a dessiné de sa main la plus maternelle, mais
que l’homme trop souvent étoffe ou corrompt_. Mr. Kingsley, in a
touching reflection—literally reflection, looking back—on the “long
lost might-have been,” adverts to that personal idea which every soul
brings with it into the world, which shines dim and potential in the
face of every sleeping babe, before it has been scarred, and distorted,
and encrusted in the long tragedy of life. Dr. Caird has said of the
birthday of the worst of men, that although it ushered a new agent of
evil into existence, and was a day fraught with more disastrous results
to the world than the day in which the pestilence began to creep over
the nations, or the blight to fasten on the food of man, or any other
physical evil to enter on a career of world-wide devastation,—yet might
this day, when the vilest of humanity first saw the light, be in some
aspects of it regarded as better (despite Solomon’s text) than the day
of his death. “For, to take only one view of it, when life commenced,
the problem of good or evil, to which death has brought so terrible a
solution, was, in his case, as yet unsolved. The page of human history
which he was to write was yet unwritten, and to that day belonged,
at all events, the advantage of the uncertainty whether it was to be
blurred and blotted, or written fair and clean.” Life, even in the most
unfavourable circumstances, it is urged, has ever some faint gleams of
hope to brighten its outset. The preacher owns that the simplicity, the
tenderness, the unconscious refinement that more or less characterize
infancy, even among the lowest and rudest, soon indeed pass away,
and give place to the coarseness of an unideal, if not the animal
repulsiveness of a sensual or sinful life. But he insists that at least
at the beginning, for a little while, there is something in the seeming
innocency, the brightness, the unworldliness, the unworn freshness of
childhood, that gives hope room to work. Is there not, he asks, for every
child, not in the dreams of parental fondness only, but in reality,
and in God’s idea, the possibility of a noble future? “The history of
each new-born soul is surely in God’s plan and intention a bright and
blessed one. For the vilest miscreant that was ever hounded out of life
in dishonour and wretchedness, there was, in the mind of the All-Good, a
Divine ideal, a glorious possibility of excellence, which might have been
made a reality.” The most hardened ruffian, the most obdurate criminal,
the most impenetrable reprobate, was once a child.
If it be a philosophical truth that the child is father of the man—all
that is now broadly emblazoned in the man having been once latent—seen
or not seen—as a vernal bud in the child; it is not therefore true
universally, as Mr. de Quincey points out, that all which pre-exists in
the child finds its development in the man. “Rudiments and tendencies,
which _might_ have found, sometimes by accident, _do_ not find, sometimes
under the killing frost of counter forces, _cannot_ find, their natural
evolution.” Most of what he has, the grown-up man is shown to inherit
from his infant self; but it does not follow that he always enters upon
the whole of his natural inheritance. Childhood has been passionately
apostrophized as
“... thou vindication
Of God—thou living witness against all men
Who have been babes—thou everlasting promise
Which no man keeps!”
_EARS TO HEAR._
ST. LUKE viii. 8.
“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” These words cried Jesus,
at the close of His parable of the Sower. And He went on to say that
to some, to the many, He spake in parables, that seeing they might
not see—not having eyes to see; and that hearing they might not
understand—not having ears to hear in the Gospel sense. Nor in the
Old Testament sense; for these very words are cited from Isaiah; in
Deuteronomy too we read of those to whom the Lord hath not given ears to
hear; and in both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, of those who have ears to hear,
and hear not. One apostle laments the destiny of those to whom God hath
given the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that
they should not hear. And to another was entrusted the appeal, “He that
hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.” For
only the ear of the wise seeketh knowledge. The unwise is like the deaf
adder that stoppeth her ear. The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the
Lord hath made even both of them.
Give but interest in the theme, and the listener’s ear fulfils its
natural function, that of hearing. “Mine ears hast Thou opened.”
Intensify the interest, and the listener is all ears, all ear. Milton
pictures a time—
“when, Adam first of men,
To first of women, Eve thus moving speech,
Turn’d him, all ear.”
So again the attendant spirit in his “Comus”:—
“... I was all ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of Death.”
Webster’s ill-starred Duchess of Malfi assures her brother, “I will plant
my soul in my ears to hear you.” _Je t’écoute sans cligner la paupière_,
exclaims Marillac, in “Gerfaut,” _dût ta narration durer sept jours et
sept nuits_. “Alarmed nature starts up in my heart, and opens a thousand
ears to listen,” cries Colonel Talbot in an old play. Perplexed in the
extreme, and cut to the heart, by a revelation of household treachery and
wrong, an incredulous husband is described in a modern romance, with his
hands clasped together, and with his head bent to catch every syllable
of the harrowing news,—listening “as if his whole being were resolved
into that one sense of hearing.” That reads like a literal translation of
Balzac’s description of one whose whole _vie se concentra dans le seul
sens de l’ouïe_. On another page he is not forgetful of _certains hommes_
who _se bouchent les oreilles pour ne plus rien entendre_. None so deaf
as those who will not hear. Next to them may rank those who do not care
to. The familiar narrative of “Eyes and No Eyes” might easily have its
pendent and parallel, point by point, and paragraph by paragraph, in one
to be called _Ears and No Ears_.
It is with hearing as with seeing. The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing. Mendelssohn, in one of his letters from
abroad, rapturous with gazing on his “favourite Titian,” declares that
one “might well wish for a dozen more eyes to look one’s fill at such
a picture.” “Had I three ears I’d hear thee!” exclaims Macbeth, when
summoned to attend by the apparition of an Armed Head, in the witches’
cave. Just as one of Plato’s epigrams expresses a wish for the thousand
eyes of the starry sky, that he might gaze his fill on the star of his
life:
εἴθε γενοίμην
Οὐρανὸς, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν ἐίς δὲ βλέπω.
Horace uses the expressive phrase, _bibit aure_, in one of his
odes—literally, “drink in with the ear”—a phrase admired by the
commentators for its lyric boldness. “I was all fixed to listen,” says
Dante, in the tenth gulf of _l’Inferno_. “O speak your counsel now,
for Saturn’s ear is all a-hungered,” entreats the Titan, in Keats’s
_Hyperion_. D’Artagnan, in the ante-chamber of M. de Treville, is
described as looking with all his eyes and listening with all his ears,
stretching his five senses so as to lose nothing. The same author tells
how Mazarin listened, dying as he was, to Anne of Austria, as ten living
men could not have listened. “Will you listen?” asks a prince in the same
story; and is answered, “Can you ask me? You speak of a matter of life or
death to me, and then ask if I will listen.”
When Falstaff asks the prince, “Dost thou hear me, Hal?” “Ay, and mark
thee too,” is the reply; and that there is a difference between hearing
and marking, between lending one ear and giving both, Falstaff knew as
well as most men. And could practise what he knew, if occasion prompted.
Witness his wilful deafness when taken to task by the Lord Chief
Justice. “Boy, tell him I’m deaf,” he bids his page say. So, “You must
speak louder, my master’s deaf,” says the boy. “I am sure he is, to the
hearing of anything good,” rejoins the Chief Justice. And when, anon,
his lordship taxes the incorrigible knight with being deaf to what he
is saying, Sir John assures him, with that consummate assurance of his,
that he hears him very well: “Rather, an’t please you, it is the disease
of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled withal.”
Quite capable is that witty profligate of entering into the import of
each phrase in the collect on the Holy Scriptures, which prays that we
may in such wise hear them, as to mark and learn, and inwardly digest
them.
A late divine, treating of “animal men” in the “animal” sense of St.
Paul, as those who cannot discern spiritual things, but are absorbed in
animalism as their being’s end and aim, affirmed that unavailing as it
seems to be to talk to them of religion, it avails no more talking of
poetry, and art, or speculative science, or the nobler things of the
soul: “How can such men discern the things of the Spirit? They understand
Tennyson as little as they understand St. Paul.” Having ears they hear
not anything so far away as the music of the spheres. Of _that_, and such
as that, the animal man might say, by self-application of a couplet of
Cowper’s,
“For which, alas! my destiny severe,
Though ears she gave me two, gave me no ear.”
_NOT ALONE IN THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS._
PSALM xxiii. 4.
No good thing will He, from whom cometh every good gift, withhold from
them that love Him, and that walk uprightly; least of all then His
presence when most that presence is indispensable,—as a _very_ present
help in trouble. And when so indispensable as in the valley of the
shadow of death—darkening more and more unto the perfect night? We must
die alone. It is a truism, in its natural sense. But in what the devout
mind refuses to call or consider a non-natural sense, the righteous hath
companionship as well as hope in his death. He who can say, The Lord is
my shepherd, I shall not want, confines not his reliance to the range
of green pastures and still waters, but extends it to the glooms of the
grave and the swellings of Jordan. Not alone at the last, for the Good
Shepherd knoweth His sheep, and is known of them. And how known? For one
that will not let them want. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod
and Thy staff they comfort me.”
Pascal said that the solitude of death was the bitterest pang of
humanity; and because one must die alone, the end of life is its heaviest
trial. Some Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, very French, have essayed, in
their peculiar fashion, to elude the disaster, simply by dying in public.
People in Paris died in public in the seventeenth century. Death, as
Mr. Herman Merivale puts it, was but the last scene of the play, to
be performed with a theatrical bow and exit. He shows us the young
beauty, perishing of dissipation, who made her adieux to the world in
appropriate costume and sentiments; and the worn-out statesman, who
might not turn his face to the wall in peace, but was surrounded by a
whole court in full dress, and talked on till his husky accents could
no longer convey the last of his smart sayings to the listeners.[42]
With all his fribbles and frivolities Horace Walpole was not quite
Frenchified enough to willingly face death in a French hotel, with all
its noise and excitement, “and, what would be still worse, exposed to
receive all visits; for the French, you know,” he writes to Conway, “are
never more in public than in the act of death. I am like animals, and
love to hide myself when I am dying”—which refers to his periodical, and
prolonged, and always perilous attacks of gout. “If,” says the author of
“Life in the Sick-room,” “I could not trust my friends to save me from
involuntary encroachment at the last, I had rather scoop myself a hole
in the sand of the desert, and die alone, than be tended by the gentlest
hands, and soothed by the most loving voices in the choicest chamber.”
Wordsworth’s Marmaduke exclaims,—
“Give me a reason why the wisest thing
That the earth knows shall never choose to die,
But some one must be near to count his groans.
The wounded deer retires to solitude,
And dies in solitude: all things but man,
All die in solitude.”
Special note has been taken of the exceptional characteristic in the
altogether exceptional career of the prophet Elijah, that, in his last
hour, when he was on his way to a strange and unprecedented departure
from this world—when the whirlwind and flame chariot were ready, he
asked for no human companionship. “The bravest men are pardoned if one
lingering feeling of human weakness clings to them at the last, and
they desire a human eye resting on them—a human hand in theirs—a human
presence. But Elijah would have rejected all. In harmony with the rest
of his lonely severe character, he desired to meet his Creator alone.”
One hears of such preferences now and then, in oddly constituted natures.
Sir Walter Scott, in a letter to his sister-in-law, appears to indicate
a disposition of this kind as prevalent in his father’s family. “Poor
aunt Curle,” he tells her, “died like a Roman, or rather like one of the
Sandy-Knowe bairns, the most stoical race I ever knew. She turned every
one out of the room, and drew her last breath alone. So did my uncle,
Captain Robert Scott, and several others of that family.” Affectation
was so inherent in Chateaubriand’s confessions and professions, that
one knows not how far genuine may have been his plea for what he calls
the “necessity of isolation,” and its advantages in death as in life.
“Any hand is good enough to reach us the glass of water that we call for
in the fever of death. Ah! may that hand not be too dear to us!” The
“necessity of isolation” reminds us of Keble’s query:—
“Why should we faint and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has will’d, we die,
Nor even the tenderest heart, and next our own,
Knows half the reasons why we smile and sigh?”
And that again reminds us, with a difference—the difference between
Madame de Staël and the sweet singer of the “Christian Year,”—of Corinne
on her death-bed, saying to Castel Forte: “But for you, I should die
alone. There is no help for such a moment; friends can but follow us to
the brink; there begin thoughts too deep, too troublous, to be confided.”
_Mon sort est de mourir seul_, writes Rousseau’s bereaved Solitaire;
_et la seule Providence me fermera les yeux_. Scott was not of mere
imagination all compact when he made Edie Ochiltree say, in the cave that
forms the old mendicant’s favourite retreat, “I hae had mony a thought,
that when I found myself auld and forfairn, and no able to enjoy God’s
blessed air ony langer, I wad e’en streek mysell out here, and abide my
removal, like an auld dog that trails its useless ugsome carcass into
some bush or bracken.” Montaigne says that, might he have his choice,
he thought he should like best to die out of his own house, and away
from his own people. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, on the seventh day
of his last illness, admitted none but his unworthy son (Commodus) to
his chamber, and after a few words dismissed him, “covered his head for
sleep, and”—in Dean Merivale’s words—“passed away alone and untended.”
Epigrammatic historians love to tell of Catherine the Great, who had
reigned over five hundred and forty towns, over forty-two governments,
over a multitude of isles of the sea from Kamschatka to Japan, and over
eighty millions of slaves, that she died alone, entirely alone, without
a single slave at hand to support her drooping head. The picture is
meant to be sensational, and as written in French and for the French,
it may be telling enough. It tells, for instance, upon such a nature as
Madame Sophie Gay, who used to promise her friends to come and die among
them, when it was her turn and her time; adding, in her very French
style, “Je ne veux pas que cette demoiselle”—meaning _la mort_—“me
trouve seule.” Upon others, the grand climax of supreme solitude fails
of effect. “It has always been my wish,” writes Southey, for example,
“to die far from my friends, to crawl like a dog into some corner and
expire unseen. I would neither give nor receive unavailing pain.” When
death overtook St. Francis Xavier, he was on board of a vessel bound
for Siam, and at his own request he was removed to the shore, that he
might die with the greater composure. Stretched on the naked beach,
with the cold blasts of a Chinese winter aggravating his pains—thus Sir
James Stephen describes his last moments—he contended alone with the
agonies of the fever which wasted his vital power. “It was an agony and
a solitude for which the happiest of the sons of men might well have
exchanged the dearest society, and the purest of the joys of life.... It
was a solitude thronged by blessed ministers of peace and consolation,
visible in all their bright and lovely aspects to the now unclouded eye
of faith; and audible to the dying martyr through the yielding bars of
his mortal prison-house, in strains of exulting joy till then unheard and
unimagined.”
“Thou must go forth alone, my soul, thou must go forth alone,—
To other scenes, to other worlds, that mortal hath not known,
Thou must go forth alone, my soul, to tread the narrow vale;
But He, whose word is sure, hath said His comforts shall not fail.
His rod and staff shall comfort thee across the dreary road,
Till thou shalt join the blessed ones, in Heaven’s serene abode.”
Mr. de Quincey has finely said of solitude, that, although it may be
silent as light, it is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for
solitude is essential to man. “All men come into this world _alone_;
all leave it _alone_. Even a little child has a dread, whispering
consciousness, that, if he should be summoned to travel into God’s
presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand,
nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his
trepidations.” King and priest, we are further reminded, warrior and
maiden, philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty galleries
alone. The solitude, therefore, which this author describes as in this
world appalling or fascinating a child’s heart,[43] is but the echo of a
far deeper solitude, through which already he has passed, and of another
solitude, deeper still, through which he _has_ to pass: reflex of one
solitude—prefiguration of another.
Crabbe says of man that, feeling his weakness, it is his habit to run to
society, to numbers,—
“Himself to strengthen, or himself to shun;
But though to this our weakness may be prone,
Let’s learn to live, for we must die, alone.”
Among the pangs which belong to death is emphatically reckoned by F. W.
Robertson, in his sermon on Victory over it, the sensation of loneliness
which attaches to that transit through the valley of shadows. Have we
ever, he asks, seen a ship preparing to sail with its load of pauper
emigrants to a distant colony? for that is keenly suggestive of the
desolation which comes from feeling unfriended on a new and untried
excursion. He dilates on all beyond the seas being to the ignorant poor
man a strange land—away from the helps and friendships and companionships
of life, scarcely knowing what is before him; and it is in such a moment,
when a man stands upon a deck, taking his last look of his fatherland,
that there comes upon him what the preacher calls “a sensation new,
strange, and inexpressibly miserable—the feeling of being alone in the
world. Brethren, with all the bitterness of such a moment, it is but a
feeble image when placed by the side of the loneliness of death. We die
alone. We go on our dark mysterious journey for the first time in all our
existence, without one to accompany us. Friends are beside our bed, they
must stay behind. Grant that a Christian has something like familiarity
with the Most High, _that_ breaks this solitary feeling; but what is
it with the mass of men? It is a question full of loneliness to them.”
Says the elder Humboldt (Wilhelm), in one of his letters: “However many
companions a man may have in the active sympathising world, he must ever
make the journey which leads across the boundaries of earthly things
alone; no one may accompany him.” Not but that in some moods, and in some
sense, this contemplative philosopher might have assented to the protest
of Paul Flemming, that had we spiritual organs, to see and hear things
now invisible and inaudible to us, we should behold the air thronged with
the departing souls of that vast multitude which every moment dies. For,
“truly the soul departs not alone on its last journey, but spirits of its
kind attend it, when not ministering angels; and they go in families to
the unknown land. Neither in life nor in death are we alone.” But then
as we have _not_ the spiritual organs in question, the fact of conscious
isolation _in articulo mortis_ is not affected; and their character,
after all, pertains rather to spiritualism than to spirituality.
A latter-day Christian lyrist expatiates on the sense of loneliness one
has at midnight, in the dread calmness of the dark,—or again, on pathless
hills, when the sun is set, and the ear listens in vain for some social
sound from afar. But,—
“If this be solitude, while life retains her healthful tone,
How shall I feel when, faint with pain,—I die alone?
“Of all the happy things that live in ocean, earth, or air,
Not one with kindred sympathy my lonely lot shall share.
My friend shall vainly scan the glance that speaks no language now;
My dog shall lick the languid hand that falters on his brow:
But none shall venture forth with me, to meet the dread unknown,
And I between two living worlds—must die alone!”
_Je mourrai seul._ Pascal’s words are continually cited, though only to
be forgotten. Mrs. Browning feelingly and earnestly expands into a sonnet
what she entitles “A Thought for a Lonely Death-bed. Inscribed to my
friend E. C.”
“If God compel thee to this destiny,
To die alone,—with none beside thy bed
To ruffle round with sobs thy last word said,
And mark with tears the pulses ebb from thee,—
Then pray alone—‘O Christ, come tenderly!
By Thy forsaken Sonship in the red
Drear wine-press,—by the wilderness outspread,—
And the lone garden where Thine agony
Fell bloody from Thy brow,—by all of those
Permitted desolations, comfort mine!
No earthly friend being near me, interpose
No deathly angel ’twixt my face and Thine,
But stoop Thyself to gather my life’s rose,
And smile away my mortal to Divine.’”
One can hardly quit this subject without recalling the awful significance
of a cry that once expressed, if one may say it, inexpressible
anguish,—anguish indescribable, incommunicable,—“My God, my God, why hast
Thou forsaken Me!” Penultimate words, these were; and appalling in their
suggestiveness of uttermost desolation. But not the last words of all. He
was not alone, consciously not alone, at the very last. Later than these,
and triumphant over these—however subdued and serene the triumph—came
those other words, Divinely calm, as became the Speaker,—“Father, into
Thy hands I commend my spirit.” And it was when He had _this_ said, that
He gave up the ghost.
FOOTNOTES
[1] “Wave your hand; the motion which has apparently ceased is taken
up by the air, from the air by the walls of the room, etc., and so
by direct and re-acting waves, continually comminuted, but never
destroyed.”—_Grove’s Correlation of Physical Forces._
[2] The Candidate, Lord Sandwich.
[3] See on the scope of the words ἐπιθυμῶν χορτασθῆναι (St. Luke xvi.
21), _Analecta Theologica_ (Rev. W. Trollope’s) _in loc._
[4] Earlier in the tale there is a touch to remind us of Lear on the
heath:
“‘Know you his conduct?’ ‘Yes, indeed, I know,
And how he wanders in the wind and snow;
Safe in our rooms the threatening storm we hear,
But he feels strongly what we faintly fear.’”
[5] Plentiful illustrations might be drawn from Plutarch to the same
effect. There is Mutius Scævola, for instance, addressing Porsenna: “Your
threatenings I regarded not, but am subdued by your generosity.” There
is Porsenna himself, who, as Publicola found, could not be quelled by
dint of arms, but whom he converted into a friend to Rome, by “the gentle
arts of persuasion.” There is young Alexander, afterwards to be, or to be
called, the Great, whose astute father saw that he did not easily submit
to authority, because he would not be forced to anything, but that he
might be led to his duty by the gentler hand of reason; and therefore, as
a wise father, who knew his own son, Philip took the method of persuasion
rather than of command.
What Plutarch says of the gentler hand of reason, reminds us of Swift’s
account of the _Houyhnhnms_, that “they have no conception how a rational
creature can be compelled, but only advised or exhorted.” And by the
way, Swift remarks in a letter on England’s harsh rule over the Irish,
“Supposing even the size of a native’s understanding just equal to that
of a dog or a horse, I have often seen these two animals civilized by
rewards at least as much as by punishments.”
But to return to Plutarch. There is his Flaminius, again, whose
appointment to the command in the war with Macedon, he calls very
fortunate for Rome, since what was required was “a general who did not
want to do everything by force and violence, but rather by gentleness and
persuasion.” As Claudian says, _Peragit tranquilla potestas quad violenta
nequit_.
Fear, observes Adam Smith, is in almost all cases a wretched instrument
of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any
order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency. “To
attempt to terrify them, serves only to irritate their bad humours, and
to confirm them in an opposition which more gentle usage perhaps might
easily induce them, either to soften, or to lay aside altogether.”
[6] The history of Latin Christianity supplies abundant examples, more or
less pertinent. Columban and his disciples are characterized as having
had little of the gentle and winning perseverance of missionaries:
they had been accustomed to dictate to trembling sovereigns; and their
haughty and violent demeanour provoked the pagans, instead of weaning
them from their idolatries (iii. 106). So of Boniface (v. 167): it was
in the tone of a master that he commanded the world to peace, a tone
which provoked resistance. “It was not by persuasive influence, which
might lull the conflicting passions of men, and enlighten them as to
their real interests.” Contrast with these the temper and policy of Pope
Eugenius III. (iii. 407), whose “skilful and well-timed use of means more
becoming the head of Christendom than arms and excommunications, wrought
wonders in his favour;” and who, by his gentleness and charity, gradually
supplanted the senate in the attachment of the Roman people: “the fierce
and intractable people were yielding to this gentler influence.” On a
later page we come across the able portraiture of our Henry II., as drawn
by a churchman who was warning Becket as to the formidable adversary he
had undertaken to oppose: “He will sometimes be softened by humility and
patience, but will never submit to compulsion,” etc. Ariste _a raison_
when he counsels Geronte, in Gresset’s “Le Méchant,” as the _bien plus
sage_ course of dealing with a difficult subject,
“Que vous le rameniez par raison, par douceur,
Que d’aller opposer la colère à l’humeur.”
[7] “Such access as Protestantism has gained to the minds of the
Catholics in Ireland, it owes, not to the thunders of any missionary
Boanerges, but to men like the [late] Archbishop of Dublin [Whately],
and the Dean of Elphin, who have taken a very different course, and
presented Protestant Christianity to their neighbours in a very different
form.”—_Saturday Review_, xi. 71.
[8] Gently soothing.
[9] Another type of mind, deficient in the higher attributes of
independence, is often feverishly eager to sink its sense of individual
responsibility by seeking what is called “rest in the Church.” Dr.
Bungener represents his Julian, when committed to the Bastile, as rather
rejoicing at than terrified by the despotism of the hand laid upon him;
and in the same way, on taking holy orders, he, being “subdued in heart,
enslaved in mind, tired of being his own master, only to create his own
torments,” flatters himself that he gives the Church complete power over
his faculties at the same time that he gives her plenary power over his
actions.
To the baser sort, remarks Sir James Stephen, no yoke is so galling
as that of self control, no deliverance so welcome as that of being
handsomely rid of free agency. “With such men mental slavery readily
becomes a habit, a fashion, and a pride. To the abject many the
abdication of self-government is a willing sacrifice.”
One of our acutest essayists on social subjects comments on the readiness
of a man to exult in the fact that he has done something which he cannot
undo, and has pledged himself to a course from which he cannot draw back,
as more commonly the sign of a weak than of a strong nature. “The comfort
of plunging right into the stream is unspeakable to anybody who has been
accustomed to stand shivering and irresolute on the bank.” When a person
of this sort, it is justly observed, has brought himself to take the
plunge, his exultation and fearlessness are wonderful: the knowledge that
the Rubicon is crossed, and the die cast, seems to relieve him from the
necessity of further resolution. “He has set in motion a machine which
will of itself wind off results and consequences for him without more
ado on his own part; and this is an order of release from the demands of
circumstances upon his will, for which he cannot be too thankful.”
[10] When at Bologna he used to visit the Campo Santo, the sexton of
which was a favourite of his, and the “beautiful and innocent face” of
whose daughter of fifteen, he used to contrast with the skulls that
peopled several cells there—and particularly with that of one skull dated
1766, “which was once covered (the tradition goes) by the most lovely
features of Bologna—noble and rich.”
[11] Not to be forgotten, however, is the suggestive rejoinder of
Mercury, that Menippus would have been as easily fooled as the rest of
them, had he but seen, not that grinning skull, but the living face that
once concealed it.
[12] In the book called “God’s Acre; or, Historical Notices relating to
Churchyards,” there is a loathsome story of a Mr. Thompson, of Worcester,
who baited his angling-hook with part of the corrupted form of King John,
and carried the fish he caught with it in triumph through the streets.
[13] “Et puisque le monde n’est qu’une comédie, il faut prendre la queue
lapin et l’épée de bois comme les autres.”—Lettres de Chaulieu, ed. 1850.
[14] Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” April 29, 1783.
[15] In the etymological sense, now practically obsolete, of misbeliever.
[16] Perhaps a better version of perhaps the same story is that of the
young Dauphin exclaiming to his right reverend preceptor, when some book
mentioned a king as having died, “Quoi donc, les rois meurent-ils?”
“Quelquefois, monseigneur,” was the reply—ironical, or parasitical, as
may be.
[17] John Asgill distinguished himself by maintaining in a treatise now
forgotten, that death is no natural necessity, and that to escape it is
within the range of the humanly practicable. But Asgill’s biography, like
every other, has for a last page the inevitable “And he died.”
[18] That is, “Let thy spirit (goste), not thy appetite, lead thee.” In
St. Peter’s words, “Abstain from fleshly lusts.”
[19] St. Augustine, Lyra, Bellarmine, and others, are chargeable with
this judgment and sentence.
[20] “Fortunately these things are known to Him, from whom no secrets are
hidden; and let us rest in the assurance that His judgments are not as
ours.”—_Rogers’s Italy._
[21] The friends spoken of were Coleridge and Miss Wordsworth. The scene
was the eastern shore of Grasmere. The date of the poem is 1800.
[22] On the “false humility” which shrinks from all censure or
reprobation of what is evil, under cover of the text “judge not, that ye
be not judged,”—as if it were the intent of that text, not to warn us
against rash, presumptuous, and uncharitable judgments, but absolutely to
forbid our taking account of the distinction between right and wrong,—see
Sir Henry Taylor’s essay on Humility and Independence in his valuable
“Notes from Life.” The man of true humility, we are there taught, will
come to the task of judgment, on serious occasions, not lightly or
unawed, but praying to have “a right judgment in all things;” and whilst
exercising that judgment in no spirit of compromise or evasion, he will
feel that to judge his brother is a duty and not a privilege; and he will
judge him in sorrow, humbled by the contemplation of that fallen nature
of which he is himself part and parcel. (See “Notes from Life” (1847),
pp. 46, _sqq._)
[23] Were we all turned inside out, however, Mr. Trollope elsewhere
surmises, some of us might find “our shade of brown to be very
dark.”—_The Bertrams_, chap. xix.
[24] The avoidance of moral _estimate_, on the other hand, is imputed
to an insufficient sense of the duty incumbent on all of us to form
determinate estimates of men and actions, if only as bearing on our own
conduct in life. (See “W. C. Roscoe’s Essays,” vol. ii., p. 308.)
[25] Owen Meredith: “The Artist.”
[26] “Cleon,” by Robert Browning.
[27] Completed. _Finis coronat opus._ Children and fools, it has been
observed, should not see a work that is half done, they not having the
sense to make out what the artist is designing. “The whole of this world
that we see, is a work half done; and thence fools are apt to find fault
with Providence.”—ARCHBISHOP WHATELY.
[28] Sonnets, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Perplexed Music.”
[29] He is said to have emptied two baskets of figs and of eggs, which
he swallowed alternately, and the repast was concluded with marrow and
sugar. In one of his pilgrimages to Mecca, Soliman is asserted to have
eaten, at a single meal, seventy pomegranates, a kid, six fowls, and a
huge quantity of the grapes of Tayaf. “If,” says Gibbon, “the bill of
fare be correct, we must admire the appetite rather than the luxury of
the sovereign of Asia.”—_Hist. Rom. Empire_, ch. lii.
[30] A broken-down old schoolmaster bore witness to Dr. Chalmers’ _modus
operandi_. “Many a pound-note has the doctor given me, and he always did
the thing as if he were afraid that any person should see him. May God
reward him!”—Hanna’s “Life of Chalmers,” chap. i.
[31] The case of St. Peter was expressly within the preacher’s view. “It
is shocking, doubtless, to allow ourselves even to admit that this is
possible; yet no one knowing human nature from men and not from books,
will deny that this might befall even a brave and true man. St. Peter
was both; yet this was his history. In a crowd, suddenly, the question
was put directly, ‘This man also was with Jesus of Nazareth?’ Then a
prevarication—a lie: and yet another.”—_Sermon on the Restoration of the
Erring._
[32] Froude, “History of Reign of Elizabeth,” vol. ii., pp. 126, 215,
226, 277, 278.
[33] Mr. Thackeray incidentally opposes the quasi-apologists for
smuggling on the ground that it is a complicated tissue of lying. In his
very last and unfinished work, he makes a good old rector allow that to
run an anker of brandy may seem no monstrous crime; but when men engage
in these lawless ventures, who knows how far the evil will go? “I buy
ten kegs of brandy from a French fishing-boat, I land it under a lie
on the coast, I send it inland ever so far, and all my consignees lie
and swindle. I land it, and lie to the revenue officer. Under a lie
(that is, a mutual secrecy), I sell it to the landlord of the Bell at
Maidstone, say.... My landlord sells it to a customer under a lie. We
are all engaged in crime, conspiracy, and falsehood; nay, if the revenue
looks too closely after us, we out with our pistols, and to crime and
conspiracy add murder. Do you suppose men engaged in lying every day
will scruple about a false oath in a witness-box? Crime engenders crime,
sir.”—_Denis Duval_, chap. vii.
[34] From Sir Walter Scott we might gather numerous examples and
aphorisms to the purpose. “It’s a sair judgment on a man,” says
Ratcliffe, in the “Heart of Mid-Lothian,” “when he has once gane sae
far wrang as I hae dune”—the present thief-taker being in fact an
ex-thief—that never a bit “he can be honest, try’t whilk way he will.”
The career of Effie Deans, anon Lady Staunton, in the same story, is a
practical sermon on the same text. “I drag on,” she owns, “the life of
a miserable impostor, indebted for the marks of regard I receive to a
tissue of deceit and lies, which the slightest accident may unravel.”
Her sister, on perusing the letter which contains these confessions, is
impressed with such an instance of the staggering condition of those who
have risen to distinction by undue arts, and the “outworks and bulwarks
of fiction and falsehood, by which they are under the necessity of
surrounding and defending their precarious advantages.”
Then again there is old Caleb Balderstone, querulous at being what he
calls “forced” to imperil his soul “wi’ telling ae lee after another
faster than I can count them,”—and elsewhere at the “cost” of “telling
twenty daily lees to a wheen idle chaps and queans, and, what’s waur,
without gaining credence.”
And for another instance we have the titular Earl of Etherington, in “St.
Ronan’s Well,” in the position as of a spider when he perceives that his
deceitful web is threatened with danger, and sits balanced in the centre,
watching every point, and uncertain which he may be called upon first to
defend. “Such is one part, and not the slightest part, of the penance
which never fails to wait on those, who, abandoning the ‘fair play of the
world,’ endeavour to work out their purposes by a process of deception
and intrigue.”
In one of Mr. Disraeli’s earlier fictions, there is a young man whose
frankness is proverbial, but who finds himself involved in a course of
prevarication—due effect being given to its preliminary process, though
“only the commencement of the system of degrading deception which awaited
him.”
But perhaps the most direct and forcible illustration of the subject in
modern fiction, is to be found in the “White Lies” of Mr. Charles Reade,
a work the title of which declares its didactic scope. Rose Beaurépaire
in an unguarded moment equivocates, or tells a white lie, and thereby
hangs the tale. Soon we have her bitterly bewailing the imbroglio in
which she has involved herself and others, and the necessity of fresh
fibs to maintain the meaning and credit of the first. “There is no end to
it,” she sobs despairingly. “It is like a spider’s web: every struggle
to be free but multiplies the fine yet irresistible thread that seems to
bind me.” In the next chapter a significant paragraph intimates, “This
was the last lie the poor entangled wretch had to tell that morning.”
And the penultimate chapter opens with a notice anew of the “fatal
entanglement” into which two high-minded sisters had been led, through
yielding to a natural foible: the desire, namely, to hide everything
painful from those they loved, even at the expense of truth. The author
lays stress on the inextricable complications due to their “amiable
dishonesty,” and he importunes the reader to take notice that after the
first White Lie or two, circumstances overpowered them, and drove them
on against their will. It was no small part, he insists, of all their
misery, that they longed to get back to truth and could not.
[35] In apposition, or opposition, to which, note the bidding and the
demur in Talfourd’s tragedy of “Ion”:—
“_Adrastus._ No; strike at once; my hour is come: in thee
I recognise the minister of Jove,
And, kneeling thus, submit me to his power.
_Ion._ Avert thy face.
_Adras._ No; let me meet thy gaze,” etc.
[36] Deut. xiii. 6. Observe too the seeming climax,—ascending from “thy
brother, the son of thy mother,” through the successive stages of “thy
son, thy daughter,” and “the wife of thy bosom,” to “thy friend, which is
as thine own soul.” As though
“The force of Nature could no further go.”
[37] “If our friends appear to look upon us with little interest, if
our arrival is seen without pleasure, and our departure without regret,
instead of charging them with a deficiency of feeling, we should turn our
scrutiny upon ourselves.”—_Essays on the Formation and Publication of
Opinions_, v. i.
[38] Hartley Coleridge, Sonnets.
[39] That is, if attention be shown him.
[40] Gusts of wind.
[41] See Hanna’s Life of Chalmers, Journal of 1810 and of 1825-6,
_passim_.
[42] “See the well-known print of Mazarin’s death-bed, surrounded by
ladies at cards. According to Grimm, the Maréchale de Luxembourg and
two of her friends played at loto by that of Madame du Deffand till
she expired. But at that time the proceeding was at least thought
singular.”—“Historical Studies,” by Herman Merivale.
[43] “God speaks to children, also, in dreams, and by the oracles that
lurk in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, ... God holds with
children ‘communion undisturbed.’”—“Autobiographic Sketches,” by Thomas
de Quincey, i. 24.
INDEX.
Answer, a soft, wrath-dispelling, 357;
most exquisite revenge for reproaches, 358;
like healing balm, 359;
comes of practised patience, 359;
Illustrations from Alison, Sir Matthew Hale, Spenser, Decker, and
others, 357-360.
Anticipations of the future, delusive, 333;
often crushed when nearest realization, 334;
when seeming fulfilled, extinguished by death, 336;
Illustrations from Homer, Michelet, Cowper, Mrs. Gaskell, and
others, 333-337.
Anxious foreboding, forbidden by Scripture, 47;
deprecated by pagan philosophy, 48;
no preparation for coming ills, 48;
only causes a depression of spirits, 49;
and cripples energy, 50;
destroys present enjoyment, 51;
cannot see into the future, 52;
indulged in, breeds despair, 54;
remedy for, 54;
Illustrations from Hume, Swift, Schleiermacher, Longfellow, and
others, 48-55.
Appetite, indulgence in, indecent, 249;
cause of death to royalty, 250;
inability of some to resist, 251;
allowed in Italy, in case of fatal sickness, 253;
a common weakness, 254;
Illustrations from Adam Smith, Gibbon, Tennyson, Gray, George
Herbert, and others, 242-255.
Bargains, makers of, their tactics, 367;
depreciate when buying, 368;
exaggerate when selling, 369;
customs of different countries, 370;
horse-dealers, their tactics, 371;
an exception to the general rule of, 372;
Illustrations from A. K. H. B., Fuller, Leigh Hunt, Capt. Marryat,
Kingsley, Plautus, and others, 367-372.
Beauty, but a clothed skeleton, 101;
all lost in the grave, 102;
only food for worms, 133;
Illustrations from Byron, Southey, Blair, Macaulay, and others,
100-104.
Beneficence, secret, an exception to the rule, 259;
dislike of, to thanks, 260;
of Wellington and Byron, 261;
finds a reward in itself, 262;
Illustrations from Chamfort, Goldsmith, Smollett, Cowper, and
others, 259-262.
Childhood, everything may be hoped from, 382;
evanescence of promise in, 383;
retrospect of, shows how we have fallen, 384;
possibility of a noble future for all, 385;
much of the good in, checked from development, 386;
Illustrations from Dante, Adam Smith, Samuel Rogers, Baron
Alderson, Charles Lamb, Dr. Caird, and others, 381-386.
Children, dying before their parents, an inversion of natural order,
182;
one of the greatest sorrows to man, 183;
the case of Mohammed cited, 184;
ruins the hopes of the parents, 186;
Citations from Canon Melvill, Edmund Burke, Moore, and others,
182-187.
Co-workers, all human beings, 348;
each in his place or degree, 349;
all required to account for their performance of their part, 350;
the difference in, not position, but how duties performed, 351;
all to one end, and that is with God, 352;
Illustrations from Coleridge, John Newton, Mrs. Gaskell, Colani,
Milton, and others, 348-352.
Darkness, increases the sense of danger, 223;
and the bitterness of death, 324;
power of, over the guilty, 324;
natural dread of, in mankind, 326;
of coming death, rouses a longing for light, 327;
the concomitant of misery, 327;
Illustrations from Marlowe, Scott, Croly, Professor Newman, Lord
Lytton, Dickens, and others, 323-328.
Death, sum and story of all humanity, 156;
the inevitable fate of all, 157;
a leveller of all distinctions and grades, 160;
even in Arcadia, 163;
the actions of the just blossom in, 165;
Illustrations from Addison, Barry Cornwall, James Montgomery,
Gibbon, Warton, Prior, George Herbert, and others, 156-165.
Elements, the, God only can control, 233;
the folly of man commanding, 232;
all men subject to, 232;
folly of Xerxes cited, 233;
legends of power of priests over, 234;
the greatest conquerors, impotent against, 235;
moral application, 237;
Illustrations from Pepys, Longfellow, Gibbon, Carlyle, Cowper, and
others, 231-237.
Falsity of friends, the sharpest pang of all, 201;
darkens man’s views of the moral government of God, 206;
shakes confidence in the whole world, 206;
David’s lament over, 208;
Illustrations from Colani, Milman, Longfellow, Corneille,
Shakspeare, and others, 200-208.
Faults in others, more easily discerned than in ourselves, 187;
we should mend our own, before looking for those of others, 188;
we often possess those, that we attribute to others, 190;
Illustrations from Trench, Horace, Hogg, Molière, Mrs. Inchbald,
and others, 187-191.
Flowers, not to be considered in a utilitarian light, 109;
awaken finer sensibilities, 110;
akin to the poetic faculty in man, 111;
the teaching of, lost on the dull, 112;
woman compared to, 113;
Illustrations from Tennyson, Leigh Hunt, Isaac Taylor, Shenstone,
and others, 109-113.
Freedom, from righteousness, a service to sin, 60;
true, only found in God’s service, 61;
sweetened by constraint, 61;
without law, pernicious, 62;
at times a relief to give up, 63;
too much, in art and literature, hurtful, 64;
obedience nobler than, 65;
Illustrations from Gray, Wordsworth, Goethe, Mrs. Gaskell, and
others, 60-66.
Freedom, the service of, 66;
from self-control, a bane, 67;
not idleness, 67;
may be enjoyed in a prison, 68;
maintained by law, 70;
Illustrations from Keble, Cowper, Johnson, Hawthorne, and others,
66-70.
Friendship, closer than relationship, 328;
want of with relatives, arises from lack of sympathy, 329;
or of knowledge of each other, 332;
Illustrations from Samuel Bailey, Thackeray, Sir Thos. Browne,
Montaigne, Richardson, and others, 328-332.
Futurity, prying into brings a penalty, 76;
ignorance of, an advantage and happiness, 77;
a knowledge of, would cloud our life, 78;
hidden from us by God, 79;
could we foresee, we should suffer by anticipation, as well as
reality, 80;
and lose hope, 81;
visionary previsions of, vanity, 82;
ignorance of, a source of content, 84;
and deprives death of part of its gloom, 85;
Illustrations from Cicero, Froude, De Quincey, Scott, La Bruyère,
and others, 76-86.
Gray hairs, first notice of decline, 372;
various ways, first discovery of, met, 373;
a shadow of the end, 374;
come unawares, 375;
Illustrations from Coleridge, C. Bowles, Thackeray, Trollope,
Tennyson, and others, 372-376.
Greatness and affluence, sometimes productive of selfishness, 15;
loss of, awakens sympathy with poor and afflicted, 16;
peculiar sin of, carelessness rather than inhumanity, 17;
this often the result of early education, 18;
sympathy with poverty need not destroy natural joy of, 18;
one object of suffering, to re-unite poverty with, 19;
of some, not a cause of poverty in others, 20;
oft performs its charity by commission, 21;
desirable for, to make personal acquaintance with misery and
suffering, 22;
case of the Pretender cited, 26;
causes an isolation from the poor, 28;
shows best when engaged in works of mercy, 28;
results of want of thought in, 29-31;
benefit of proper use of, 32;
Illustrations from Shakspeare, 17;
La Bruyère, Hannah More, and others, 18-32.
Guilt, first thoughts of, abhorrent, 255;
case of Hazael, 255;
mere protestation against, no safeguard against, 256;
familiarity with, breeds apologies for, 257;
one step in, speedily induces others, unsuspected, 258;
transforms those subject to it, 259;
Illustrations from Miss Lee, Tobin, Dr. Hamilton, Southey,
Sainte-Beuve, and others, 255-259.
Hearing, with the mind as well as ears, 386;
interest in theme, creates attentive, 387;
compared with seeing, 388;
difference between, and marking, 388;
some have no, for spiritual things, 389;
Illustrations: Milton, Webster, Balzac, Dumas, Shakspeare, and
others, 386-389.
Human body, the, reduced to its lowest terms, 104;
Hamlet’s speculation on, 105;
as Mummy, a merchandise, 106;
turned to animal black, 106;
suggestion to use bones as a manure, 107;
used for earthworks, 108;
Illustrations from Sydney Smith, Chateaubriand, Xenophon, Dicey,
and others, 101-109.
Human Knowledge, imperfection of, 224;
in things of this world, 226;
in the workings of providence, 226;
imperfect, because we cannot see the end of all, 229;
Illustrations from Locke, Mrs. Browning, Thomson, Addison, Le
Maistre, and others, 224-231.
Hurry and Excitement, the characteristic of the present age, 242;
its effect on current literature, 243;
destructive of calm thought, 244;
different from haste, 245;
hinders clearness of perception, 246;
deadens capacity for simpler enjoyments, 247;
too little work as fatal as, 248;
Illustrations from Chateaubriand, Dr. Boyd, Longfellow, Sir Henry
Taylor, and others, 242-249.
Joy—human, mostly overshadowed, 87;
of success, overclouded by the thought of the future, 88;
of hope, by thought of others’ present suffering, 89;
present, by the thought of death, 90;
soon fades, 91;
Illustrations from Gibbon, R. Browning, Lord Lytton, Hannay, and
others, 86-91.
Judgment, Man’s, of his fellow, deprecated, 208;
wrong, because he knows not himself, 210;
nor the secrets of others, 211;
nor their motives, 212;
the habit of, presumptuous, 213;
God’s, the only just, 214;
God’s, more merciful than man’s, 215;
man’s necessarily imperfect, 216;
human, severe, 219;
of the heart, belongs only to God, 221;
should be charitable, because of our own failings, 224;
Illustrations from Shakspeare, Sir Thomas Browne, La Bruyère,
Arthur Helps, O. W. Holmes, Anthony Trollope, Carlyle, and
others, 208-224.
Lies, lead to further lies, case of Jacob, 290;
carry their punishment, in necessity of further lies, 291;
inextricably entangle those who use them, 293;
injurious to those who tell them, 294;
one makes a necessity for others, 295;
Illustrations from Mrs. Browning, Scott, Corneille, Cellini, Jeremy
Taylor, Beaumont and Fletcher, and others, 290-296.
Light—“at evening time”—the promise of, a comfort, 313;
a deliverance from the fear of death, 314;
often clears up the end of a life of trial, 315;
disperses all darkness and difficulties, 316;
a relief from troubles in declining years, 317;
appears sometimes unexpectedly, 318;
_Light_—a longing of the human soul, 319;
to die in, almost a universal craving, 321;
the comfort of dying moments, 322;
Illustrations from Bunyan, O. W. Holmes, Dickens, Shirley Brooks,
Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, Sophocles, Landor, and others, 313-323.
Love and Gentleness more powerful agents than force, 33;
illustrations from Plutarch, 33;
children more easily governed by, than fear, 34;
this also the case with nations, 35;
natures not amenable to, exceptional, 35;
the means usually employed by women to gain their ends, 36;
the best method for missionaries, 37;
used by Queen Elizabeth and Empress Catherine towards their people,
38;
when rulers fail with, they employ worse means, 39;
best means of eliciting truth, 40;
works even on the most depraved natures, 40;
Illustrations from Ben Jonson, Mr. Freeman, Scott, Dr. Beattie, and
others, 32-41.
Lying, engenders lying, 286;
the case of St. Peter, 287;
demands a good memory, 288;
leads to hopeless entanglement, 289;
first step in all wrong doing, 289;
Illustrated by Trench, Swift, Robertson, Froude, and others,
286-290.
(See also pp. 290-296.)
Mirth, good in due season, 296;
must be recommended by higher qualities, 297;
too much is wearisome, 298;
deep and true feeling of more real value than mere, 299;
in some, always inclines to sadness, 300;
Illustrations from Tennyson, St. Evremond, Richardson, Scott, Mrs.
Riddell, Hood, and others, 296-300.
Music—its power to dispel evil humours, 55;
gives ease in various nervous disorders, 56;
used by Luther to repel his visions of Satan, 57;
removed the melancholy of a king of Spain, 57;
wakes up feelings of the past, 58;
studied by the Jewish priesthood, 58;
effect of, on lunatics, 59;
soothes grief, 60;
Illustrations from Beveridge, Burton, Sir James Stephen, Schiller,
and others, 55-60.
Order, Heaven’s first law, 273;
human not to be compared with Divine, 274;
obedience to, the stay of the world, 275;
to be found in all God’s handiwork, 276;
man should be the servant of, 277;
love of, improving to the mind, 278;
the basis of civil government, 279;
truth is, 280;
a love of, may subsist with a low mental standard, 281;
the happiness of heaven, 281;
Illustrations from C. H. Townshend, Hooker, Carlyle, Shaftesbury,
Lowell, George Herbert, Crabbe, Patmore, Southey, 273-282.
Plans, of Man, overruled by God, 305;
for the future, vain, 306;
often bring but trouble, 308;
Illustrations from Helps, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Thackeray,
Schiller, Congreve, Tasso, 305-309.
Praise, of self, unseemly, 96;
productive of ridicule, 96;
common among savages, 97;
a mark of vanity, 98;
fault of Cato and Cicero, 98;
true merit disdains, 99;
degrading, 100;
Illustrations from Plutarch, Swift, Chateaubriand, Barrow, Feltham,
Carlyle, 96-100.
Prayer, without action, the mark of feebleness, 342;
with action, shows trust in God, 343;
for help, must be accompanied by self-help, 345;
only when in danger, the folly of some, 346;
of Benvenuto Cellini, 347;
Illustrations from Bentley, Kingsley, Froude, John Brown, Lord
Broughton, and others, 342-347.
Prayers—at times made for what would be our own hurt, 147;
made in ignorance of true needs, 148;
the best, for those things which God sees needful for us, 149;
instances of ruin, by granted, 150;
real answer to, opposite of what we expect, 152;
granted, by seeming to be rejected, 154;
Illustrations from Plato, Juvenal, Montaigne, Madame de Sévigné,
Carlyle, Walpole, Jane Taylor, De Quincey, Tennyson, 147-156.
Present despair, succeeded by comfort, 92;
anger, by joy, 92;
joy, by grief, 92;
pleasure, mixed with pain, 93;
triumph, with anxiety for the future, 94;
prosperity bears within it decay, 95;
Illustrations from Shakspeare, Byron, Mrs. Browning, Johnson,
Tennyson, Pope, 91-95.
“Prophet, no man one in his own country,” 143;
few admired by their own domestics, 144;
mankind apt to underrate those they are familiar with, 145;
some exceptions to the rule, 146;
Illustrations from Montaigne, Ben Jonson, Scott, Mrs. Oliphant,
Milman, 143-147.
Protestation, fervid, case of Peter’s, 165;
too much, a mark of insincerity, 166;
over, awakens suspicion, 167;
over, the refuge of base minds, 168;
not needful to truth, 168;
seldom to be trusted, 169;
fails of its purpose, 170;
Illustrations from Racine, Disraeli, Milman, Hawthorne, Wolcot,
Corneille, Feltham, Fielding, B. Jonson, Alison, 165-170.
Purposes of man, often frustrated by God, 301;
confounded by the smallest accident, 302;
often end as least expected, 302;
Illustrations from Molière, Dryden, W. Irving, Burns, Wordsworth,
301-304.
Repentance and Relapse, in the case of Pharaoh, 125;
in sickness, and falling back in health, a mark of weak minds, 126;
made in fear of death, usually vanishes on removal of cause, 127;
the irreligious, prompt with in trouble, 128;
Infidels in health, repentant in sickness, 130;
at times, but want of power to sin, 131;
may in some, be measured by their health, 132;
when in danger, no repentance, 134;
Illustrations from Boileau, Lady M. W. Montagu, Scott, Le Sage,
Crabbe, Montesquieu, Butler, Wolcot, Gibbon, Whately, 125-134.
Retributive Justice, in the case of Haman, 41;
that of Daniel, and his accusers, 42;
the delight of early ballads, 42;
popular history teaches, by examples, 43;
examples of, from ancient history, 44;
Illustrations from Hamlet, 47.
Retrospect of Human Life, vanity, 361;
in, swiftness of time seems infinite, 302;
in, past seems as a dream, 364;
nothing in regard to eternity, 364;
Illustrations from Seneca, Moore, Southey, Mde. de Sévigné, Cowper,
and others, 361-365.
Saints considered as Strangers and Pilgrims, 192;
to them, this world but as an inn, 193;
looking to their home, lightens their earthly troubles, 194;
this world as a wilderness, 196;
their home on high, 197;
look there for their rest, 198;
this, to them, a subject of rejoicing, 200;
Illustrations: Leighton, Beveridge, Lamennais, John Foster,
Chaucer, Mrs. Browning, Robertson, Keble, 192-200.
Scripture, often quoted, by the vicious, to excuse their faults, 10,
13;
by divines to support their own peculiar tenets, 11;
used in election squibs, 12;
sometimes quoted for self-deceit, 14;
misused quotations, 14;
Illustrations from Bunyan, Shakspeare, Carlyle, Dickens, and
others, 10-16.
Self-control, the greatest victory, 276;
the effort of all noble minds, 377;
constant practice of, subdues the most violent tempers, 377;
strengthened by religion, 378;
should be exercised in letter writing, 379;
failure of, causes the greatest mischief, 380;
Illustrations from Marcus Antoninus, Clarendon, Macaulay, Dr.
Chalmers, Scott, Gibbon, Swift, Buxton, Molière, 376-381.
Shadow a, man’s life compared to, 170;
earthly pursuits and pleasures, but, 171;
man’s corpse becomes, 173;
some waste their life in hunting, 175;
reality to be sought above, and hereafter, 181;
man’s soul a reality, 182;
Illustrations: Burke, Emerson, G. Herbert, Scott, R. Browning, Abbé
Gerbert, Hawthorne, La Bruyère, De Tocqueville, Hare, Sterling,
Rob. Lytton, Churchill, Carlyle, 170-182.
Silence, discreet in a fool, 70;
a virtue in wise men, 71;
when it breaks, ignorance shows itself, 72;
by keeping, fools acquire respect, 73;
often taken as a mark of wisdom, 75;
Illustrations: Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, Ben Jonson, C. Lamb,
W. Irving, Jewsbury, Goldsmith, and others, 70-76.
Sin of One Man, consequences of felt by whole nations, cases of
Achan and David, 1;
results of, felt in distant lands and by future generations, 2;
affects others by force of example, 4;
remote consequences of, even greater than present, 5;
the effects of, often show when deed forgotten by sinner, 5;
Illustrations from South, G. Eliot, Robert Browning, and others,
1-6.
Sleep, Death compared to, in Scripture, 134;
and Death as twin brothers, 135;
a counterfeit of death, 136;
Sancho Panza’s apostrophe to, 136;
a daily death, 137;
of a child, as death of a Christian, 138;
Illustrations from Homer, Warton, Byron, Sir Thomas Browne, George
Herbert, Mrs. Browning, and others, 134-139.
Sleep, peaceful, destroyed by crime, 282;
exceptions to the rule, 283;
disturbed by feelings of remorse, 284;
only enjoyed by an innocent mind, 286;
Illustrations from “Macbeth,” G. W. Cooke, R. Lytton, Hawthorne,
Godwin, Roscoe, Webster, 282-286.
Society, regarded as a body, 353;
each member in, has his peculiar functions, 353;
subordination in, no degradation, 354;
all service in, the same in God’s sight, 355;
contentment to be found by each member of, in doing his duty, 356;
Illustrations: F. W. Robertson, Mrs. Browning, R. Browning,
Wordsworth, J. C. Hare, R. Lytton, G. Herbert, 353-357.
Solitude, in death, 389;
in a spiritual sense, not to the Christian, 390;
the bitterest pang of humanity, 390;
the choice of the animal creation, 391;
a preference for, in some natures, 391;
in a natural sense, a necessity, 393;
our Lord, the highest example of, 396;
Illustrations from Pascal, Wordsworth, Scott, Merivale, De Quincey,
Crabbe, Robertson, W. Humboldt, Mrs. Browning, 389-396.
Stage, this world considered as a, 114;
man an actor on, 115;
human life in its varieties, like a play, 116;
one man plays many parts, 118;
man of the world, only first-class actor, 118;
Mary Stuart, an actress on the political, 119;
every man spectator as well as actor, 120;
players the representatives of human nature, 121;
an epitome of this world, 121;
necessity for each to act his part well, on, 123;
Illustrations from Shakspeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Cervantes, Dr.
Maginn, Sainte-Beuve, Chamfort, Hazlitt, Overbury, R. Hall,
114-125.
Sympathy, as first shown by Job’s friends, 6;
often best proved by silence, 7;
moralizing no evidence of, 8;
more strongly evidenced by deeds, 8;
Illustrations from Steele, Rousseau, and others, 6-9.
To-morrow, cannot be calculated upon, 263;
hopes and fears intent on, 264;
penitence deferred till, too late, 266;
vain the pursuit of, 266;
the refuge of fools, 268;
a favourite phrase with Napoleon, 270;
a vanishing quantity, 271;
one, will come to all, 273;
Illustrations: Shakspeare, C. Rossetti, Charles Reade, Hawthorne,
Prior, Macaulay, Southey, and others, 263-273.
Unconscious peril—the case of Saul, 237;
surrounds man, 238;
retrospect of, more interesting than that of positive danger, 239;
escape from, proof of superintending Providence, 240;
often nearest when least suspected, 241;
Illustrations: Cowper, De Quincey, Hawthorne, Scott, Southey,
Milman, Young, 237-242.
Unrest, one of the woes denounced against the Jews, 365;
one of the greatest afflictions of man, 366;
Illustrations: Shakspeare, Landor, Crabbe, Keats, Keble, Mrs.
Gaskell, Shenstone, 365-367.
Utilitarianism, of the crass, pur-blind sort, 309;
has no sympathy with the beautiful as such, 310;
or self-sacrifice, 311;
only a one-sided and degrading way of satisfying the mind, 312;
sees nothing beyond money-making, 313;
Illustrations from Hare, Carlyle, Coleridge, Buckle, De
Tocqueville, Haliburton, 309-313.
Vain-glory, punishment of, in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, 337;
of Belshazzar, 338;
mostly the forerunner of a fall, 339;
founded on the favour of man, 341;
Illustrations from Prescott, Ben Jonson, Milman, Shakspeare, and
others, 337-342.
Worth, unrecognized, by one’s kindred, case of David cited, 139;
Pythagoras said to have borrowed his learning, etc., 140;
familiarities of common life hinder appreciation of, 141;
one’s family most difficult to convince of, 142;
Illustrations from Euripides, Gibbon, David Hume, Swift, Horace
Walpole, and others, 139-143.
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