argument, so I mention the case of a man about whom much debate goes
on even to this day. Napoleon starved in the streets of Paris; one by
one he sold his books to buy bread; he was without light or fire on
nights of iron frost, and his clothing was too scanty to keep out the
cold. He arrived at that pass which induces some men to end all their
woes by one swift plunge into the river; but he was not of the
despairful stamp, and he stood his term of misery bravely until the
light came for him. Leave his splendid, chequered career of glory and
crime out of reckoning, and remember only that he became emperor
because he had courage to endure starvation; that lesson at least from
his career can harm no one. Choose the example of a woman, for
variety's sake. George Eliot was quite content to scrub furniture,
make cheese and butter, and sweep carpets until she arrived at ripe
womanhood. She felt her own extraordinary power; but she never repined
at the prospect of spending her life in what is lightly called
domestic drudgery. The Shining Ones oftenest walk in lowly places and
utter no sound of mourning. She was nearing middle age before she had
an opportunity of gaining that astonishing erudition which amazed
professed students, and, had she not chanced to meet Mr. Spencer, our
greatest philosopher, she would have lived and died unknown. She never
questioned the decrees of the Power that rules us all, and, when she
suddenly took her place as one of the first living novelists, she
accepted her fame and her wealth humbly and simply. Till her last day
she remembered her bitter years of frustration and failure, and the
meanest of mortals had a share of her holy sympathy; she gained her
unexampled conquest by resolutely treading down despair, and her brave
story should cheer the many girls who find life bleak and joyless.
George Eliot was prepared to bear the worst that could befall her, and
it was her frank and gentle acceptance of the facts of life that
brought her joy in the end. We must also remember such people as
Arkwright, Stephenson, Thomas Edwards the naturalist, and Heine the
poet. Arkwright saw his best machinery smashed again and again; but
his bull-dog courage brought him through his trouble, and he
surmounted opposition that would have driven a weakling to exile and
death. Stephenson feared that he would never conquer the great morass
at Chat Moss, and he knew that, if he failed, his reputation would
perish. He never allowed himself to show a tremor, and he won. Poor
Edwards toiled on, in spite of hunger, poverty, and chill despair; he
received one knock-down blow after another with cheery gallantry, and
old age had clutched him before his relief from grinding penury came;
but nothing could daunt him, and he is now secure. Heine lay for seven
years in his "mattress grave;" he was torn from head to foot by the
pangs of neuralgia; one of his eyes was closed, and at times the lid
of the other had to be raised in order that he might see those who
visited him. Let those who have ever felt the aching of a single tooth
imagine what it must have been to suffer the same kind of pain over
the whole body. Surely this poor tortured wretch might have been
pardoned had he esteemed his life a failure! His spirit never flagged,
and he wrote the brightest, lightest mockeries that ever were framed
by the wit of man; his poems will be the delight of Europe for years
to come, and his memory can no more perish than that of Shakspere.
Enough of examples; the main fact is that to men and women who refuse
to accept failure all life is open, and there is something to hope for
even up to the verge of the grave. When the sullen storm-cloud of
misfortune lowers and life seems dim and dreary, that is the hour to
summon up courage, and to look persistently beyond the bounds of the
mournful present. Why should we uplift our voices in pettish
questioning? The blows that cut most cruelly are meant for our better
discipline, and, if we steel every nerve against the onset of despair,
the battle is half won even before we put forth a conscious effort.
There never yet was a misfortune or an array of misfortunes, there
never was an entanglement wound by malign chance from which a man
could not escape by dint of his own unaided energy. By all means let
us pity those who are sore beset amid the keen sorrows that haunt the
world, look with tenderness on their pain, soothe them in their
perplexities; but, before all things, incite them to struggle against
the numbing influence of despondency. The early failures are the raw
material of the finest successes; and the general who loses a battle,
the mechanic who fails to find work, the writer who pines for the
approach of tardy fame, the forsaken lover who looks out on a dark
universe, and the servant who meets only censure and coldness, despite
her attempts to fulfil her duty, all come under the same law. If they
consent to drift away into the limbo of failures, they have only to
resign themselves, and their existence will soon end in futility and
disaster; but, if they refuse to cringe under the lash of
circumstances, if they toil on as though a bright goal were
immediately before them, the result is almost assured; and, even if
they do succumb, they have the blessed knowledge that they have failed
gallantly. Half the misfortunes which crush the children of men into
insignificance are more or less magnified by imagination, and the
swollen bulk of trouble dwindles before an effort of the human will.
Read over the dismal record of a year's suicides, and you will find
that in nine cases out of ten the causes which lead unhappy men and
women to quench their own light of life are absolutely trivial to the
sane and steadfast soul. Let those who are heavy of heart when
ill-fortune seems to have mastered them remember that our Master is
before all things just. He lays no burden that ought not to be borne
on any one of His children, and those who give way to despair are
guilty of sheer impiety. The same Power that sends the affliction
gives also the capability of endurance, and, if we refuse to exert
that capability, we are sinful. When once the first inclination toward
weakness and doubt is overcome, every effort becomes easier, and the
sense of strength waxes keener day by day. Who are the most serene and
sympathetic of all people that even the most obscure among us meet?
The men and women who have come through the Valley of the Shadow of
Tribulation. By a benign ordinance which is uniform in action, it so
falls out that the conquerors derive enhanced pleasure from the memory
of difficulties beaten down and sorrows vanquished. Where then is the
use of craven shrinking? Let us rather welcome our early failures as
we would welcome the health-giving rigour of some stern physician.
Think of the heroes and heroines who have conquered, and think
joyfully also of those who have wrought out their strenuous day in
seeming failure. There are four lines of poetry which every
English-speaking man and woman should learn by heart, and I shall
close this address with them. They were written on the memorial stone
of certain Italian martyrs--
"Of all Time's words, this is the noblest one
That ever spoke to souls and left them blest;
Gladly we would have rested had we won
Freedom. We have lost, and very gladly rest."
XVIII.
"VANITY OF VANITIES."
Those who have leisure to explore the history of the past, to peer
into the dark backward and abysm of Time, must of necessity become
smitten with a kind of sad and kindly cynicism. When one has travelled
over a wide tract of history, and when, above all, he has mused much
on the minor matters which dignified historians neglect, he feels much
inclined to say to those whom he sees struggling vainly after what
they call fame, "Why are you striving thus to make your voice heard
amid the derisive silence of eternity? You are fretting and frowning,
with your eyes fixed on your own petty fortunes, while all the
gigantic ages mock you. Day by day you give pain to your own mind and
body; you hope against hope; you trust to be remembered, and you fancy
that you may perchance hear what men will say of you when you are
gone. All in vain. Be satisfied with the love of those about you; if
you can get but a dog to love you during your little life, cherish
that portion of affection. Work in your own petty sphere strenuously,
bravely, but without thought of what men may say of you. Perhaps you
are agonised by the thought of powers that are hidden in you--powers
that may never be known while you live. What matters it? So long as
you have the love of a faithful few among those dear to you, all the
fame that the earth can give counts for nothing. Take that which is
near to you, and value as naught the praises of a vague monstrous
world through which you pass as a shadow. Look at that squirrel who
twirls and twirls in his cage. He wears his heart out in his ceaseless
efforts at progression, and all the while his mocking prison whirls
under him without letting him progress one inch. How much happier he
would be if he stayed in his hutch and enjoyed his nuts! You are like
the restless squirrel; you make a great show of movement and some
noise, but you do not get forward at all. Rest quietly when your
necessary labour is done, and be sure that more than half the things
men struggle for and fail to attain would not be worth the having even
if the strugglers succeeded. Do not waste one moment; do not neglect
one duty, for a duty lost is the deadliest loss of all; snatch every
rational pleasure that comes within your reach; earn all the love you
can, for that is the most precious of all possessions, and leave the
search for fame to those who are petty and vain."
Such a cold and chilling speech would be a very good medicine for
uneasy vanity, but the best medicine of all is the contemplation of
the history of men who have flourished and loomed large before their
fellows, and who now have sunk into the night. How many mighty
warriors have made the earth tremble, filling the mouths of men with
words of fear or praise! They have passed away, and the only record of
their lives is a chance carving on a stone, a brief line written by
some curt historian. The glass of the years was brittle wherein they
gazed for a span; the glass is broken and all is gone. In the wastes
of Asia we find mighty ruins that even now are like symbols of
power--vast walls that impose on the imagination by their bulk,
enormous statues, temples that seem to mock at time and destruction.
The men who built those structures must have had supreme confidence in
themselves, they must have possessed incalculable resources, they must
have been masters of their world. Where are they now? What were their
names? They have sunk like a spent flame, and we have not even the
mark on a stone to tell us how they lived or loved or struggled. Far
in that moaning desert lie the remains of a city so great that even
the men who know the greatest of modern cities can hardly conceive the
original appearance and dimensions of the tremendous pile. Travellers
from Europe and America go there and stand speechless before works
that dwarf all the efforts of modern men. The woman who ruled in that
strong city was an imposing figure in her time, but she died in a
petty Roman villa as an exile, and Palmyra, after her departure, soon
perished from off the face of the earth. One pathetic little record
enables us to guess what became of the population over whom the queen
Zenobia ruled. A stone was dug up on the northern border of England,
and the inscription puzzled all the antiquarians until an Oriental
scholar found that the words were Syriac. "Barates of Palmyra erects
this stone to the memory of his wife, the Catavallaunian woman who
died aged thirty-three." That is a rude translation. Poor Barates was
brought to Britain, married a Norfolk woman of the British race, and
spent his life on the wild frontier. So the powerful queen passed away
as a prisoner, her subjects were scattered over the earth, and her
city, which was once renowned, is now haunted by lizard and antelope.
Alas for fame! Alas for the stability of earthly things! The
conquerors of Zenobia fared but little better. How strong must those
emperors have been whose very name kept the world in awe! If a man
were proscribed by Rome, he was as good as dead; no fastness could
hide him, no place in the known world could give him refuge, and his
fate was regarded as so inevitable that no one was foolhardy enough to
try at staving off the evil day. How coolly and contemptuously the
lordly proconsuls and magistrates regarded the early Christians. Pliny
did not so much as deign to notice their existence, and Pontius
Pilate, who had to deal with the first twelve, seems to have looked
upon them as mere pestilent malefactors who created a disturbance. For
many years those scornful Roman lords mocked the new sectarians and
refused to take them seriously. One scoffing magistrate asked the
Christians who came before him why they gave him the trouble to punish
them. Were there no ropes and precipices handy, he asked, for those
who wished to commit suicide? Those Romans had great names in their
day--names as great as the names of Ellenborough and Wellesley and
Gordon and Dalhousie and Bartle Frere, yet one would be puzzled to
write down a list of six of the omnipotent sub-emperors. They fought,
they made laws, they ruled empires, they fancied themselves only a
little less than the gods, and now not a man outside the circle of a
dozen scholars knows or cares anything about them. The wise lawgivers,
the dread administrators, the unconquerable soldiers have gone with
the snows, and their very names seem to have been writ in water.
If we come nearer our own time, we find it partly droll, partly
pathetic to see how the bubble reputations have been pricked one by
one. "Who now reads Bolingbroke?" asked Burke. Yes--who? The brilliant
many-sided man who once held the fortunes of the empire in his hand,
the specious philosopher, the unequalled orator is forgotten. How
large he loomed while his career lasted! He was one of the men who
ruled great England, and now he is away in the dark, and his books rot
in the recesses of dusty libraries. Where is the great Mr. Hayley? He
was arbiter of taste in literature; he thought himself a very much
greater man than Blake, and an admiring public bowed down to him.
Probably few living men have ever read a poem of Hayley's, and
certainly we cannot advise anybody to try unless his nerve is good. Go
a little farther back, and consider the fate of the distinguished
literary persons who were famous during the period which affected
writers call the Augustan era of our literature. The great poet who
wrote--
"Behold three thousand gentlemen at least,
Each safely mounted on his capering beast"--
what has become of that bard's inspired productions? They have gone
the way of Donne and Cowley and Waller and Denham, and nobody cares
very much. Take even the great Cham of literature, the good Johnson.
His fame is undying, but his works would not have saved his reputation
in vigour during so many generations. To all intents and purposes his
books are dead; the laboured writings which he turned out during his
years of starvation are not looked into, and our most eminent modern
novelist declares that, if he were snowed up in a remote inn with
"Bradshaw's Railway Guide" and the "Rambler" as the only books within
reach, he would assuredly not read the "Rambler." Perhaps hardly one
hundred students know how admirably good Johnson's preface to
Shakspere really is, and the "Lives of the Poets" are read only in
fragmentary fashion. Strange, is it not, that the man who made his
reputation by literature, the man who dominated the literary world of
his time with absolute sovereignty, should be saved from sinking out
of human memory only by means of the record of his lighter talk which
was kept by his faithful henchman? But for the wise pertinacity of
poor Boswell, the giant would have been forgotten even by the
generation which immediately followed him. His gallant and strenuous
efforts to gain fame really failed; his chance gossip and the amusing
tale of his eccentricities kept his name alive. Surely the irony of
fate was never better shown. Even this Titan would have had only a
bubble reputation but for the lucky accident which brought that
obscure Scotch laird to London.
Most piteous is the story of the poor souls who have sought to achieve
their share of immortality by literature. Go to our noble Museum and
look at the appalling expanse of books piled up yard upon yard to the
ceiling of the immense dome. Tons upon tons--Pelion on Ossa--of
literature meet the eye and stun the imagination. Every book was
wrought out by eager labour of some hopeful mortal; joy, anguish,
despair, mad ambition, placid assurance, wild conceit, proud courage
once possessed the breasts of those myriad writers, according to their
several dispositions. The piles rest in stately silence, and the
reputations of the authors are entombed.
As for the fighters who sought the bubble reputation even at the
cannon's mouth, who recks of their fierce struggles, their bitter
wounds, their brief success? Who knows the leaders of the superb host
that poured like a torrent from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, and
smote Napoleon to the earth? Who can name the leaders of the doomed
host that crossed the Beresina, and left their bones under the Russian
snows? High of heart the soldiers were when they set out on their wild
pilgrimage under their terrible leader, but soon they were lying by
thousands on the red field of Borodino, and the sound of their moaning
filled the night like the calling of some mighty ocean. And now they
are utterly gone, and the reputation for which they strove avails
nothing; they are mixed in the dim twilight story of old unhappy
far-off things and battles long ago.
Critics say that our modern poetry is all sad; and so it is, save when
the dainty muse of Mr. Austin Dobson smiles upon us. The reason is not
far to seek--we know so much, and the sense of the vanity of human
effort is more keenly impressed upon us than ever it was on men of
more careless and more ignorant ages. We see what toys men set store
by, we see what shadows we are and what shadows we pursue, so there is
no wonder that we are mournful. The sweetest of our poets, the most
humorous of our many writers cannot keep the thought of death and
futility away. His loveliest lyric begins--
"Oh, fair maids Maying
In gardens green,
Through deep dells straying,
What end hath been.
Two Mays between
Of the flow'rs that shone
And your own sweet queen?
They are dead and gone."
There is the burden--"dead and gone." Another singer chants to us
thus--
"Merely a round of shadow shows
Shadow shapes that are born to die
Like a light that sinks, like a wind that goes,
Vanishing on to the By-and-by.
Life, sweet life, as she flutters nigh,
'Minishing, failing night and day,
Cries with a loud and bitter cry,
'Ev'rything passes, passes away.'
* * * * *
Who has lived as long as he chose?
Who so confident as to defy
Time, the fellest of mortals' foes?
Joints in his armour who can spy?
Where's the foot will nor flinch nor fly?
Where's the heart that aspires the fray?
His battle wager 'tis vain to try--
Ev'rything passes, passes away."
The age is diseased. Why should men be mournful because what they call
their aspirations--precious aspirations--are frustrated? They seek the
bubble reputation, and they whimper when the bubble is burst; but how
much better would it be to cleave to lowly duties, to do the thing
that lies next to hand, to accept cheerfully the bounteous harvest of
joys vouchsafed to the humble? Since we all end alike--since the
warrior, the statesman, the poet alike leave no name on earth save in
the case of the few Titans--what use is there in fretting ourselves
into green-sickness simply because we cannot quite get our own way? To
the wise man every moment of life may be made fruitful of rich
pleasure, and the pleasure can be bought without heartache, without
struggling painfully, without risking envy and uncharitableness.
Better the immediate love of children and of friends than the hazy
respect of generations that must assuredly forget us soon, no matter
how prominent we may seem to be for a time. I have read a sermon to my
readers, but the sermon is not doleful; it is merely hard truth. Life
may be a supreme ironic procession, with laughter of gods in the
background, but at any rate much may be made of it by those who refuse
to seek the bubble reputation.
XIX.
GAMBLERS.
The great English carnival of gamblers is over for a month or two; the
bookmakers have retired to winter quarters after having waxed fat
during the year on the money risked by arrant simpletons. The
bookmaker's habits are peculiar; he cannot do without gambling, and he
contrives to indulge himself all the year round in some way or other.
When the Newmarket Houghton meeting is over, Mr. Bookmaker bethinks
him of billiards, and he goes daily and nightly among interesting
gatherings of his brotherhood. Handicaps are arranged day by day and
week by week, and the luxurious, loud, vulgar crew contrive to pass
away the time pleasantly until the spring race meetings begin. But
hundreds of the sporting gentry have souls above the British
billiard-room, and for them a veritable paradise is ready. The
Mediterranean laps the beautiful shore at Monte Carlo and all along
the exquisite Eiviera--the palms and ferns are lovely--the air is soft
and exhilarating, and the gambler pursues his pleasing pastime amid
the sweetest spots on earth. From every country in the world the
flights of restless gamblers come like strange flocks of migrant
birds. The Russian gentleman escapes from the desolate plains of his
native land and luxuriates in the beautiful garden of Europe; the
queer inflections of the American's quiet drawl are heard everywhere
as he strolls round the tables; Roumanian boyards, Parisian swindlers,
Austrian soldiers, Hungarian plutocrats, flashy and foolish young
Englishmen--all gather in a motley crowd; and the British bookmaker's
interesting presence is obtrusive. His very accent--strident, coarse,
impudent, unspeakably low--gives a kind of ground-note to the hum of
talk that rises in all places of public resort, and he recruits his
delicate health in anticipation of the time when he will be able to
howl once more in English betting-rings.