Methinks, before the issue of our fate,
A spirit moves within us, and impels
The passion of a prophet to our lips.--ANONYMOUS.
O vitae Philosophia dux, virtutis indagatrix!-CICERO.
["O Philosophy, conductress of life, searcher after virtue!"]
Upon leaving the House of Commons, Mordaunt was accosted by Lord
Ulswater, who had just taken his seat in the Upper House. Whatever
abstraction or whatever weakness Mordaunt might have manifested before
he had left his home, he had now entirely conquered both; and it was
with his usual collected address that he replied to Lord Ulswater's
salutations, and congratulated him on his change of name and accession
of honours.
It was a night of uncommon calm and beauty; and, although the moon was
not visible, the frosty and clear sky, "clad in the lustre of its
thousand stars," [Marlowe] seemed scarcely to mourn either the
hallowing light or the breathing poesy of her presence; and when Lord
Ulswater proposed that Mordaunt should dismiss his carriage, and that
they should walk home, Algernon consented not unwillingly to the
proposal. He felt, indeed, an unwonted relief in companionship; and
the still air and the deep heavens seemed to woo him from more
unwelcome thoughts, as with a softening and a sister's love.
"Let us, before we return home," said Lord Ulswater, "stroll for a few
moments towards the bridge: I love looking at the river on a night
like this"
Whoever inquires into human circumstances will be struck to find how
invariably a latent current of fatality appears to pervade them. It
is the turn of the atom in the scale which makes our safety or our
peril, our glory or our shame, raises us to the throne or sinks us to
the grave. A secret voice at Mordaunt's heart prompted him to dissent
from this proposal, trifling as it seemed and welcome as it was to his
present and peculiar mood: he resisted the voice,--the moment passed
away, and the last seal was set upon his doom; they moved onward
towards the bridge. At first both were silent, for Lord Ulswater used
the ordinary privilege of a lover and was absent and absorbed, and his
companion was never the first to break a taciturnity natural to his
habits. At last Lord Ulswater said, "I rejoice that you are now in
the sphere of action most likely to display your talents: you have not
spoken yet, I think; indeed, there has been no fitting opportunity,
but you will soon, I trust."
"I know not," said Mordaunt, with a melancholy smile, "whether you
judge rightly in thinking the sphere of political exertion the one
most calculated for me; but I feel at my heart a foreboding that my
planet is not fated to shine in any earthly sphere. Sorrow and
misfortune have dimmed it in its birth, and now it is waning towards
its decline."
"Its decline!" repeated his companion, "no, rather its meridian. You
are in the vigor of your years, the noon of your prosperity, the
height of your intellect and knowledge; you require only an effort to
add to these blessings the most lasting of all,--Fame!"
"Well," said Mordaunt, and a momentary light flashed over his
countenance, "the effort will be made. I do not pretend not to have
felt ambition. No man should make it his boast, for it often gives to
our frail and earth-bound virtue both its weapon and its wings; but
when the soil is exhausted its produce fails; and when we have forced
our hearts to too great an abundance, whether it be of flowers that
perish or of grain that endures, the seeds of after hope bring forth
but a languid and scanty harvest. My earliest idol was ambition; but
then came others, love and knowledge, and afterwards the desire to
bless. That desire you may term ambition: but we will suppose them
separate passions; for by the latter I would signify the thirst for
glory, either in evil or in good; and the former teaches us, though by
little and little, to gain its object, no less in secrecy than for
applause; and Wisdom, which opens to us a world, vast, but hidden from
the crowd, establishes also over that world an arbiter of its own, so
that its disciples grow proud, and, communing with their own hearts,
care for no louder judgment than the still voice within. It is thus
that indifference not to the welfare but to the report of others grows
over us; and often, while we are the most ardent in their cause, we
are the least anxious for their esteem."
"And yet," said Lord Ulswater, "I have thought the passion for esteem
is the best guarantee for deserving it."
"Nor without justice: other passions may supply its place, and produce
the same effects; but the love of true glory is the most legitimate
agent of extensive good, and you do right to worship and enshrine it.
For me it is dead: it Survived--ay, the truth shall out!--poverty,
want, disappointment, baffled aspirations,--all, all, but the
deadness, the lethargy of regret when no one was left upon this
altered earth to animate its efforts, to smile upon its success, then
the last spark quivered and died; and--and--but forgive me--on this
subject I am not often wont to wander. I would say that ambition is
for me no more; not so are its effects: but the hope of serving that
race whom I have loved as brothers, but who have never known me,--who,
by the exterior" (and here something bitter mingled with his voice),
"pass sentence upon the heart; in whose eyes I am only the cold, the
wayward, the haughty, the morose,--the hope of serving them is to me,
now, a far stronger passion than ambition was heretofore; and whatever
for that end the love of fame would have dictated, the love of mankind
will teach me still more ardently to perform."
They were now upon the bridge. Pausing, they leaned over, and looked
along the scene before them. Dark and hushed, the river flowed
sullenly on, save where the reflected stars made a tremulous and
broken beam on the black surface of the water, or the lights of the
vast City, which lay in shadow on its banks, scattered at capricious
intervals a pale but unpiercing wanness rather than lustre along the
tide, or save where the stillness was occasionally broken by the faint
oar of the boatman or the call of his rude voice, mellowed almost into
music by distance and the element.
But behind them, as they leaned, the feet of passengers on the great
thoroughfare passed not oft,--but quick; and that sound, the commonest
of earth's, made rarer and rarer by the advancing night, contrasted
rather than destroyed the quiet of the heaven and the solemnity of the
silent stars.
"It is an old but a just comparison," said Mordaunt's companion,
"which has likened life to a river such as we now survey, gliding
alternately in light or in darkness, in sunshine or in storm, to that
great ocean in which all waters meet."
"If," said Algernon, with his usual thoughtful and pensive smile, "we
may be allowed to vary that simile, I would, separating the universal
and eternal course of Destiny from the fleeting generations of human
life, compare the river before us to that course, and not it, but the
city scattered on its banks, to the varieties and mutability of life.
There (in the latter) crowded together in the great chaos of social
union, we herd in the night of ages, flinging the little lustre of our
dim lights over the sullen tide which rolls beside us,--seeing the
tremulous ray glitter on the surface, only to show us how profound is
the gloom which it cannot break, and the depths which it is too faint
to pierce. There Crime stalks, and Woe hushes her moan, and Poverty
couches, and Wealth riots,--and Death, in all and each, is at his
silent work. But the stream of Fate, unconscious of our changes and
decay, glides on to its engulfing bourne; and, while it mirrors the
faintest smile or the lightest frown of heaven, beholds, without a
change upon its surface, the generations of earth perish, and be
renewed, along its banks!"
There was a pause; and by an involuntary and natural impulse, they
turned from the waves beneath to the heaven which, in its breathing
contrast, spread all eloquently, yet hushed, above. They looked upon
the living and intense stars, and felt palpably at their hearts that
spell--wild, but mute--which nothing on or of earth can inspire; that
pining of the imprisoned soul, that longing after the immortality on
high, which is perhaps no imaginary type of the immortality ourselves
are heirs to.
"It is on such nights as these," said Mordaunt, who first broke the
silence, but with a low and soft voice, "that we are tempted to
believe that in Plato's divine fancy there is as divine a truth; that
'our souls are indeed of the same essence as the stars,' and that the
mysterious yearning, the impatient wish which swells and soars within
us to mingle with their glory, is but the instinctive and natural
longing to re-unite the divided portion of an immortal spirit, stored
in these cells of clay, with the original lustre of the heavenly and
burning whole!"
And hence then," said his companion, pursuing the idea, "might we also
believe in that wondrous and wild influence which the stars have been
fabled to exercise over our fate; hence might we shape a visionary
clew to their imagined power over our birth, our destinies, and our
death."
"Perhaps," rejoined Mordaunt, and Lord Ulswater has since said that
his countenance as he spoke wore an awful and strange aspect, which
lived long and long afterwards in the memory of his companion,
"perhaps they are tokens and signs between the soul and the things of
Heaven which do not wholly shame the doctrine of him [Socrates, who
taught the belief in omens.] from whose bright wells Plato drew (while
he coloured with his own gorgeous errors) the waters of his sublime
lore." As Mordaunt thus spoke, his voice changed: he paused abruptly,
and, pointing to a distant quarter of the heavens, said,--
"Look yonder; do you see, in the far horizon, one large and solitary
star, that, at this very moment, seems to wax pale and paler, as my
hand points to it?"
"I see it; it shrinks and soars, while we gaze into the farther depths
of heaven, as if it were seeking to rise to some higher orbit."
"And do you see," rejoined Mordaunt, "yon fleecy but dusky cloud which
sweeps slowly along the sky towards it? What shape does that cloud
wear to your eyes?"
"It seems to me," answered Lord Ulswater, "to assume the exact
semblance of a funeral procession: the human shape appears to me as
distinctly moulded in the thin vapours as in ourselves; nor would it
perhaps ask too great indulgence from our fancy to image amongst the
darker forms in the centre of the cloud one bearing the very
appearance of a bier,--the plume, and the caparison, and the steeds,
and the mourners! Still, as I look, the likeness seems to me to
increase!"
"Strange!" said Mordaunt, musingly, "how strange is this thing which
we call the mind! Strange that the dreams and superstitions of
childhood should cling to it with so inseparable and fond a strength!
I remember, years since, that I was affected even as I am now, to a
degree which wiser men might shrink to confess, upon gazing on a cloud
exactly similar to that which at this instant we behold. But see:
that cloud has passed over the star; and now, as it rolls away, look,
the star itself has vanished into the heavens."
"But I fear," answered Lord Ulswater, with a slight smile, "that we
can deduce no omen either from the cloud or the star: would, indeed,
that Nature were more visibly knit with our individual existence!
Would that in the heavens there were a book, and in the waves a voice,
and on the earth a token of the mysteries and enigmas of our fate!"
"And yet," said Mordaunt, slowly, as his mind gradually rose from its
dream-like oppression to its wonted and healthful tone, "yet, in
truth, we want neither sign nor omen from other worlds to teach us all
that it is the end of existence to fulfil in this; and that seems to
me a far less exalted wisdom which enables us to solve the riddles,
than that which elevates us above the chances, of the future."
"But can we be placed above those chances;--can we become independent
of that fate to which the ancients taught that even their deities were
submitted?"
"Let us not so wrong the ancients," answered Mordaunt; "their poets
taught it, not their philosophers. Would not virtue be a dream, a
mockery indeed, if it were, like the herb of the field, a thing of
blight and change, of withering and renewal, a minion of the sunbeam
and the cloud? Shall calamity deject it? Shall prosperity pollute?
then let it not be the object of our aspiration, but the byword of our
contempt. No: let us rather believe, with the great of old, that when
it is based on wisdom, it is throned above change and chance! throned
above the things of a petty and sordid world! throned above the
Olympus of the heathen! throned above the Stars which fade, and the
Moon which waneth in her course! Shall we believe less of the
divinity of Virtue than an Athenian Sage? Shall we, to whose eyes
have been revealed without a cloud the blaze and the glory of Heaven,
make Virtue a slave to those chains of earth which the Pagan subjected
to her feet? But if by her we can trample on the ills of life, are we
not a hundredfold more by her the vanquishers of death? All creation
lies before us: shall we cling to a grain of dust? All immortality is
our heritage: shall we gasp and sicken for a moment's breath? What if
we perish within an hour?--what if already the black cloud lowers over
us?--what if from our hopes and projects, and the fresh woven ties
which we have knit around our life, we are abruptly torn?--shall we be
the creatures or the conquerors of fate? Shall we be the exiled from
a home, or the escaped from a dungeon? Are we not as birds which look
into the Great Air only through a barred cage? Shall we shrink and
mourn when the cage is shattered, and all space spreads around us,--
our element and our empire? No; it was not for this that, in an elder
day, Virtue and Valour received but a common name! The soul, into
which that Spirit has breathed its glory, is not only above Fate,--it
profits by her assaults! Attempt to weaken it, and you nerve it with
a new strength; to wound it, and you render it more invulnerable; to
destroy it, and you make it immortal! This, indeed, is the Sovereign
whose realm every calamity increases, the Hero whose triumph every
invasion augments; standing on the last sands of life, and encircled
by the advancing waters of Darkness and Eternity, it becomes in its
expiring effort doubly the Victor and the King!"
Impressed by the fervour of his companion, with a sympathy almost
approaching to awe, Lord Ulswater pressed Mordaunt's hand, but offered
no reply; and both, excited by the high theme of their conversation,
and the thoughts which it produced, moved in silence from their post
and walked slowly homeward.