_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._