“is justly served:
It is a poison tempered by himself”
for Hamlet, which Claudius has just drank of, and drinking died. The
tragedy of the prince of Denmark does indeed abound in instances of what
Horatio calls
“Accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
And deaths put on by cunning and forced cause;
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on the inventors’ heads.”
_TO-DAY’S SUFFICING EVIL, AND TO-MORROW’S FORECAST CARE._
ST. MATTHEW vi. 34.
With a divine calm fall those words from the Sermon of the Mount—spoken
as never man spake—which bid us take “no thought for the morrow; for the
morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the
day is the evil thereof.”
Pagan philosophy had, and natural theism has, its approximation to
the same point of view. Horace is all for letting the mind enjoy the
enjoyable present, and for leaving no room or resting-place for the sole
of the foot of Black Care, raven and unclean bird that she is. The morrow
may be hers, but to-day at least is his, and the morrow shall take care
for the things of itself:
“Lætus in præsens animus quod ultra est
Oderit curare.”
David Hume, again, meets the doctrine that we should always have before
our eyes, death, disease, poverty, blindness, calumny, and the like,
as ills which are incident to human nature, and which may befall us
to-morrow,—by the answer, that if we confine ourselves to a general and
distant reflection on the ills of human life, such a vague procedure can
have no effect to prepare us for them; and that if, on the other hand, by
close and intense meditation we render them present and intimate to us,
we realise the true secret for poisoning all our pleasures, and rendering
us perpetually miserable. He grieves more than need be, who begins to
grieve before he need, is one of Seneca’s sententious sayings: _Plus
dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet quam necesse est_. One of Mrs.
Gore’s women of the world—who might probably be counted by the hundred—is
sprightly and smart in her rebuke of her husband and his sister for their
delight in perplexing the brightest moments of existence by all the
agonies of second sight, and whom she represents as quite indignant when
they find her sympathy waiting the actual occurrence of evil. “I hate,”
she says, “to turn back my head towards the dark shadow that follows me,
or direct my telescope towards a coming storm.” And herein was she wise,
if not with all the wisdom of those Christian morals, of which we have so
impressive an expositor in Sir Thomas Browne. “Leave future occurrences
to their uncertainties,” writes the fine old physician, Religiosus
Medicus, “think that which is present thy own; and, since ’tis easier to
foretell an eclipse than a foul day at some distance, look for little
regular below. Attend with patience the uncertainty of things, and what
lieth yet unexerted in the chaos of futurity.” Shakspeare’s noble Roman,
at the dawn of the day of battle on which so much depends, is natural man
enough to utter the aspiration:
“O, that a man might know
The end of this day’s business, ere it come!”
But he is also stoic philosopher enough to check that prospective
yearning, with the reflection,
“But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known.”
Swift opens his Birthday Address to Stella with the assurance,
“This day, whate’er the fates decree,
Shall still be kept with joy by me:
This day, then, let us not be told,
That you are sick and I grown old;
Nor think on our approaching ills,
And talk of spectacles and pills;
To-morrow will be time enough
To hear such mortifying stuff.”
For once, however, it is only in the opening verses that the dean
is jocose; and he soon turns aside from his strain of levity to bid
Stella accept some serious lines “from not the gravest of divines.”
Schleiermacher, in one of his rather gushing letters,—for he, too, though
nothing of a Swift, and though of real weight in divinity, was not in all
senses the gravest of divines,—implores his “dearest Jette” not to look
so much into the future. He cannot beg this too earnestly and too often,
he says,—so depressed is Jette apt to be by anticipation of things to
come, and from a perverse habit of condensing advent difficulties. “It is
easy to see through _one_ pane of glass, but through ten placed one upon
another we cannot see. Does this prove that each one is not transparent?
or are we ever called upon to look through more than one at a time?
Double panes we only have recourse to for warmth; and just so it is with
life. We have but to live _one_ moment at a time. Keep each one isolated,
and you will easily see your way through them.” So again writes good
Frederick Perthes to his wife, whose fearful and hopeful longings, he
tells her, are indeed guarantees for the great future beyond the grave,
but whom he urges to bear in mind that a vigorous grasp of the present
is our duty so long as we are upon earth. It is the present moment, he
reminds her, that supplies the energy and decision that fit us for life;
retrospect brings sadness, and the dark future excites fears, so that we
should be crippled in our exertions were we not to lay a vigorous grasp
upon the present. And
“Labour with what zeal you will,
Something still remains undone;
Something uncompleted still
Waits the rising of the sun.
By the bedside, on the stair,
At the threshold, near the gates,
With its menace or its prayer,
Like a mendicant it waits;
Waits, and will not go away;
Waits, and will not be gainsaid:
By the cares of yesterday
Each to-day is heavier made;
Till at length the burden seems
Greater than our strength can bear;
Heavy as the weight of dreams
Pressing on us everywhere.
And we stand from day to day,
Like the dwarfs of times gone by,
Who, as Northern legends say,
On their shoulders held the sky.”
Quite exceptional is the temperament impersonated by Wordsworth in one
who seemed a man of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows.
Longfellow has his midnight reflection on To-morrow; himself a watcher
and contemplative, his little ones asleep: and thus the _pensées_ end:
“To-morrow! the mysterious, unknown guest,
Who cries to me, ‘Remember Barmecide,
And tremble to be happy with the rest.’
And I make answer, ‘I am satisfied;
I dare not ask; I know not what is best;
God hath already said what shall betide.’”
There is never, observes Madame d’Arblay, in her diary, such a
superfluity of actual happiness as to make it either rational or
justifiable to feed upon _expected_ misery. “That portion of philosophy
which belongs to making the most of the present day, grows upon me
strongly; and, as I have suffered infinitely from its neglect, it is what
I most encourage, and, indeed, require.” Kindly ordained, she takes it,
is the concealment of
“the day of sorrow;
And enough is the present tense of toil—
For this world, to all, is a stiffish soil—
And the mind flies back with a glad recoil
From the debts not due till to-morrow.”
It is one of Scott’s young heroes who opens a letter of troublous tidings
with the confession that, until now, he had rarely known what it was to
sustain a moment’s real sorrow; what he called such was, he now felt
assured, only the weariness of mind which, having nothing actually
present to complain of, turns upon itself, and becomes anxious about the
future—disregarding the Scriptural monition that sufficient unto the day
is the evil thereof. Is there, Armstrong asks,
“an evil worse than fear itself?
And what avails it that indulgent Heaven
From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come,
If we, ingenious to torment ourselves,
Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own?
Enjoy the present; nor, with needless cares
Of what may spring from blind misfortune’s womb,
Appal the surest hours that life bestows:
Serene, and master of yourself, prepare
For what may come; and leave the rest to Heaven.”
Prevision and imagination, as Rousseau says, multiply the evils of our
lot: “_Pour moi_,” he professes—however the profession may have squared
with the practice—“_j’ai beau savoir que je soufrirai demain, il me
suffit de ne pas souffrir aujourd’hui pour être tranquille_.” It is
certainly a frenzy, quoth old Montaigne, to go now and whip yourself,
because it may so fall out that fortune may one day decree you a
whipping, and to put on your furred gown at Midsummer, because you will
stand in need of it at Christmas. It was one of Madame de Sévigné’s
maxims in life to “regarder l’avenir comme une obscurité, dont il peut
arriver des biens et des clartés à quoi l’on ne s’attend pas.” Milton’s
Adam laments the mournful privilege of “visions ill foreseen.” Better had
he lived ignorant of future! so had borne his part of evil only, each
day’s lot enough to bear. So again, in Milton’s Masque, the elder brother
bids the younger be not over-exquisite to cast the fashion of uncertain
evils:
“For grant they be so, while they rest unknown,
What need a man forestall his date of grief,
And run to meet what he would most avoid?”
And once more, Milton himself, in one of those Sonnets which stand in
the like relation of merit to his great epic that Shakspeare’s do to
his great dramas, admonishes his scholar, Cyriack Skinner, that heaven
disproves the care,
“though wise in show,
That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.”
“Melancholy commonly flies to the future for its aliment,” says Sydney
Smith, “and it must be encountered,” he adds, “by diminishing the range
of our views.” The great remedy for melancholy, he insists in another
place, is to “take short views of life.” Are you happy now? Then why
destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at
all? For “every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them
shadows of your own making.” One of his correspondents he emphatically
counsels to dispel that prophetic gloom which dives into futurity, to
extract sorrow from days and years to come, and which considers its
own unhappy visions as the decrees of Providence. “We know nothing of
to-morrow, our business is to be good and happy to day.” In effect, like
Maucroix,
“Il rit de ces prudents qui, par trop de sagesse,
S’en vont dans l’avenir chercher de la tristesse
Et des soucis cuisants.”
Once and again in his autobiography does the most influential, perhaps,
of French philosophers avow his resolve _á vivre désormais au jour la
journée_, to take short views of life, and regard distant objects as at
once illusive and elusory. “Usons de chaque jour sans trop de prévoyance
du lendemain,” says another. And it was an old French poet, fourscore and
upwards, who in 1700 wrote the four verses which since then have been
often cited:
“Chaque jour est un bien que du ciel je reçois,
Je jouis aujourd’hui de celui qu’il me donne;
Il n’appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu’a moi,
Et celui de demain n’appartient a personne.”
Dr. Boyd recognises as sound philosophy in Sydney Smith, the advising
us, whether physically or morally, to “take short views.” One of his
illustrations to the purpose is, that it would knock you up at once if,
when the railway carriage moved out of the station at Edinburgh, you
began to trace in your mind’s eye the whole route to London. Never do
that, he says; think first of Dunbar, then of Newcastle, then of York,
and, putting the thing thus, you will get over the distance without
fatigue of mind. What little child, he asks, would have heart to begin
the alphabet, if, before he did so, you put clearly before him all
the school and college work of which it is the beginning? “The poor
little thing would knock up at once, wearied out by your want of skill
in putting things. And so it is that Providence, kindly and gradually
putting things, whiles us onward, still keeping hope and heart, through
the trials and cares of life.” Every dog has its day, quaintly observes
A. H. K. B. on another occasion; but the day of the rational dog is
overclouded in a fashion unknown to his inferior fellow-creatures; it
is overclouded by the anticipation of the coming day which will not be
his. And the essayist reminds us accordingly how “that great though
morbid man, John Foster,” could not heartily enjoy the summer weather,
for thinking how every sunny day that shone upon him was a downward step
towards the winter gloom—each indication that the season was advancing,
though only to greater beauty, filling him with a sort of forecast
regret. “I have seen a fearful sight to-day,” he would say, “I have
seen a buttercup.” And we know, of course, adds his critic, “that in his
case there was nothing like affectation; it was only that, unhappily for
himself, the bent of his mind was so onward-looking, that he saw only a
premonition of December in the roses of June.” Waife, in Lord Lytton’s
story, checks his grandchild’s query when, happy, and unaccustomed to
happiness, and therefore distrusting its continuance, she wistfully
exclaims, “It cannot last, can it?” “’Tis no use in this life, my dear,”
Waife tells her, “no use at all disturbing present happiness by asking,
‘Can it last?’ To-day is man’s, to-morrow his Maker’s.” Life being a
succession of stages, urges another practical philosopher, we should
think of one stage at a time. Most people, he judiciously reminds us,
can bear one day’s evil; what breaks men down is the trying to bear on
one day the evil of two days, twenty days, a hundred days. “We can bear
a day of pain, followed by a night of pain, and that again by a day of
pain, and thus onward. But we can bear each day and night of pain, only
by taking each by itself. We can break each rod, but not the bundle.”
And the sufferer, in real great suffering, is well described as turning
to the wall in blank despair, when he looks too far on. To cite another
illustration of A. K. H. B.’s, we should, for certain purposes, look
not at the entire chain, but at each successive link of it; we know, of
course, that each link will be succeeded by the next; but we should think
of them one at a time.
Do not say, _wait the end_, is a maxim of Paul Louis Courier’s, who
declares that, saving the respect due to the ancients, nothing is more
false than that rule. “The evil of to-morrow shall never deprive me
of the good of to-day,” is one of the brilliant Frenchman’s resolves.
Another brilliant but highly bilious Frenchman testifies from observation
and experience to the necessity, in the long run, of living from day to
day, without indulgence either in unavailing regrets or anxious forecast,
“on s’aperçoit qu’il faut vivre au jour le jour, oublier beaucoup, enfin
éponger la vie à mésure qu’elle s’écoule.” But it may too truly be said
of this philosopher that he wrote, and lived, as one having no hope, and
without God in the world.
Horace was in his placid _Il Penseroso_ mood when he counselled the
acceptance of each new-born day as possibly one’s last, and appropriating
it accordingly:
“Inter spem curamque, timores inter et iras,
Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum:
Grata superveniet quæ non sperabitur hora.”
We might suggest suggestive parallels by the score, as this from a play
of Leigh Hunt’s,
“One day—could you not try one day and then
Enjoy or fear another as it suited?
Ay, one—one—one. Try but one day, and then
Trust me if one day would not give you strength,”
for morrows in store. Or this, from a poem of Owen Meredith’s:
“Be quiet! Take things as they come;
Each hour will draw out some surprise.
With blessing let the days go home:
Thou shalt have thanks from evening skies.”
_MEDICAMENTAL MUSIC._