Why had Saul disquieted Samuel, to bring him up from the place of the
dead, by the midnight agency of the “wise woman” of Endor? Because he
would fain pry into futurity, and learn from supernatural sources his
coming fate. The desired foresight was vouchsafed him. By to-morrow he
and his sons were to be with the dead-and-gone seer, whose spirit he had
rashly invoked. The prevision had its present penalty. “Then Saul fell
straightway all along on the earth, and was sore afraid, because of the
words of Samuel.” The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, and
only those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children.
The tree of foreknowledge of good and evil may offer fruit that is
pleasant to the sight, and seemingly to be desired to make one wise; but
it is fatal food, not to be eaten of, nor to be touched, by any but the
venturesome profane.
Indulged to his cost with previsions of what should befall his posterity,
Milton’s Adam, at sight of the Flood and its ravages, breaks out into the
exclamation,
“O visions ill foreseen! Better had I
Lived ignorant of future! so had borne
My part of evil only, each day’s lot
Enough to bear.”
Warned by so distressful an experience, he would have no man seek
henceforth to be foretold what shall befall him or his children; “evil he
may be sure, which neither his foreknowing can prevent; and he the future
evil shall, no less in apprehension than in substance, feel grievous to
bear.” It has been asked what would become of men, were their future
absolutely foreknown by them: would they not become in imagination, and
therefore in reality, the passive slaves of an inevitable fate, with all
hope extinguished, all fear intensified, awaiting in terror the foreseen
evil, and looking with indifference on the promised good, darkened as it
would be by the shadow of intervening calamities, and stripped of the
bright colouring of hope? And yet,
“With eager search to dart the soul,
Curiously vain, from pole to pole,
And from the planets’ wandering spheres
To extort the number of our years,
And whether all those years shall flow
Serenely smooth, and free from woe,
Or rude misfortune shall deform
Our life with one continual storm;
Or if the scene shall motley be
Alternate joy and misery,—
Is a desire which, more or less,
All men feel, though few confess.”
So at least affirms the author of the “Rosciad,”—who in another of his
writings puts the query:
“Tell me, philosopher, is it a crime
To pry into the secret womb of time;
Or, born in ignorance, must we despair
To reach events, and read the future there?”
Assuredly, says Cicero, the ignorance of evils to come is of more
advantage than the knowledge of them: _certe ignoratio futurorum malorum
utilior est quam scientia_. And Horace, in a celebrated passage:
“Prudens futuri temporis exitum
Caliginosâ nocte premit Deus:
Ridetque, si mortalis ultra
Fas trepidat.”...
_Caliginosa nox_ forms a thick black curtain.
“What hangs behind that curtain?—would’st thou learn?
If thou art wise, thou would’st not.”
A thoughtful mind, sententiously observes Miss Clarissa Harlowe, is not
a blessing to be coveted, unless it has such a happy vivacity with it
as her friend Miss Howe’s: a vivacity which enables one to enjoy the
present, without being anxious about the future. It is, according to
Goldsmith, the happy confidence in bright illusions that gives life
its true relish, and keeps up our spirits amidst every distress and
disappointment. “How much less would be done, if a man knew how little he
can do! How wretched a creature would he be, if he saw the end as well
as the beginning of his projects! He would have nothing left but to sit
down in torpid despair, and exchange enjoyment for actual calamity.” The
warrior in Mr. Roscoe’s tragedy argues judiciously when he says,
“What is’t to me, that I should vex my soul
In dim forebodings of what is to be?
It is enough I know, and ache to know,
What on this bridge of time I have to do,
Not overlook the abysm till my head fail.”
Fortunately for us mortals, Mr. Froude says, necessary as any future
may be, and inevitable as by our own actions we may have made it, it is
kindly kept from us wrapt up in clouds, and we are not made wretched
about it by anticipation. “O my fortune,” prays Agrippina, in one of
Jonson’s Roman tragedies, “let it be sudden thou preparest against me;
strike all my powers of understanding blind, and ignorant of destiny to
come!”
Seek to know no more, is in vain the joint appeal of the three witches
to Macbeth, beside the magic caldron in the cave; but as to the future
of Banquo’s issue he _will_ be satisfied. Cranmer, predicting a glorious
reign for the infant Elizabeth, parenthesises a sigh on the common lot—
“Would I had known no more! but she must die.”
Shakspeare’s King Henry the Fourth, again, in one place utters the
aspiration, “O Heaven! that one might read the book of fate!” Hardly an
aspiration, however, as the context shows; a privilege to be deprecated
rather; for could there be foreseen all the changes and chances of one’s
mortal life, “how chances mock, and changes fill the cup of alteration
with divers liquors,”
“O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth,—viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,—
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.”
Mr. de Quincey describes an Installation of the Knights of St. Patrick at
which he was present, during the Lord-Lieutenancy of Lord Cornwallis—the
narrator’s companions on that occasion being Lord and Lady Castlereagh,
who “were both young at this time, and both wore an impressive appearance
of youthful happiness; neither, happily for their peace of mind, able to
pierce that cloud of years, not much more than twenty, which divided them
from the day destined in one hour to wreck the happiness of both.” Vision
ill foreseen it were to know the times and the seasons, the manner how,
and the place where.
“O tell me, cried Ereenia, for from thee
Nought can be hidden, when the end will be.
Seek not to know, old Casyapa replied,
What pleaseth Heaven to hide.
Dark is the abyss of Time.
But light enough to guide your steps is given;
Whatever weal or woe betide,
Turn never from the way of truth aside,
And leave the event, in holy hope, to Heaven.”
The hermit in Scott’s “Talisman,” who, after failing to read aright the
fate of others, has to own himself uncertain whether he may not have
miscalculated his own,—withdraws from the action of the story with the
reflection that God will not have us break into His council-house, or
spy out His hidden mysteries. “We must wait His time with watching and
prayer—with fear and with hope. I came hither the stern seer—the proud
prophet, skilled, as I thought, to instruct princes, and gifted even
with supernatural powers, but burdened with a weight which I deemed no
shoulders but mine could have borne. But my bands have been broken! I go
hence humble in mine ignorance,” etc. In Scott’s other and less popular
Tale of the Crusaders, Eveline deprecates the Lady of Baldringham’s
offer to show her niece how the balance of fate inclines, and shrinks
from the asserted privilege “enjoyed” by their house of looking forward
beyond the points of present time, and seeing in the very bud the thorns
or flowers which are one day to encircle their head. “For my own sake,
noble kinswoman,” answered Eveline, “I would decline such foreknowledge,
even were it possible to acquire it without transgressing the rules of
the Church. Could I have foreseen what has befallen me within these last
unhappy days, I had lost the enjoyment of every happy moment before that
time.” So again reasons the Italian adept, Baptista Damiotti, in one of
Sir Walter’s shorter tales, when dismissing the two agitated ladies who
have been consulting his magic mirror. “Few,” he added, in a melancholy
tone, “leave this house as well in health as they entered it. Such being
the consequence of seeking knowledge by mysterious means, I leave you
to judge of the condition of those who have the power of gratifying
such irregular curiosity.” Cowper observes in one of his letters that
man often prophesies without knowing it; but that did he foresee, what
is always foreseen by him who dictates what he supposes to be his own,
he would suffer by anticipation as well as by consequence; and wish
perhaps as ardently for the happy ignorance to which he is at present so
much indebted, as some have foolishly and inconsiderately done, for a
knowledge that would be but another name for misery. Even in the ecstasy
of rapturous foresight the Seer exclaims,
“Visions of glory, spare my aching sight,
Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul!”
When Harold and Haco, “pale king and dark youth,” in Lord Lytton’s
historical novel, would read the riddle of the future, and “climb
to heaven through the mysteries of hell,” the witch bids them—poor
“worms”—crawl back to the clay—to the earth: “One such night as the hag
ye despise enjoys as her sport and her glee, would freeze your veins, and
sear the life in your eyeballs,” etc., etc. What says the wizard, again,
in Tasso?
“But that I should the sure events unfold
Of things to come, or destinies foretel,
Too rash is your desire, your wish too bold.”
Cagliostro, professing to foresee the fate of La Perouse, is
importunately asked by his fellow-guests at that memorable dinner-party
commemorated by M. Dumas, why then he did not forewarn and save that
brave man before setting out. At the very least, why not have told him to
“beware of unknown isles”—that he might at any rate have had the chance
of avoiding them? But, “I assure you no, count,” is the mystic’s reply;
“and, if he had believed me, it would only have been the more horrible,
for the unfortunate man would have seen himself approaching those isles
destined to be fatal to him, without the power to escape from them.
Therefore he would have died, not one, but a hundred deaths, for he would
have gone through it all by anticipation. Hope, of which I should have
deprived him, is what best sustains a man under all trials.” “Yes,” says
Condorcet, the sceptical and sententious, “the veil which hides from us
our future, is the only real good which God has vouchsafed to man.” And
what again, to the same purport, says the Hermit Monk to Alpine’s Lord:—
“Roderick, it is a fearful strife
For man endowed with mortal life,
Whose shroud of sentient clay can still
Feel feverish pang and fainting chill, ...
’Tis hard for such to view, unfurl’d,
The curtain of the future world.
Yet witness every quaking limb,
My sunken pulse, mine eyeballs dim,
My soul with harrowing anguish torn,—
This for my chieftain have I borne!”
And therefore, says Sir Thomas Browne, in his moralisings on the
undesirableness of all such foresight, “and therefore the wisdom of
astrologers, who speak of future things, hath wisely softened the
severity of their doctrines; and even in their sad predictions, while
they tell us of inclination not coaction from the stars, they kill us
not with Stygian oaths and merciless necessity, but leave us hopes of
evasion.” _Tant mieux_ for those who, like Hudibras,
... “still gape to anticipate
The cabinet-designs of fate,
Apply to wizards to foresee
What shall, and what shall never be;”
like Hudibras, bursting with the wish,
“Oh, that I could enucleate
And solve the problem of my fate;
Or find, by necromantic art,
How far the destinies take my part!”
Vanity and vexation of spirit, these visionary previsions all. Sacred,
therefore, be, in Thomson’s phrase, the veil that kindly clouds a light
too keen for mortals,
... “for those that here in dust
Must cheerful toil out their appointed years.”
In a feeling paragraph on the pains of a first separation, Miss Ferrier
observes, or rather asks, if in the long and dreary interval that ensues,
it were foreseen what griefs were to be borne, what ties severed, what
hearts seared or broken—“who of woman born could bear the sight and live?
But ’tis in mercy these things are hidden from our eyes.” Looking back
upon a certain year’s accumulated troubles, Mrs. Gaskell’s Margaret Hale
“wondered how they had been borne. If she could have anticipated them,
how she would have shrunk away and hid herself from the coming time!” And
yet day by day, it is explained, had of itself, and by itself, been very
endurable—small, keen, bright little spots of positive enjoyment having
come sparkling into the very middle of sorrows. Margaret Hale does but
exemplify in prose what Home’s Lady Randolph enunciates in sonorous verse:
“Had some good angel oped to me the book
Of Providence, and let me read my life,
My heart had broke when I beheld the sum
Of ills which one by one I have endured.”
Whereupon the lady’s faithful Anna remarks:
“That God, whose ministers good angels are,
Hath shut the book, in mercy to mankind.”
Not but that this doctrine has found special recusants, if too generally
taken, or, in their own instance, too particularly applied. “I have
somewhere read,” says Caleb Williams, “that Heaven in mercy hides from us
the future incidents of our life. My own experience does not well accord
with this assertion.” And mentioning one critical occasion, he adds,
that this once at least he should have been saved from insupportable
labour and indescribable anguish, could he have foreseen what was then
impending.—Sometimes the natural complaint is like that of Duke Ferdinand
in John Webster’s tragedy:
“Oh, most imperfect light of human reason,
That mak’st us so unhappy to foresee
What we can least prevent!”
Sometimes a solace is found in such a reflection as this:
“Then did I see how that presentient shroud
Of grief, which raiseth many a fond complaint
In mortal bosoms, is a friendly cloud.
Storms fall less heavily which men fore-paint.
And the struck spirit utterly would faint,
Hurl’d from full joy.”
To be ignorant of evils to come, as well as forgetful of past, Sir Thomas
Browne hails as a merciful provision of nature, “whereby we digest the
mixture of our few and evil days.” In another of his works the fine old
physician would have us, in the heyday of prosperity, “think of sullen
vicissitudes,” but beat not our brains to foreknow them. “Be armed
against such obscurities, rather by submission than fore-knowledge. The
knowledge of future evils modifies present felicities, and there is more
content in the uncertainty or ignorance of them. This favour our Saviour
vouchsafed unto Peter, when he foretold not his death in plain terms,
and so by an ambiguous and cloudy delivery damped not the spirit of His
disciples. But in the assured fore-knowledge of the deluge, Noah lived
many years under the affliction of a flood, and Jerusalem was taken unto
Jeremy before it was besieged.” Holy George Herbert is scarcely more
quaint in verse than Sir Thomas Browne in prose:
“Only the present is thy part and fee.
And happy thou,
If, though thou didst not beat thy future brow,
Thou couldst well see
What present things required of thee.
They ask enough; why shouldst thou further go?
Raise not the mud
Of future depths, but drink the clear and good.
Dig not for woe
In times to come; for it will grow.
Man and the present fit; if he _provide_
He breaks the square.
This hour is mine: if for the next I care,
I grow too wide,
And do crusade upon death’s side:
For death each hour environs and surrounds.
He that would know
And care for future chances, cannot go
Unto those grounds,
But thro’ a churchyard which them bounds.”
The assured knowledge of the exact minute of one’s death may be treated
religiously as a privilege, after the manner of appeals by gaol-chaplains
to condemned-cell criminals; as where the clergyman of the Tolbooth
Church bade Wilson and Robertson, convicted Porteous rioters, not despair
on account of the suddenness of the summons, “but rather to feel this
comfort in their misery, that, though all who now [in that church] lifted
the voice, or bent the knee in conjunction with them, lay under the
same sentence of certain death, _they_ only had the advantage of knowing
the precise moment at which it should be executed upon them.” But how
does Professor Henry Rogers treat the question, in its practical aspect,
in his so-called “Vision about Prevision”? The seer, or foreseer, in
that _fantasiestück_, when asked, concerning those who consult him as
to the future, whether some at least do not wish to know the hour of
their death—that they may duly prepare for it? answers, “That least of
all. Not a soul will hear his tale told to the end; they won’t let us
unveil to them the hour or the mode of their dissolution.... They prefer
having a veil thrown over the closing scene of their life. Like other
play-goers, they do not like death to be actually exhibited on the stage,
and willingly let the curtain fall ere the catastrophe.” Well, but the
seer himself: he at any rate is above that weakness: he at any rate has
inquired into the secret of his end? “For what purpose?” is his reply:
is not that knowledge the very misery of prisoners in the condemned
cell? are they not accounted miserable precisely because they are to
die just that day month? will not hundreds, who pity them for that very
circumstance, in fact die before them? and yet are not these accounted
happy in comparison, because they know it not?
“E’en the great shadow, Death, lost half its gloom
In kind oblivion of impending doom,”
says one philosophical poet. Another, and a greater, in a poem on
presentiments, has this among many stanzas addressed to them:
“’Tis said, that warnings ye dispense,
Emboldened by a keener sense;
That men have lived for whom,
With dread precision, ye made clear
The hour that in a distant year
Should knell them to the tomb.
Unwelcome insight!”⸺
_that_ is the comment, that the note of exclamation, with which
Wordsworth commences the stanza next ensuing. When death has invaded the
quiet rectory in Miss Tytler’s Huguenot story, we have each servant
mysteriously and fanatically delivering her experience in the matter of
corpse-candles, death-spells, death-watches, etc., so that one might have
learned for all one’s life afterwards to look on one’s death as a dark
fate, haunting and hovering over one’s own person and those of beloved
friends, from which there is no escape, not even by prayer and fasting;
might have learned to “look out for it in dim prognostications, to
watch for it, and anticipate its cruel blows in incipient madness.—‘Our
Bibles say we know not the day nor the hour,’ said Grand’mère; ‘but He
knows—that is enough.’” One of La Bruyère’s _pensées sur la mort_ is,
that “ce qu’il y a de certain dans la mort, est un peu adouci par ce qui
est incertain: c’est un indéfini dans le tems, qui tient quelque chose
de l’infini, et de ce qu’on appelle éternité.” Byron indeed utters the
remonstrant query,
“Ah! why do darkening shades conceal
The hour when man must cease to be?”
But his sigh was little in the spirit of the Psalmist’s prayer to be made
to know his end, and the measure of his days, what it was.
_BEATIFIC VISION AND OVERSHADOWING CLOUD._
ST. LUKE ix. 34.
To the three favoured apostles it was granted by their Master to be
eye-witnesses of His majesty, when they were with Him on the holy
mount. They saw the fashion of His countenance altered, and His raiment
become white and glistering. They saw with Him in glory Moses, whose
burial-place no man knew, and Elijah, who was translated that he should
not see death. And Peter said it was good to be there, and he desired
to make that mount of transfiguration a dwelling-place, and to prolong
the splendours of that beatific vision. Three tabernacles he proposed to
rear, in that eager impetuosity which so often marked his character;
at present scarcely knowing what he said, but conscious of a privileged
apocalypse, and deprecating its speedy withdrawal. But “while he thus
spake, there came a cloud, and overshadowed them; and they feared as they
entered into the cloud.”
So it was again at a later day, and upon another mount, when the risen
Master was asked by His assembled apostles would He at this time restore
again the kingdom to Israel? Brief was the reply, and no sooner uttered
than, while they beheld—gazed wistfully, hopingly, longingly, on the
Presence they had so lately lost, and were now eager to retain—while they
beheld, “He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.”
* * * * *
The overshadowing cloud to mar the sunshine is one of the commonest of
common-places in man’s experience. Perpetually being verified in prosaic
reality, all too real, is the poet’s image—
“Across the sunbeam, with a sudden gloom,
A ghostly shadow flitted,”
_Medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid._ The very exuberance of
human happiness tends to suggest its opposite.
Gibbon felt simply as a man when he felt what he has described in a
memorable passage relating to his sense of gratified triumph at the
conclusion of his _magnum opus_. It was between the hours of eleven and
twelve, he records, on a calm night in June, that he wrote the last lines
of his last page in a summer-house in his garden at Lausanne. After
laying down his pen, he took several turns in a covered walk of acacias,
which commanded a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains.
The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon
was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. “I will not
dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and,
perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled,
and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had
taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and
that whatsoever might be the future date of my history the life of the
historian must be short and precarious.” It is the common lot. It is but
another reading of the complaint in Prior’s pastorals—
“Yet thus beloved, thus loving to excess,
Yet thus receiving and returning bliss,
In this great moment, in this golden Now,
...
A melancholy tear afflicts my eye,
And my heart labours with a sudden sigh;
Invading fears repel my coward joy,
And ills foreseen the present bliss destroy.”
Or as elsewhere the same poet gloomily exclaims, and fruitlessly
supplicates—
“O impotent estate of human life,
Where hope and fear maintain eternal strife!
Where fleeting joy does lasting doubt inspire,
And most we question what we most desire!
Amongst Thy various gifts, great Heaven, bestow
Our cup of love unmixed; forbear to throw
Bitter ingredients in; nor pall the draught
With nauseous grief.”
Hardly can it be called, though the author of “The Ring and the Book”
does call it,—
... “strange how, even when most secure
In our domestic peace, a certain dim
And flitting shade can sadden all; it seems
A restlessness of heart, a silent yearning,
A sense of something wanting, incomplete.”
A thought comes over us sometimes in our career of pleasure, Lord Lytton
remarks, or in the exultation of our ambitious pursuits, a thought comes
over us like a cloud, that around us and about us Death, Shame, Crime,
Despair, are busy at their work. He tells us what he has read somewhere
of an enchanted land where the inmates walked along voluptuous gardens,
and built palaces, and heard music, and made merry; while around and
within the land were deep caverns, where the gnomes and the fiends dwelt;
and ever and anon their groans and laughter, and the sounds of their
unutterable toils or ghastly revels, travelled to the upper air, mixing
in an awful strangeness with the summer festivity and buoyant occupation
of those above. And this he claims to be a picture of human life.
Always there is a black spot in our sunshine, exclaims Mr. Carlyle; and
he tells us what it is, “the shadow of ourselves.”
At a seeming crisis of assured prosperity the heroine of a French _roman_
is made to exclaim, “The future is all our own—the radiant future,
without cloud or obstacle, pure in the immensity of its horizon, and
extending beyond the reach of sight.” But while she thus speaks her
features suddenly assume an expression of touching melancholy, as she
adds, in a voice of profound emotion, “And yet—at this very hour—so many
unfortunate creatures are suffering pain!” So with the young hero in one
of Mr. Hannay’s fictions: “In that moment he felt that he had attained
a new stage of life; yet, an instant’s reaction seized him, as in every
fruition through one’s progress in time comes that curious moment’s
speck, the touch of an unseen hand, that seems to tell you, ‘Too much
joy is not for you here.’ It passed away, having just dashed his triumph
as it always does.” At a later stage in this adventurer’s career the ebb
of his spirits is made the text of a paragraph comparing them to a ship
in the tropics, where a light wind comes, and dies again, and leaves you
becalmed, or the horizon blackens suddenly and death seems impending
in the unhealthy air. “Few things are more touching than that peculiar
melancholy which sometimes comes over one in theatres or at feasts, and
reminds us of the dark element in nature and the heart ... which chills
the philosopher and the pleasure-taker.... When the light southerner of
old got a glimpse of it he called for his lyre and his garlands; but
roses will not charm it away from the deep heart of the child of the
Teuton, and he sees its awful shadow trembling in the wine.” The English
Opium-eater somewhere professes to derive from the spectacle of dancing,
where the motion is continuous and the music not of a trivial character
but charged with the spirit of festal pleasure, “the very grandest form
of passionate sadness which can belong to any spectacle whatever.”
Wordsworth is treating of presentiments when he says that—
“The laughter of the Christmas hearth
With sighs of self-exhausted mirth
They feelingly reprove.”
And of such is Currer Bell too treating in a passage that tells of the
writer’s fancy budding fresh and her heart basking in sunshine; only
these feelings “were well kept in check by the secret but ceaseless
consciousness of anxiety lying in wait on enjoyment, like a tiger
crouched in a jungle. The breathing of that beast of prey was in my ear
always.” Ἐξ ἡδονῆς γὰρ φύεται τὸ δυστυχεῖν.
“Who knows what that low sullen murmur means,
The river’s fall sends up to blast life’s fairest scenes?”
The happiest, as Pope’s Homer has it, “taste not happiness sincere,
but find the cordial draught is dashed with care.” What biography of
successful ambition but has its parallel passage to one in Prescott’s
history of the conqueror of Peru: “Amidst this burst of adulation the cup
of joy commended to Pizarro’s lips had one drop of bitterness in it that
gave its flavour to all the rest”! As M. Ampére’s Cleopatra owns,—
“Oui, parmi les plaisirs, la joie et les festins,
Je médite du sort les arrêts incertains.”
How apt, at a bright banquet, is the thought of death to flash across the
mind, is trite among the truisms of experience. It was at Belshazzar’s
feast, while they drank wine out of the golden vessels of the temple, and
praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and
of stone, when the revelry was at its height and the revellers at their
best, that in the same hour there came forth fingers of a man’s hand,
and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of
the king’s palace; and then was king Belshazzar greatly troubled, and
his countenance was changed in him, and his lords were astounded. In
Hawthorne’s allegory of the Maypole at Merry Mount, the lord and lady
of the May are abruptly overcome with a shadow of sadness, just when
the minstrelsy of pipe, cittern, and viola is pealing forth in such a
mirthful cadence that the boughs of the maypole quiver to the sound;
and just then too, as if a spell had loosened them, down comes a little
shower of withering roseleaves from the maypole. There is sometimes, says
Fielding, a little speck of black in the brightest and gayest colours of
fortune, which contaminates and deadens the whole.
“In every joy there lurks
An impulse of decay;
With silent speed it works,
While all without is gay:”
—with silent speed, like the worm at Jonah’s gourd. “Fleurs, vous aussi,”
so Béranger apostrophizes them,
... “vous avez vos souffrances.
Le ver est là; le vent peut accourir.”
_Le ver_, as the worm prepared for Jonah’s gourd; _le vent_, as the
vehement east wind to wither Jonah’s strength.
“While blooming love assures us golden fruit,
Some inborn poison taints the secret root;
Soon fall the flowers of joy.”
But Jonah’s gourd must have a section apart.
_THE SPREADING GOURD AND THE SPEEDING WORM._
JONAH iv. 6-8.
As Elijah the Tishbite sat down in the wilderness under a juniper-tree,
heavy-hearted, and fleeing for his life from the grasp of Jezebel, yet
requesting for himself that he might die; as he said, “It is enough; now,
O Lord, take away my life,” yet anon found rest and refreshment under
the juniper-tree, and did eat and drink, and lay down again, and went
in the strength of that rest and that meat, forty days and forty nights,
unto Horeb the mount of God; so Jonah the son of Amittai, displeased
exceedingly, and very angry, prayed in bitterness the same prayer, “O
Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to
die than to live.” Did he well to be angry? Did Elijah well to despair?
Under a juniper-tree Elijah recovered strength, took heart, and became of
good courage. For Jonah there was preparing a gourd. A gourd; and a worm
to make short work of the gourd.
Jonah left the city in wrath, and made him a booth, and sat under it in
the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city—the city
which he had doomed and God had spared. Under the burning sun he awaited
the judgment of Nineveh. “And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made
it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to
deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.
“But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote
the gourd that it withered.”
And when the sun arose, there arose too another thing of God’s preparing.
As He had prepared the gourd, and prepared the worm to smite the gourd,
so, at sunrise, “God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon
the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die.” And
not only so, but again expressed the wish, with the old bitterness and
even increasing wrath. Did he well to be angry for the gourd? “I do well
to be angry, even unto death,” he exclaimed. The gourd was so gladdening
a creation, it made even that morose spirit exceeding glad. But scarcely
had he time to congratulate himself on this relief, in complacent
assurance of its continuance, when the sheltering gourd was eaten to the
heart by a speeding worm, and what came up in a night, perished in a
night; and this also was vanity, vanity and vexation of spirit.
A perverse fate seems to lie in wait for man,
“And though he in a fertile climate dwell,
Plague him with flies: though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such charges of vexation on’t,
As it may lose some colour.”
In the words of another of Shakspeare’s dramas, “joy cannot show itself
modest enough without a badge of bitterness.” _Inter delicias semper
aliquid sævi nos strangulat_, says the Latin adage; the _aliquid sævi_
answering to the _aliquid amari_ of Lucretius, _quod in ipsis floribus
angat_; or again to the _aliquid solliciti_ of Ovid,
... “Nulla est sincera voluptas;
Sollicitique aliquid lætis intervenit.”
Why, Byron asks himself, in his diary (at Ravenna), why, at the very
height of desire and human pleasure, does there mingle a certain sense
of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what _is_—a
retrospect of the past, leading to a prognostication of the future?
Mrs. Browning has penned a suggestive sonnet to which the title is
superscribed of Pain in Pleasure:
“A thought lay like a flower upon my heart,
And drew around it other thoughts like bees
For multitude and thirst of sweetnesses,—
Whereat rejoicing, I desired the art
Of the Greek whistler, who to wharf and mart
Could lure those insect swarms from orange-trees,
That I might hive me with such thoughts, and please
My soul so, always. Foolish counterpart
Of a weak man’s vain wishes! While I spake,
The thought I called a flower, grew nettle-rough—
The thoughts called bees, stung me to festering,
Oh, entertain (cried reason, as she woke,)
Your best and gladdest thoughts but long enough,
And they will all prove sad enough to sting.”
As Shakspeare words it in one of _his_ sonnets,
“Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud,”
and every gourd has its worm. So again Cowper:
“Here every drop of honey hides a sting;
Worms wind themselves into our sweetest flowers.”
On the same text moralizes the meditative sire of the Cid, in Corneille’s
tragedy:
“Jamais nous ne goûtons de parfaite allégresse:
Nos plus heureux succès sont mêlés de tristesse;
Toujours quelques soucis en ces événements
Troublent la pureté de nos contentements.”
_Semper amari aliquid._ It is like Johnson’s reflections on his first
transports at Ranelagh. When first he entered those festive gardens,
it gave, he tells Boswell, an expansion and gay sensation to his mind,
such as he never experienced anywhere else. But, as Xerxes wept when he
reviewed his immense army, and considered that not one of that great
multitude would be alive a hundred years afterwards, so it went to the
doctor’s heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant
circle but was afraid to go home and think; that “the thoughts of each
individual there would be distressing when alone.” Boswell approves the
reflection as “experimentally just,” and appends a commonplace of his
own, upon the feeling of langour, which succeeds the animation of gaiety,
being itself a very severe pain.
It was in the mid hey-day of military triumph that Paulus Æmilius
astonished his encircling admirers by, first, a prolonged silence, and
next, a sombre homily on the vicissitudes of fortune, and of human
affairs. What time for confidence can there be to man, he asked,
when in the very instant of victory he must necessarily dread the
power of fortune, and the very joy of success must be mingled with
anxiety—_aliquid solliciti_—from a reflection on the course of unsparing
fate, which humbles one man to-day, and to-morrow another! Gladdening is
the gourd, with its pleasant promise of protection against the arrow that
flieth by day from a burning sun; but only him can it make, like Jonah,
exceeding glad, who knows not, or makes a point of forgetting, what a
worm can do, between a setting and a rising sun.
The night thoughts of man in general are one with the Night Thoughts of
Young in particular, when he exclaims,
“How sad a sight is human happiness
To those whose thoughts can pierce beyond an hour!
—Know, smiler! at thy peril thou art pleased:
Thy pleasure is the promise of thy pain.”
This is the state of man, by the experience of Shakspeare’s Wolsey:
to-day he puts forth the tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blossoms, and
bears his blushing honours thick upon him. He is exceeding glad, even as
the prophet of his gourd; but a worm is preparing, or if not, a frost;
and next day, or at latest
“The third day, comes a frost, a killing frost;
And,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a ripening,—nips his root,
And then he falls.”
The worm may speed in its mission, or otherwise; but the fulfilment of
its mission is only a question of time. There is a
... “little rift within the lute,
That by-and-by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.
“The little rift within the lover’s lute
Or little pitted speck in garner’d fruit,
That, rotting onward slowly moulders all.”
Slowly, sometimes, but surely. Not so slowly as surely.
Remembering both the “foolish pride” of Jonah in his gourd, and his
“impious discontentment” at the decree which smote it, which of us but
might, for ourselves, do worse than adopt the words and the spirit of one
verse at least of Pope’s Universal Prayer,
“Save me alike from foolish pride
And impious discontent
At aught Thy wisdom hath denied,
Or aught Thy bounty lent.”
_SELF-PRAISE._
PROVERBS xxvii. 2.
“Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger,
and not thine own lips.” Our English adage, “Self-praise is no
recommendation,” has its analogue in the Latin: _Laus in proprio ore
sordescit_—“A man’s own laudation of himself is unseemly.” Another bit of
good old Latin admonition is, to enlarge rather upon the praises of one’s
friends, than upon one’s own: _Amicorum, magis quàm tuam ipsius laudem,
prædica_; which seems to be, however, but a literal transcript of the
second line in a couplet from the Greek Anthology:
Ὑπὲρ σεαυροῦ μὴ φράσης ἐγκώμια·
Φίλων ἔπαινον μᾶλλον ἢ σαυτοῦ λέγε.
Syrus, again, utters the caution, “That whoso praiseth himself will
soon find some one to laugh at him”—_Qui seipsum laudat, cito derisorem
inveniet_. It was Æsop’s derisive counsel to an unreadable author, who
did all his own praising and puffing, and therefore did it well—well, at
least, in quantity, if not in quality—to stick by all manner of means to
that home-brewed system; for it was the poor creature’s only chance of
ever tasting the sweets of praise at all.
“Ego, quod te laudas, vehementer probo,
Namque hoc ab alio nunquam continget tibi.”
In one of the wordy encounters between Shakspeare’s Beatrice and
Benedick, the lady imputes signal unwisdom to the signor, when she tells
him “There’s not one wise man in twenty that will praise himself.”
Benedick scouts this as an old, old apophthegm, quite out of date; for,
says he, “if a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies,
he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings, and the widow
weeps.” And how long is _that_? Why, an hour in clamour (the bell),
and (the widow) a quarter in rheum. Therefore, he infers, “it is most
expedient for the wise to be the trumpeter of his own virtues, as I am to
myself. So much for praising myself (who, I myself will bear witness, is
praiseworthy).” Shakspeare often expatiates, with dramatic diversities
of phase and aspect, of character and incident, upon this worldly-wise
theme, by the worldly-wise held worthy of all acceptation, of every man
his own trumpeter. To a few examples out of these many we may recur anon.
Swift is writing after his own humour when he says, in the work he seems
to have admired the most of his voluminous _opera omnia_, but to which
some refer as the distinct cause of his never getting a bishopric—“That
as for the liberty he has thought fit to take of praising himself
upon some occasions or none, he is sure it will need no excuse, if a
multitude of great examples be allowed sufficient authority; for it is
to be noted,” he goes on to say, that praise was originally a pension
paid by the world; but the moderns, finding the trouble and charge too
great in collecting it, “have lately bought out the fee simple; since
which time the right of presentation is wholly in ourselves.” But it is
in the simpler states and stages of society, according to a latter-day
essayist on social subjects, that the man who values himself highly has
little scruple in confessing as much. “Savages have no more reticence
in parading their good points than peacocks.” North American Indians,
and the like, sublimely ignore any such courses of conduct as that, Not
he that approveth himself is commended. Their faith and practice run
counter to this kind of self-discipline. Chateaubriand gives an example
of the style of chant in which a jubilant warrior, Sioux or Iroquois,
proclaims his doughty prestige:—“Brave and renowned were my forefathers.
My grandsire was the wisdom of his tribe, and the thunder of war. My
father was a pine-tree in strength. My great-grandmother gave birth to
five men of war; my grandmother was alone worth a council of sachems;
my mother makes first-rate soup. As for myself, I am stronger and wiser
than all my ancestors.” Later Americans, _not_ of the redskin family, are
charged with a scarcely inferior knack of extolling themselves in all
the simplicity of an ignorance which knows nothing higher or better, and
with being frankly astonished at their own successes. Among them, it is
alleged by caustic Cis-atlantic criticism, nobody is thought the worse of
for praising himself; whereas among ourselves, “the practice is out of
date; a man cannot here puff himself off with impunity—without in fact,
being taken for a fool; and therefore, if he have ordinary sagacity,
he will keep within bounds.” But not the less, it is allowed, must the
thought of the heart find some outlet; men draw wide distinctions between
pride and vanity, but both have at least this in common, that they like
to feel and be acknowledged “first;” and both, it is added, “agree in
the instinct to gain their end by a side-wind—to boast themselves by
implication, if circumstances will not permit the more agreeable incense
of positive praise and adulation.”
Plutarch does not blame Cato (the elder) for perpetually boasting and
exalting himself, although the old censor somewhere pronounces it absurd
for a man either to praise or to disparage himself. But Plutarch _does_
“think the man who is often praising himself, not so complete in virtue
as the modest man, who does not even want others to praise him.” He takes
frequent note of the habit of self-commendation in some of his heroes,
and of the absence of it in others. Cato, “who was never sparing in his
own praises, and thought boasting a natural attendant on great actions,”
was nothing like so grievous an offender in this respect, to Plutarch’s
thinking, as Cicero, whose writings, says he, “were so interlarded with
encomiums on himself that, although his style was elegant and delightful,
his discourses were disgusting and nauseous to the reader; for the
blemish stuck to him like an incurable disease.” Comparing this greatest
of Roman orators with the greatest of the Greek, Plutarch observes of
their respective writings, that Demosthenes, when he touches on his own
praise does it with an inoffensive delicacy, never, indeed, giving way to
it at all unless he has some important matter in view; whereas Cicero,
habitually and systematically, “speaks in such high terms of himself
that it is plain he had a most intemperate vanity.” Modern critics not
a few, German, English, and French, have made the most—not to say made
the best—of this foible of Cicero’s. In particular, Mr. de Quincey makes
merry over it, without mercy, at the father of his country’s expense.
Isaac Barrow points the moral of the text which these heterogeneous
annotations are meant to illustrate, with a special warning against
Cicero’s infirmity. “If a man have worthy qualities and do great deeds,
let them speak for him,” urges that masterly divine; they will of
themselves extort commendation; his silence about them, his seeming to
neglect them, will enhance their worth in the opinion of men. “Prating
about them, obtruding them upon men, will mar their credit, inducing men
to think them done, not out of love to virtue, but for a vain-glorious
design. Thus did Cicero, thus have many others, blasted the glory of
their virtuous deeds.” It is quaintly said by Owen Feltham, that whoso
makes boast of the good he truly has, obscures much of his own worth,
in drawing it up by so unseemly a bucket as his own tongue. “Though the
vaunts be true, they do but awaken scoffs; and instead of a clapping
hand, they find a look of scorn.” When a soldier bragged too much of a
great scar in his forehead, he was asked by Augustus if he did not get
it when he turned his back on the enemy. So, “If I have done anything
well”—this is one of Feltham’s “Resolves,”—“I will never think it worth
while to tell the world of it.”
“O sir, to such as boasting show their scars,
A mock is due,”
says Shakspeare’s Troilus to Ulysses—modest, valiant Trojan, to shrewd,
circumspect Greek. So another Trojan to another Greek, in the same
play—which Coleridge reckoned almost the most wonderful of Shakspeare’s
all—Æneas, namely, to Agamemnon; or rather, indeed, Æneas to himself, in
Agamemnon’s hearing:—
... “But peace, Æneas,
Peace Trojan; lay thy finger on thy lips!
The worthiness of praise disdains his worth,
If that the praised himself bring the praise forth:
But what the repining enemy commends,
That breath fame follows; that praise, sole pure, transcends.”
And in yet another scene, Agamemnon, King of Men, pithily and pointedly
tells that stalwart dullard—big, blustering, boisterous Ajax—who, for the
life of him, cannot see the pith or point of it, that “whatever praises
itself but in the deed, devours the deed in the praise.” Ajax suspects
not the general to mean that _he_, son of Telamon, is his own praise, his
own chronicle.
One more excerpt from our myriad-minded poet:—“Then we wound our modesty,
and make foul the clearness of our deservings, when of ourselves we
publish them.” The wise saw drops from the sententious lips of the sage
old steward of the Countess of Roussillon in what is probably as little
read and slightly relished as any of Shakspeare’s plays.
* * * * *
Years ago there used to perambulate the streets of London, a prodigy of
a hat, some seven feet high, the trade-mark advertisement of a hatter
in the Strand. This gigantic puff Mr. Carlyle once made the text for
some characteristic strictures on the puffery of the age. Every man his
own trumpeter: that he alleged was, to an alarming extent, the accepted
rule. “Make loudest possible proclamation of your hat.” Against which
doctrine our strenuous _censor morum_ objected, that nature requires
no man to make proclamation of his doings and hat-makings; but, on the
contrary, forbids all men to make such. There is not, he contends, a
man, or hat-maker born into the world but feels, or has felt, that he
is degrading himself if he speak of his excellences, and prowesses, and
supremacy in his craft. His inmost heart says to him, “Leave thy friends
to speak of these: if possible, thy enemies to speak of these; but at all
events, thy friends.”
_PAINTED FACE, TIRED HEAD, & EXPOSED SKULL._